jducoeur

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I'm now ensconced on Mastodon. I've recently moved my account over to jducoeur@social.coop, which seems to suit me pretty well -- social.coop is a rather process-wonky Mastodon instance focused on collective action: thoughtful progressivism is the general tone.

I'm posting a lot more over there than here at the moment. Partly that's simply because it's new and cool, and has that fresh new-social-network smell. (Mastodon is by no means new, but the Muskocalypse is causing massive sudden growth, so the energy level there is sky-high at the moment.) And partly it's because my brain is currently rather over-focused on Mastodon itself and the Twitter meltdown, and that topic just seems more appropriate over there: I'm going to try to avoid too much of that particular navel-gazing here.

Digression: it's slightly disturbing how I can't take my eyes off of the Twitter situation. We have a channel at work titled #social-twitter-slow-motion-train-wreck, and at this point at least once a day someone comes in and says, "Slow motion? Uh, no."

On the one hand, I'm angry and sad for the employees who have been subjected to this bullshit, as Kaiju Billionaire stomps all over Mega-Tokytwitter and then wonders why everyone doesn't love and follow him. There were a lot of good people there, many of whom were seriously trying to build a site that both worked well and was at least sometimes a net social good.

(Yes, I know, it's easy to mock Twitter. But one upshot of the past few weeks for me has been coming to understand that the #BlackTwitter community is deeply angry, because it was a central organizational tool for them, and they are far from alone. It's easy to forget how important it has been for both marginalized communities and revolutionary movements -- a place to organize and amplify their voices. That's a very serious loss, and much though I like Mastodon, there are some good reasons why it's not simply a good replacement for that.)

OTOH, wow -- it's hard to resist noshing the popcorn and watching. If there is any positive side to this horror, it is the vivid illustration of a self-proclaimed master of the universe discovering that this social stuff is not rocket science -- it's much, much harder. And it's a fine public lesson that shitting on your employees, making rash decisions without understanding the lay of the land, and generally acting like a corporate Trump is not a winning proposition.

There have been bigger corporate failures before, but never in history has there been one that was so fast, and so blatantly the fault of one idiot with the world's biggest case of Dunning-Kruger syndrome. One can't help but think that, if this is what Musk is like, Tesla and SpaceX have succeeded despite him, not because of him.

But I digress...

Anyway, I'm not leaving DW -- one of my first Mastodon posts (and certainly my most-boosted) was reminding people that this is still the best blogging site.

But I like Mastodon a lot more than I did Twitter, so I'll probably continue to post more frequently there than here. The micro-blogging approach works well when I only have a couple of paragraphs of something to say, or am largely just link-sharing, and the 500-character limit there is much more comfortable than Twitter's 280. I'll be doing most of my macro-blogging here, both diarizing and longer, more thoughtful posts. (You can do long posts in thread form over there, same as Twitter, but like Twitter that's kind of an annoying hack on a system that's mostly not designed for it.)

I do commend Mastodon to you: it's not a replacement for DW, but it's an interesting supplement if you'd like a feed that is chattier, more random, more publicly social, and often a bit more "newsy". The technical differences aside, the look and feel is a lot like a less-toxic version of Twitter, and it's rather fun.

I will note in advance that getting started on Mastodon is rather more hassle than it should be -- indeed, I have a long thread going on how we might improve things for new folks. For now, I'll just say that it gets a lot easier and more fun after you get past those initial hurdles. I'm happy to chat about that, and help as best I can, if you are interested in talking about it -- ping me directly, or just comment here.