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Taking a look at Mastodon

Evert Pot on November 01, 2022

I've been a Twitter user and fan since 2007. With Twitter's future looking a bit grim, I started looking around if there's another place to go. Tw...
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codenameone profile image
Shai Almog

I joined too into mastodon.social which seems to focus most of the attention in my community. We also started collecting links of community members in a git repo for easier tracking/follow.

I find the silo aspect less attractive. The big benefit of twitter is that if forces people to come together and communicate with people who have different opinions. It did it badly by promoting the lowest common denominator. But I don't want to be in a bubble. Not in tech or in politics.

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lucyferu profile image
lucy allsaints

as you say in the other comments, that "coming together" is also "regulated" by a certain algorithm which promotes hate speech and whatnot.

anyway, in mastodon you have three different feeds. the personal one a.k.a. people you follow, the local which is your instance, and the federated which is all of the instances your own is federated with.

hence, you can kind of "choose" your own degree of "siloation"? (yeah, tried a bad joke with silo and isolation here lol)

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codenameone profile image
Shai Almog

Agreed. That's a major problem I have with mastodon.

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lucyferu profile image
lucy allsaints

what is the major problem you're pointing at?
i genuinely didn't get it, sorry.

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codenameone profile image
Shai Almog

The fact that it's overly siloed. I want to face people I disagree with. I want my opinion challenged with thought provoking debate. I get that occasionally on twitter although often it's not as high brow. But it's important to me that I don't live in a bubble.

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lucyferu profile image
lucy allsaints

that's one way to look at it, which is also quite privileged tbf.
on mastodon as on anywhere else, people are victim of racism, queerphobia, ableism and you know what else. so, the "siloing" nature of that social media shield people from being in constant contact with fash content and hate speech basically.

im not sure what kind of disagreement you're looking to face, but all the constructive conversations you might be able to get over a social media are of course not affected by instance defederation.

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Andreas Sander

I joined toot.cafe some while ago which is an instance of nolanlawson.com. Under current circumstances the server is sweating a lot, but I really hope that the instance can stay and Nolan accepts funding.

Besides that: A dev.to #mastodon instance would be IMHO super nice as well. :)

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Michael Tharrington

Heyo Andreas!

I'm a Community Manager for DEV and we have a Mastodon account here... I think we set it up a while back, but I know our Social Media Manager, @erinposting, has just recently been getting it back into action.

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moopet profile image
Ben Sinclair

Oh hello fellow toot.cafe person, I didn't see you there.
It's also running about 2 days behind because of the volume of traffic coming in from Twitter at the moment, which is, I guess, and example of the problems federated services can have.

Personally, I'd pay a couple of dollarpounds a month to help prop it up.

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Peter Witham

I've been on Mastodon for a while now, my concern with it is sharing user names with folks and making it easy for them to find and use (people don't seem to understand the instances when I try to explain it to them). I've tried a few clients including what I think is the official one, and they still do not feel as natural (yet).

But I am continuing to use it and hope that the new interest in it helps move the platform and the usage forward.

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lucyferu profile image
lucy allsaints • Edited

as a long-time mastodon user and twitter quitter, im clearly bias towards this post, but i will try to gve my contribution.

here people can find a useful, nice and easy to read guide/introduction to mastodon.

while this is a way for users to stay on top of news and follow high profile people through mastodon.

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Jon Randy 🎖️

Can you explain why you think Twitter's future looks grim?

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evert profile image
Evert Pot

It's taken over by a psychopathic man-child billionaire.

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Jon Randy 🎖️

Thank you for that in-depth, balanced & nuanced analysis. Could you expand a little, as I don't really feel it answered my question?

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evert profile image
Evert Pot

Unless you've lived under a rock, I doubt that the the sort of things he's known for or the general sentiment towards him has really escaped you. So what exactly is the question. You're not sure how his past behavior could have consequences in a place like Twitter?

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Jon Randy 🎖️ • Edited

Yes. I'm asking you what you think will happen to Twitter that makes you so pessimistic for its future? So far I've only learnt about your dislike of Elon Musk. What specific "sort of things he's known for" and "past behavior" could affect what he does with Twitter?

 
evert profile image
Evert Pot

Hi, sorry I'm not engaging with this. Good luck with everything!

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Alvaro

There is more power on the fediverse than just mastodon, you could comment a peertube (alternative to youtube)video from mastodon or viceversa.
The fediverse protocols are an amazing idea, is removing walled gardens, a real interaction and federated applications that csn talk to each other.

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Duy K. Bui

Is this the open-source software Trump used without credit for his Truth Social? The name sounds familiar to a lawsuit I read about.

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moopet profile image
Ben Sinclair

Yes, at least one of those "free speech" things was exactly that.
Also, you might remember Gab, which was an attempt to create a massive central "free speech" mastodon instance and quickly got blocked by pretty much every other instance because of its ultra-right-wing population.

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