Exploring other systems after the Muskocalypse

[jducoeur]

No important changes -- I expect to do most of my all-too-infrequent diarizing over here -- but in the wake of my skepticism of Twitter growing even more this week, I'm trying out a couple more services.

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On the more-established side, I've finally set up a profile on Mastodon. I expect to use that the same way I've been using Twitter: to post links to interesting stuff, with relatively light commentary. Probably little content per se, but I'll likely use that to tie together my posts from here, Medium, and elsewhere, along with other things that catch my eye.

For those who haven't encountered it, Mastodon is a social network, but one designed in the good old-fashioned way: a federated network based on common protocols, rather than a huge corporate monolith. So instead of being a walled garden, it's a whole bunch of cooperating systems, each with its own ethos and focus -- you can join one and still follow stuff from the others. (Within some limits: for example, many servers explicitly ban content from servers that are focused on white supremacy, child porn, etc.)

If you're curious check it out; if you're already there, feel free to follow me and let me know you're around.

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On the more-experimental side, I'm also checking out Cohost, which is Yet Another Posting Platform. We'll see whether it goes anywhere -- it looks nice, but at first glance may be too similar to DW for me to actually do much with it. But if you're over there, say hi!

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Any other recommendations folks have? While I'm not sure that Twitter is going to melt down, I strongly suspect that Musk has no idea what he's doing, and the panic seems to be driving some healthy churn. Time to encourage folks towards less-sucktastic platforms...

Comments

[cellio]

I looked at Mastadon a while back but couldn't figure out how to navigate all the options that block the first action: account creation. I can't tell from your profile: what server are you on, and would you recommend it for me? I don't know how much I'm going to use it either, but it seems useful to have an account there and start connecting to people I know who are there. Edit: oh, mastadon.social is the server?

I have longer thoughts about current events that I intend to wrangle into a post of my own instead of scattering comments on everyone else's journals.

[jducoeur]

I can't tell from your profile: what server are you on

You can tell that from the URL: mastodon.social. Yes, that's a URL -- a fair chunk of Mastodon is under the .social TLD.

and would you recommend it for me?

Less clear, now that I understand the lay of the land a little better. The upside of the Fediverse is that it's very distributed across lots of friendly little servers, each of which has its own attitude and style. The downside is that yeah, wow -- that's a lot of servers to choose from.

mastodon.social is the oldest and biggest of the servers. That makes it the easiest choice, but not necessarily the best, and lots of folks recommend not using it as your home base. That's for several reasons:

• Since so many people have been jumping into it lately, it's been struggling a little with the load.
• Since it is so huge, the local "what's new" page isn't very interesting -- it's a rapid stream of posts in various languages, on every possible topic, most of them irrelevant to me. The nice thing about the smaller and more focused servers is that the Local page is often very interesting: when the server only has hundreds of members, who you share some bond with, it can be both practical and enjoyable to sometimes just see everything that folks are saying.
• There are some folks who claim that mastodon.social, being so large, is less well-moderated and too open to the "bad" servers. OTOH, other folks deny both of those claims, and I haven't observed any problems myself yet.

("Bad servers" -- one thing about the Fediverse is that, by design, it is a truly free-speech zone when considered in its entirety: rules of moderation are 100% a local decision. The unsurprising consequence is that there are some utterly vile servers out there. But also by design, servers are allowed to filter or entirely block content from other servers. Which ones get blocked is also a local decision, and different communities are more or less strict about that.)

On the plus side, it's not necessarily a permanent decision: the Mastodon ecosystem explicitly allows you to move your account, with all of your followers, to another server. You can't transfer your content, but so long as your old server is reasonably stable and you leave breadcrumbs in both directions that doesn't seem to be a tragic problem.

At some point, it wouldn't surprise me if I move elsewhere; I just haven't found the ideal place for me yet. (Which would probably be a broad-based geek-oriented server, queer-friendly and fascism-hostile. It probably exists, but most of what I've found so far seems to be a little more narrowly focused.)

So mastodon.social isn't a bad starting place; it appears to be quite common to start there and move elsewhere. It's probably worth scanning instances.social, which provides a little bit of filtering for you, to see if something right jumps out, but the list is still impressively huge.

I have longer thoughts about current events that I intend to wrangle into a post of my own instead of scattering comments on everyone else's journals.

Yep, me too. Between the events over at Twitter and those at Adobe (the Pantone disaster), I think folks are starting to take a harder look at the consequences of the corporate conquest of the Web, and the virtues of the more "classic" philosophies...

[cvirtue]

This sounds (as a quick-take) more like a Reddit-similar site than FB/Twitter type. Y/N?

[jducoeur]

No, actually -- the experience of Mastodon is much more like Twitter. The details differ (most sites have a 500-character limit, not 240), and the technical underpinnings are dramatically different, but it's very much about microblogging and responding, not a forum-like thing like Reddit. The UI is very similar to Twitter in many ways.

Part of the complexity here is that Mastodon is just one component of the larger Fediverse, a cooperating system of protocols that together cover microblogging, macroblogging, video sharing, and lots more. Most Mastodon sites look and feel pretty Twitter-ish, but some Fediverse options are, eg, much more like Facebook. It's a very diverse environment.

[cvirtue]

Aha, thanks for explanation.

[jducoeur]

Of course, no sooner do I describe this than someone releases a Fediverse service that is exactly a BBS in its UX. Does drive home the "diverse environment" point, I suppose...

[cellio]

Thanks for all your advice. As you know, I found my way there. (If anybody else reading this cares, I'm @cellio@indieweb.social.)

[sporky_rat]

I'm on Mastodon and have been so on medievalist.masto. It's run by a MoD in England (originally from the Outlands).

[jducoeur]

Oh, neat -- I hadn't come across that instance yet. Thanks for the pointer!

[jducoeur]

What's your profile there? Not much of the user directory is publicly visible. (Edit: never mind, just found your follow.)