Mastodon (Not the Band) Classic or Dud

Every "let me explain Mastodon" tweet just leaves me more confused and less interested in trying it out.

it turns out it does not matter which server you use to sign up.

discoverability of other accounts is hard though if you are not on a bigger server, I guess. you basically need to know the name of an account you want to follow.

Every "let me explain Mastodon" tweet just leaves me more confused and less interested in trying it out.

― a superficial sheeb of intelligence (jon /via/ chi 2.0),

what if Ezra Klein wrote an explainer

xp

my workaround for this is looking at who other people are following

It's easy to get lost in the whole decentralized/fediverse rhetoric and there are certain unavoidable elements that do result from that but from dipping my toes in the water on Friday at this point I have a slew of familiar names in my feed and because it's not an overwhelming crush of posts and reblogs (yet, obv.) I can treat it as less of a firehose, and the basic functionality is that of Twitter. *shrug* Works for me? My FB presence is private and I can have more general rambly discussions there, same with IG in terms of the low key use I have for it, so this addresses that aspect of things and allows me to post shorter public thoughts instead of in the venue I was using up until now.

Searching for hashtags and things seems to not work , or there really are not many people using this

I do find I can locate people now if I have their full address.
Hard to knwo what is a shortcoming of mastodon and what is just broken at the moment

lol this thread is more siloed than mastodon

yeah, there are degrees of social media experiences:

ilxor/message boards- for like-minded enthusiasts to enthuse and fight

Facebook-- place to post photos and explain your jokes to your relatives

Twitter-- place to watch a bunch of famous and non-famous people embarrass themselves in front of millions

Mastodon-- who knows? Seems somewhere between message board and Facebook at this point, but in the future could be cool kid twitter or cool kid Parler

maybe mastodon will just be something to add and keep the rest until our cup runneth over with social media

mastodon is where we can practice playing nice so we get the respite to be more horrible everywhere else

Very pro this kind of thing on principle as the original reason I had for checking out of twitter a few years ago was visceral disgust over whatever tiny role I'd played as a longtime user (since the SMS days!) in building up the heft of this thing to the point where it was an appealing lever for people looking to (for example) commit securities fraud or incite a nuclear conflict. Granted, that's just a particularly absurd synecdoche for the broader gnarl of modernity but at least in this case I felt like I could make a choice to opt out.

In practice I'd be really surprised if mastodon represents a stable/viable paradigm. I'm getting the vibe that it's stuck in an awkward middle ground between the goal of delivering something that looks/feels/acts like a familiar web 2.0 platform and the logistical realities of a ton of different people maintaining infrastructure on an ad hoc basis.

But it's worth a good faith effort and we'll have some laughs regardless of how it shakes out: https://mastodon.sdf.org@catniptwinz

Btw was never on sdf but was delighted to see that they had a mastodon instance.

The reason I never used twitter was because it was a "here have all the posts in the world mauahahaha" sort of firehose as Ned says. It was just too bloody much, and I have less than 100 followers/following. But they all retweet endlessly, so I see everything except the people I actually hear from?

But then I realise that, unlike 10 years or more ago, I Do Not Care to blather on about my life to an unseen online audience anymore. So I dunno what the point of any of this is now uuuughhhh *drowns self*.

Well you could create an account, construct a feed of those you want to read and not post otherwise. No reason it can't be used that way!

followed ya moodles

there's kind of a giddy excitement that's not unrelated to how drab the experience is at first. oh how cool! I'm seeing posts from one person I know, and literally nobody else! ~no static at all~

fantastic, I may just post someday

this isn't so bad. seems to be working for the most part. https://ravenation.club/@manthonyslc

ahhh fuggit.

https://masthead.social/@trayce

Went for the journo/writers/bloggers instance - it has loads of ppl, is accepting signups and is the kinda ppl I'd likely want to see.

i'm getting the impression that ravenation.club was started by louis tomlinson?

watching federated is like staring at oncoming traffic on the freeway

some euro thing called #fotomontag is fun, also #catsofmastodon

Are different instances faster/slower? I notice a couple of you are on ravenation and that seems to take forverrrrrr to load up?

Also my apologies but I dont know who Catnip Twinz is haha sorry man :(

I haven't noticed any slowness, but it could have to do with your location vs the location of the server?

Maybe yeah.

I think I'm just gonna stick with ilx and the Instagram account I check once a week

ravenation was being really slow for me there for a while

xp All good, no worries

captnip twinz seems like an interesting person and i welcome their presence in my feed.

mastodon is an apt name for this because it's slow like the ice age !! haha

@catnip: I dont mean I wont follow you! I just dont recognise your handle, are you an ILM person or have u changed handles and I'm just slow.

ravenation.club heating da fuq up

Camila_Cabello
Camila Cabello :verified: @Camila_Cabello

When I was in high school I loved doing group work.

Harry Styles :verified: @Harry__Styles

The awkward moment when i reply to a fake @Louis_Tomlinson Haha!

of course i know these are fake.

reader: for a minute he thought they were real.

xxp Ha okay, sorry for any confusion.

Longtime ILM reader, brief stint posting last year when I thought 'if I value "olde internet" spaces like this (hopefully not an objectionable characterization?) I should probably participate more in the interest of keeping them going' before a new job unexpectedly burned up every last shred of mental energy that I had for participating in this or anything else and I dropped back off the face of the earth for a minute. Not at all someone you "should recognize" in a Cheers sense!

Like (I imagine) everyone else in this thread I'm trying to get my head around Mastodon, have been following people thinking "oh yeah I remember Twitter circa 2007; you just had to follow a bunch of people who were probably going to be fun to talk about records with and let things take their course from there". After a few follows, thought "I should probably say hi in the thread too, so people know what's up."

Anyway, feel free to follow or not; I have no idea whether I'll be all that engaged with Mastodon or in what way, and I absolutely 1000% get being like "don't know who this is, not worth it" in response to a follow request on the internet of 2022.

sort of feel like it makes a difference what server you join. like i could enjoy watching the 'local' feed if it wasn't a bunch of louis tomlinson fans posting about how the louis tomlinson account is fake??

i hope some high value twitter people start using it. though maybe it's more interesting as a 'start fresh' kind of deal and see where it goes, maybe nowhere, maybe something small and interesting.

the thing that will keep me coming back for a while is that it's open source and not for profit, that is naturally appealing to me even if it keeps the content limited and quiet.

Yes its not cavalier like days of yore, I agree there.

Mastodon is like a nice quiet visit to the library - nod your head politely to people you know, maybe the odd whispered conversation here or there - and then off again into the big bad world.

http://philip.greenspun.com/images/pcd0133/monument-valley-goats-40.1.jpg

RETVRN

got my verification email in the middle of the night.
but looks like the server i chose is pretty wobbly to say the least.
have sent a few follow requests to various folks here while i try and figure my way around.

Mastodon.lol mod telling me to log off

"Last update for tonight: The queue is starting to go down, slowly.

For now the best thing you can do to help things recover faster is stay off Mastodon for a few hours. It means less jobs get added to the queue and the delay will get shorter.

Good night"

It is like a library - you have to wait for the inter-library loan!

lol mod otm

so far I like Mastadon but I'm not following many people, only people from here and a few stray other accounts...but what I like about it is the insularity of it, I feel like I could more easily only follow ILXors et al and keep my feed about music and cultural issues and avoid politics entirely.

Molly JongFast had a post pointing out how Mastodon reinforces the point that quote retweets are destructive and generally are invites to dunk and bully

I see that ravenation has stopped registrations, these servers are all getting overwhelmed

Can't find the twitter thread this morning, but I saw one last night about a guy who got his Mastodon account nuked when the person who ran the server (federation? - not sure of the right term yet) he joined on decided to stop doing it and didn't follow the proper protocol for allowing users to move to a different one. Not sure if that's a one off thing or a wrinkle that still needs to get addressed as it grows more popular.

lol mod otm

― mark s, Tuesday, 8 November 2022 bookmarkflaglink

Rude

"I've got a lot of messages on how to donate to help with server costs, please check the post pinned on my profile for the Patreon (it's always been there!) :blobcat:"

Love how the emoji description is pasted.