Mastodon (Not the Band) Classic or Dud

if im honest i find the masto-push to be a bit nicer useful bcz it's counter-manifesting as a push to be a bit meaner elsewhere and i feel i need to lean into this

ppl i have been beloved for too long, time for me to svck

Good thread on Mast

it works differently, it has different affordances, its architecture encodes politics in a very different way.

— hugo reinert 🐑 (@metaleptic) November 13, 2022

lol i followed metaleptic's randomised bot = notaleptic like a decade ago and only grasped that metaleptic exists and runs notaleptic (or more accurately lets it run w/o paying attention to it) this morning

I am thinking it is going ot be hard for workplaces to block mastodon instances since there is not one central site but many sites...

if easy to block facebook.com

not so much https://ravenation.club/ etc etc etc that are all in the "fediverse"

point in favor imo

i wonder if toots can be as easily embedded as tweets can? or does the federated part make that a lot more complicated

cw: disgusting fingernails. if you're taking a picture of something, no one wants to see your huuuge yellow unclipped disgusting fingernails surrounding it.

https://wandering.shop/@daviddlevine/109348616337901383

GOOD POINT! PUT BLAUBARRY ON TABLE OR SOMEthing

feet even norse

I just created a filter that blocks twitter, elon musk, fediverse, and federated. Let's see how this goes.

pondering adding mastodon to my filter as well, but that may be a bit much

I find a lot of twitter stuff is behind a CW screen anyway 0

but let me know how that goes and dont you dare block mastodon

Meanwhile

I just have little interest in endless meta posts about either social network and that was a very large portion of my feed

It's starting to burn out some but yeah for a few days there...

I am hoping people I know will leave Twitter and come to mastodon and that will be my feed

ambrosia

i am loving building a new crew that i follow/follow me on 'don to be honest.

yeah, outside of the aforementioned meta posts, it's all been great. I'm mostly following a bunch of modular synth folks.

I just saw someone (on twitter) say 'use Tusky' which is a client for Mastodon. It feels like a smoother experience. Anyone else using it?

Yes it's better than the default app but seems to be no way to admire I mean review just your own toots.

Looking into this "discord" business

Okay it looks like Discord is just a big group chat. I hate it

— Mr. Chau (@Srirachachau) November 18, 2022

Yes it's better than the default app but seems to be no way to admire I mean review just your own toots.

You can. To see your own posts, you have to first tap on your profile photo in the top left-hand corner. That opens up a panel with a list of various things like drafts and favourites. To view your profile and posts you then have to tap on your profile photo in the top left-hand corner of that panel.

I can actually click on another profile and see followers and following by clicking on those words some of the time. This is revolutionary.

lol thanks dubmill, that's an...interesting ux choice

lol thanks dubmill, that's an...interesting ux choice

I keep going back and forth between twittor and mastodon and twittor is like aaaahhh whaaaats haaapening aahhh - and mastodon is like "Hello! what do we have here? this coul dbe my new home? "

https://connecticuthistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/PuritanPioneers.jpg

in case wondering/interested

https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/ri295h/what_is_federated_timeline/

I've seen a number of complaints (on twitter mainly) about Mastadon not being a safe space for marginalized communities/people, which is something to keep in mind, but that makes it, in a sense a bit more reflective of real life. As I understand it there is no central authority at Mastadon, so if someone is harassing you, or saying things you find offensive, there is no appealing to 'the owners' to deplatform; you can get your server to block them or their instance and that's about it, but there is no guarantee that will happen.

Saying Mastodon isnt a safe space is a bit like saying Reddit isnt.

Its up to the moderators/managers of that instance to make it safe, isnt it?

yes. I think the issue is that many people by default joined mastadon.social because it has the most obvious name and seems to be the biggest instance, and they seem to be pretty hands off w/r/t moderation

...wait, thogh I get you now, if theyre from elsewhere on Masto not much you can do. I get thats a problem.

Re: Dischord: I just see that as a modern IRC, has no appeal to me (I dont know how I kept up with IRC all the time like I used to in my late 20s)

my only experience with Discord is looking at what my kid is logged into and it makes my eyes bleed and brain shrivel up. no thank you.

yeah its meant for small groups with specific needs - the kids for eg will use it with their mates while theyre in a session of TeamFortress or whatever so they can yell at each other/swap notes.

I used discord for a class I was taking - like the class had a discord server. But the internet archive one seems very chaos

Someone could spin up a mastodon instance for a specific marginalized community and mod the hell out of it I think

I am still suprized to see how many bots i was followin g on Twittr

My Twitter follows is in the low 2 digits both out and inbound. I just never really used it.

mastodon is a thousand petty fiefdoms ruled by whim rather than profit, squabbling through fractious "federated" alliances -- the true technofeudalism. say what you will about the value form, at least it leads to predictable constraints and tendencies!

— Gavin Mueller (@gavinmuellerphd) November 18, 2022

lol i was breifly worried abt this academic with "teaching marxist theory" in his bio saying "the true technofeudalism" here -- i mean no -- but then i explored like two lines further and he admits he's just shitposting, as are we all tbf

Oh yeah he is a v good poster who switches to shitposting quite comfortably.

it's shitposting but it's not exactly wrong either, etc.

the federated nature of it really seems like a worst-of-both-worlds situation to me, not quite a lot of little independent online communities (and the messageboard is still the superior format for that, really) nor the single central website for everyone about all things, but it's trying to be both at once and isn't good at either as a result

The challenge for a everyone everywhere platform I guess is: 1) how do you scale so that 'everyone' can be on it and 2) how do you moderate it so that the worst ppl are kicked out.

Mastodon is trying to solve 2), but it probably won't be good enough at 1).

i don't think it's solving 2) because the politics of who's federated with who and different moderation standards and practices seems to get very messy very quickly

Agreed.

I think if there were standards and these could be enforced that might be a way of solving 2).

But not at scale.

yes all that we need is a technology and a top-down constitution that solves political messiness, no i am not a neolib crackpot

People seem to be pushing Hive as an alternative all of a sudden; seems to have a lot of Twitter-like features except you can also add a song to your profile like MySpace (which was my favorite obnoxious feature).

Solve like we did and let mod bots operate. 50 strikes and you are out (one week only) xp

happy I'm not well known like Wesley

"In brief, he's tired of being harassed constantly by random internet people, and the straw that broke the camel's back was getting run out of Mastodon by malicious users reporting his account simply for being there."

https://wilwheaton.net/2018/08/the-world-is-a-terrible-place-right-now-and-thats-largely-because-it-is-what-we-make-it/

I did it: @AlfredS✧✧✧@l✧✧.s✧

l✧✧.s✧ you say?

It must be true.

Is Mastodon real?

I rely on Twitter for three professional niches: biology, computer science, and numerical analysis. When I write that “I rely on Twitter,” I mean it. Nearly every collaboration of mine in the past three-four years started on Twitter. It’s been extremely nice to have all three (mostly disconnected) communities on one website. I was skeptical about, despite their rehetoric, whether these communities would move. Yet I feel like the entire biology community (or the subset relevant to me) moved to Mastodon this weekend. Today I see that the computer science community is starting to strongly consider moving. The numerical analysis community? Hopeless. They’ll likely move back to Usenet, if anywhere (this isn’t a joke, they continued to rely on Usenet and Listserv until the late 2010s). I don’t know whether Mastodon will be my new “home,” but I do hope I find one.

It's already feeling very comfortable, I have to say.

mastodon feels like it can serve the academic niches just fine, i think whatever various media outlets/members of the media choose could become the true twitter heir tho and i think the federatedness of mastodon doesnt lend itself to ease of sharing stuff like that, at least not in its current form