I've been on Mastodon for a week now and loving it.
But it's a different beast from Twitter. I find it much more socially engaging and interactive. On Twitter, I mostly just followed people and consumed their posts the way I consume an RSS feed. I re-tweeted, but never really posted much on my own or engaged in any kind of dialogue with anyone else.
On Mastodon, I don't really follow anyone. I post a lot of random thoughts on my mind, watch the local timeline and jump into impromptu conversations with people about whatever is striking our fancy at the time. I use it more like an threaded IRC channel or a very ephemeral/rapid-fire bulletin board.
I've been really engaging with Mastodon lately and having a similar experience. I find it's also changing the way I behave on sites like Twitter and HN as well.
I don't really get this point about Twitter, as often as it's said. On my account I don't follow anyone I personally know. I only follow some infosec/tech people who consistently have stuff to say about infosec/tech that I find at least a little interesting. Maybe occasionally they'll make a slight political tangent, but a great majority of what I see is on topic because I only follow people who stay on topic (John Carmack for instance usually geeks out on there about stuff related in some way to VR).
How has it ever been a problem? Create a new account on a new server, post a message on your old account "hey I'm moving to <url of new account>".
Conversations are usually only a day or two old before going stale, who cares whether or not toots from a year ago are linked to your account.
What I gain over facebook: no ads, not being tracked across the internet via 'like' buttons, not contributing to a massive dataset exclusively available to potentially evil corporation, and interacting with interesting strangers.
