Note that Mastodon is third in the list. I consider that a success.
1. They ignore you. 2. They laugh at you. 3. They fight you. <<<--- we are here. 4. You win.
1. They ignore you. 2. They laugh at you. 3. They fight you. <<<--- we are here. 4. You win.
Right now I use sigmoid.social for tech stuff and Post for mainstream chatter.
The only proper way that I can see to join Mastodon is to have your own personal instance. And maybe that's how social media should be, but then the difference between that and a webserver with an RSS feed is getting quite small.
And I think there’s value in decentralization even without the granularity of a server-per-person. Sure, some Mastodon servers might go down, or some admins might do unwise things, but damage should be limited. the entire network - I hope - would not fail.
Of course, I’ve lived through the death of Usenet, so perhaps I should not be so optimistic :-/
Edit: not to mention the arguable centralization of email, blogging, and perhaps soon podcasting :-(
I found community in Twitter by following people I knew, a small number of organizations, websites and celebrities, then occasionally following people I learned about through retweets or replies.
How did you do it on Twitter? Did you use the search functionality? What did you do with it? The idea of doing that just seems overwhelming to me.
I mean all this genuinely - this is not intended as a snark post! I am sure your way of using Twitter is just as valid as mine, and maybe it’ll give me some ideas for things I could do differently.
When I first joined Twitter it seemed like more people I knew where there, so that initial bootstrapping was a lot easier.
I joined Twitter in the fairly early days, and my network grew from tech folks I’d met in real life out (‘Are you on Twitter? What’s your handle?’ was a common refrain at meetups and conferences). Later, non-tech friends, news organizations and celebrities joined. It was easy to organically grow my feed without search or algorithmic recommendations, and I never came to really use either.
If you were to try Mastodon again, my recommendation would be to initially join either a large server (mastodon.social, mas.to etc.) or one that targets an interest you have (tech?). On the targeted one, the local feed might be interesting. On the larger one, the federated feed will be pretty complete and searchable for hashtags.
Wherever you join, as you follow people it’ll become more rounded out and you’ll start to see boosts from people you follow that might reveal others to follow - from all sorts of servers. It’ll feel more like early Twitter before the algorithmic feed.
I have to admit, server choice paralyzed me for a long time! I finally joined a local geographic one - sfba.social - and it’s pretty good. Being the SF Bay Area the local feed can have a good mix of local and tech stuff (and a lot of random uninteresting ephemera, I will admit…) and it’s big enough that the federated feed is pretty full too (perhaps too full!). But server choice doesn’t _really_ matter - it’s easy to move and I haven’t seen any criticism of folks moving.
Do you believe that all centralized platforms are inherently evil?
Probably, but who needs a clone of what we had and didn't work out? Lets make the next thing better than the last. If it's a clone, then it's another big money-backed "engagement maximisation" play. (2)
Post seems to be dodgy around micropayments (1)
1) https://post.news/terms_conditions
https://home.social/@raccoon/109526574444237572
2)
https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/28/post-news-twitter-alternat...
In a way that are the failure modes of Twitter itself. Centralized, funded by VCs, susceptible to the whims of the millionaire owners.
Wasn’t Post the clone where, according to their TOS, you couldn’t "discriminate by net worth"?
https://mastodon.social/@taylorlorenz/109422846935825930
But they might have changed that "no criticising the rich" policy now. Since it's such a bad look.
Someone with a zero net worth because they have millions in assets and millions in debt is probably actually rich - otherwise how’d they get the loans?
Same for a new dentist who’s negative due to student debt but is about to have more than enough income to handle it.
https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr
https://github.com/aljazceru/awesome-nostr
Overall design seems very simple. It feels a bit like email, in the sense that you could probably put together a barebones implementation like sendmail and still be fully functional.
To what degree is it decentralized?
My decision so far was to go and run a one-person Mastodon instance but this sounds intriguing.
I've only started learning about it today, though, so my understanding is limited!
[1] https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr#the-problem-with-mas...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/plexodus/comments/sy7e67/pluspora_p...
Their critique of both centralized and dweb alternatives are mostly spot on. The elephant in the room though is whether people-oriented broadcast social media (those with a strong emphasis on one-directional “followers” and personalities) can ever be good. If Nostr was content oriented like Reddit or HN, I would have already started using it. The good news is that it can probably be retrofitted, or at least replicated easily, while adhering to the same technical architecture.
This new policy against sharing Mastodon links makes me think their numbers are showing an exodus of users toward it.
A 'Mastondoninabox' distribution would be a very nice starting point.
I also wish Elizabeth Holmes didn't ruin it for me.