Maybe you’ve heard of the newish social network Mastodon, or maybe you haven’t, but between Facebook’s repeat mishandling of data and Twitter’s gen...
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In general I think the level of vitriol and general stressful content is a bit lower, compared to Twitter; I think it helps a lot that people can set content warnings on posts, so if you know a lot of your followers are getting hackles up over an issue, you can allow them to choose whether to engage. I think it probably varies by instance—I imagine the local timeline is a lot spicier on some of the more politics-oriented instances—but I think it's a lot easier to mediate exposure. A lot of instances also enforce much stricter codes of conduct than Twitter.
As far as privacy for who you follow, it's possible to hide your following list, yeah. A lot of blocking seems to be done on an instance-wide scale, since some instances allow illegal content or certain types of behavior while others specifically don't. If you're on a pretty general instance like mastodon.cloud, though, you're unlikely to get blocked by anyone just based on that.
I think it has some legs this time. I've checked out Mastodon a few times, but recently I'm finding myself spending more time on Mastodon than Twitter.
It's really nice to be able to read the Local and Global timelines, just like in the early days of Twitter. Having a firehose of people, personalities and topics is nice.
Plus Mastodon is developer friendly, unlike bird site.
Fediverse reminds me of Usenet, but before I elaborate on that aspect, thanks @carlymho for the introduction to the fediverse! This post is worth to rediscover now, as Mastodon and other fediverse servers like chaos.social get more new users annoyed of mainstream (anti)social networks with their biased algorithms and dude-ish "chief twats".
Everyone, please remember that the decentralized independent federation is mostly run by non-profit volunteers, which is the whole point about being noncommercial, so the next step after signing up and completing your profile is to find out how to donate some money (often easy to do via Patreon) to keep your fediverse provider running! For the popular Mastodon server, see joinmastodon.org/sponsors.
There has been renewed discussion about the difference between federated and centralized social networks and their culture and values.
Unlike Twitter and Instagram, the fediverse reminds me a bit of Usenet, a decentralized network of knowledge and discussion that has been here long before the world-wide-web brought us forums and so-called social networks with sparkling multi-media online content and addictive algorithms. Although Usenet was mainly text-based, people also managed to exchange images and other files as well. Usenet was not only decentralized in terms of ownership and responsibility, but it was more resilient against anyone taking control, taking it offline, or introducing a paywall to use it.
The main difference between Usenet and forums on one hand, and modern social networks on the other: in social networks, you follow and interact with people, and topics are an optional secondary aspect added using hashtags.
The "Web3" movement, often dismissed as a fad by gamer kids trying to get rich quick, has expressed some reasonable criticism against (the current mainstream) "Web 2.0" being centralized and controlled by an oligopoly of commercial corporations trying to manipulate its users.
While I don't agree with the technology-obsessed solutions proposed by Web3 thought leaders, trying to add even more technology, I prefer that we remember the times before the world-wide web and revive some of the ideas that were vital to the internet from the beginning, like decentralization, resilience and robustness.
Mastodon and the rest of the fediverse are a chance to rethink the way we want to use technology and communication. Let's take back control and conceive another take on a future web that puts people before technology.
hope springs eternal, friend.
Thank you for this comprehensive guide! I really <3 Mastodon, I like that there’s an instance for everyone, but I can still follow friends on other instances.
As someone who's never Twittered, what does Mastodon have to offer?
Everything seems to say it's Twitter but better, but that doesn't tell me why I should go from no Twitter to a Mastodon.
If you're not necessarily into twitter's posting format, you might not find it super useful, but I think it's a solid way to provide status updates to friends and people interested in your work, in the same way as Twitter.
The other thing about Mastodon is that instances are often organized around themes, which is a good way to have connections right off the bat with people who have similar interests, unlike Twitter. Especially on active instances with a smaller or medium-sized population, there's a nice sense of community and people will follow you back pretty enthusiastically, so it feels a little bit more friendly.
Something tells me you like cats. I think you will do well on this internet thing.
It appears that this has a lot more traction than in the past. However, I haven't used either of those so maybe you're right.
LOL. I didn't even know that was a thing until I saw Thomas Fuchs abandon twitter for Mastodon. How do you even pronounce it? Mas-to-don? Masto-don? It's a hideous name, lol.
This response to the name makes me want to ask you so many questions! Are you a US native? I've always taken it for granted that everyone learns about mastodons.
No, I'm not a natural born US native. I never thought about looking up the meaning of mastodon, but now that you've mentioned it, I'm surprised that I didn't know about it. Perhaps I was sleeping in class 😕. Actually, I don't recall studying about it. I know about Woolly mammoths though.