Quote:
Originally Posted by Media Boy UK
Last January I join Twitter and I am loving it.
But I am thinking about also joining Mastodon at somepoint next year.
If anyone on Cable Forum is using Mastodon what is your views on it.
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As with many open source projects, on trying to sign up you are immediately hit in the face with a ‘feature’ the coders who invented it thought was self explanatory but really isn’t. When Elon Musk first took over Twitter there was a flurry of discussion on there amongst people who were trying out Mastodon and almost invariably the reason people I follow gave for not bothering to sign up was the poorly-presented and badly explained requirement to join a server.
Once you get past that it’s fairly straightforward though, and it works much as Twitter does, however the decentralised design does have some implications for the way it works.
When you choose your server, you are choosing an independently operated instance of the Mastodon software, which someone (or a group of people) has installed on their own server. They maintain the installation and moderate posts on it according to posting rules they have established. Not unlike a good old fashioned vBulletin forum like this one in that respect.
However, Mastodon is designed to (almost) seamlessly integrate all those different Mastodon installations into one user experience. You can choose to follow whoever you want, whichever server they are a member of. You will see everyone you follow in your news feed. You will be aware they reside on a different server because the long form of their user name tells you which server they are on. You, too, have a long form and a short form user name. People on the same server as you can reference you by your short form. It’s a bit like choosing to use or omit the STD code when using a landline phone.
There are some limitations. As this is open source and decentralised, how smoothly your home server operates depends on the commitment, in time and money, of its owner. How it is moderated depends on the rules they set and how strictly they enforce them. And the real kicker is that while in theory one Mastodon server connects to all the others, your local admin may sever the connection with any other server they might object to on taste, decency or just political grounds. So you can’t ever be certain you’re accessing the entire Mastodon ecosystem. If anything, the risk of finding yourself in an echo chamber where you only hear opinions that reflect and amplify your own is even greater than it is on Twitter.
I have an account which I post on every couple of weeks just to keep it going but I won’t dive right into it unless Twitter becomes intolerable. I suspect, however, that the Elon nonsense will be a flash in the pan and if he can’t offload it he will find a way to distance himself from it. It’s too big to fail, especially as it’s not just his own pocket money he threw at it. Lots of other wealthy people are going to want a return at some point. It will survive.
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