Mastodon is having its moment in the sun
November 8, 2022 6:12 AM Subscribe

Mastodon's popularity is soaring, and it's all due to the chaotic actions of one man. As people explore what else is on offer for social media, Mastodon has emerged as a viable open-source alternative, with no ads. Reuters has an explainer, as does CNN, New York Times, and the Guardian.

Mastodon's founder, Eugen Rochko, explains how Mastodon avoids attracting hate:

You can have communities that have much stricter rules than Twitter has. And in practice, a lot of them are [stricter]. And this is part of where, again, the technology intersects with guidance or leadership from Mastodon the company. I think that, through the way that we communicate publicly, we have avoided attracting a crowd of the kind of people who you would find on Parler or Gab, or whatever other internet hate forums. Instead we’ve attracted the kind of people who would moderate against hate speech when running their own servers. Additionally, we also act as a guide for anyone who wants to join. Because on our website, and our apps, we provide a default list of curated servers that people can make accounts on. And through that, we make sure that we curate the list in such a way that any server that wants to be promoted by us has to agree to a certain basic set of rules, one of which is that no hate speech is allowed, no sexism, no racism, no homophobia, or transphobia. And through that, we ensure that the association between Mastodon, the brand, and the experience that people want is that of a much safer space than something like Twitter.

Not sure who to follow on Mastodon? Wired has a guide to finding your Twitter friends on Mastodon.

A curated list of Mastodon-related stuff. More awesome Mastodon stuff.

A list of recommended ways to finding good accounts to follow.

A list of Mastodon instances.

The Walt List - a list of mostly journalists verified by Walt Shaub "senior ethics fellow, Project On Government Oversight; former director, U.S. Office Government Ethics"

List of verified, large, or notable Twitter accounts that have a Mastodon account - verified/compiled by Dr. Jorge Caballero and others.

Previously. (Also, MetaFilter is discussing hosting its own instance.)

posted by toastyk (409 comments total) 77 users marked this as a favorite

I think mostly people don't remember that the birdsite stuff we take for granted now - hashtags, at-referencing other people, etc - basically all of that was invented by its participants, not the company. Twitter used to be an SMS-to-microblog bridge; the idea that it could be a social network at all was effectively forced on it by its early audience.

I'm optimistic about Mastodon for similar reasons; not because it's going to be "better Twitter" but because it looks like a lot of the people who don't settle for the default settings are there trying to build on top of it and figure out what's next. It feels like the larval stage of the future.

(Coincidentally, I finished typing this into Mastodon just seconds ago.)
posted by mhoye at 6:33 AM on November 8, 2022 [48 favorites]

Thus far Mastodon seems primarily composed of "Due to the influx of requests, we are not accepting new members at this time" messages. It's like if a store only sold No Trespassing signs. Someone in one of the other Mastodon threads pointed out just how much engineering effort has to go into Twitter and Facebook to make them easily accessible, and I guess that'll be one of the great ironies of this current migration, that many people will just be funneled back to Twitter for lack of an option they can actually join, at least until the next slick corporate data-vampire site comes up.
posted by mittens at 6:39 AM on November 8, 2022 [12 favorites]

the always great simon willison has been sharing some useful (simple!) info and guides and stuff on moving to Mastodon, highly recommend.
posted by lazaruslong at 6:44 AM on November 8, 2022 [7 favorites]

This looks cool and all, but for someone who isn't on twitter, the impact of twitter is the memes and news stories it creates. Mastodon can take care of the memes. But can reporters get the soundbites that they rely on twitter for from Mastodon? Even the Reuters article has tweets about Mastodon in it, instead of toots from those people on their Mastodon servers. I think that part of what made twitter come to the forefront was the breathless excitement the media showed every time Trump tweeted. Will the NYT, BBC, CNN, FoxNews be looking for and quoting people from Mastodon?

I really hope so, but until that is solved, this will remain the Linux of social networks. A million users is nothing to sneer at, but is it possible for it to replace twitter in terms of the same kind of impact and watching by the media? Because until it does so, the media will keep twitter afloat in some way because it's the easiest way to get those soundbites and find controversy.
posted by Hactar at 6:45 AM on November 8, 2022 [12 favorites]

I strongly suspect that the niceness that people report from Mastodon is a factor of it being small and relatively inaccessible rather than its design - the last big wave of people trying it out, back in 2018, was enough to convince me that microblogging itself was the culprit, a conviction that's only grown as sociologists have come back and reported how the social dynamics of microblogs with non-mutual following and chronological feeds specifically amplify harassment in a way that Mastodon seems poised to replicate.
posted by Merus at 6:45 AM on November 8, 2022 [34 favorites]

Hactar: " But can reporters get the soundbites that they rely on twitter for from Mastodon? "

Nope. And that's a good thing.
Mastodon isn't the "new twitter". It doesn't want to be.
posted by signal at 6:46 AM on November 8, 2022 [19 favorites]

It's been fascinating watching the garbage fire. Mastodon is an answer for some things, maybe, but neo-sorta-Usenet is not a replacement for an easily accessible stew of 450 million people in semi-communities with paper-thin walls. I went looking for alternatives this weekend and was happily forced to reconsider (yet again) my relation to social media, and what my actual use cases are for it, from gathering news to connecting with friends and colleagues. Some of those purposes have waned heavily in recent years, and it was so freeing to realize that.
posted by cupcakeninja at 6:49 AM on November 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

I strongly suspect that the niceness that people report from Mastodon is a factor of it being small and relatively inaccessible rather than its design

Yes, I am wincing in pain every time someone suggests that the "niceness" is going to be a permanent feature.

(Said "eh," tried to join, and got the "we're thinking about it, will get back to you" message. If all else fails, my blog is sitting right there.)
posted by thomas j wise at 6:57 AM on November 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

Mastodon isn't the "new twitter". It doesn't want to be.

That's been my feeling for a long time. I wrote a short ranty thread about related things the other day.

I've been using Masto since 2016 and seen multiple crisis-elsewhere waves of new users come and go, and it has managed to grow over time while also never exploding in size or functionality, and that's absolutely for the best for all involved because replicating and replacing twitter in its current form would be the worst thing that could happen to any upstart alternative. Masto is gonna be one of the places more energy flows into for a while, and it seems to do a pretty good job of retaining a portion of that influx each time it happens, and so it has been an increasingly populated nonetheless-far-less-busy space, and it's reasonably healthy because of that.

There are things I like about the people and dynamics of twitter that it won't replicate. There are things I loathe about twitter that it's not trying to. It's a different thing, it won't swap out 1:1, and thank fucking christ for that. I don't care how much the media wants a horse-race narrative, in this as in all things. I want smaller, weirder places in general to flourish within their own scales and contexts, as an end rather than a means.
posted by cortex at 6:58 AM on November 8, 2022 [36 favorites]

Thus far Mastodon seems primarily composed of "Due to the influx of requests, we are not accepting new members at this time" messages.

My mastodon instance is so overloaded with new users (now closed to signups, and hardware got upgraded) that there's like a 7hr db backlog and my feed doesn't really seem to have anything newer that that. It's surprisingly relaxing!
posted by advil at 7:00 AM on November 8, 2022 [5 favorites]

I think that part of what made twitter come to the forefront was the breathless excitement the media showed every time Trump tweeted.

so much to unpack here
posted by elkevelvet at 7:01 AM on November 8, 2022 [13 favorites]

Having been on mastodon and related protocols for a decade and having avoided any large social network of the twitter kind, it's been interesting this week to be able to follow climate scientists, astronomers, friends who were previously inaccessible, and the odd celeb (eg Greta).
posted by joeyh at 7:07 AM on November 8, 2022 [6 favorites]

I signed up on a big server (mastodon.cloud) and I'm not digging the enormity of the instance. Browsing the local timeline is a stream of bots and some degree of spam. It feels more like middle-aged twitter than old twitter.

This is just because I'm on a big instance, right? I think I'll look for something more a-tuned to my interests once the initial wave of signups die down.
posted by a complicated history at 7:08 AM on November 8, 2022

I signed up for smallish Norwegian, Finnish and Italian instances (to work on the respective language skills) and have found the local feeds there much more interesting and community-like than the firehose of mastodon.online.

Small topical instances seem like the way to go, the problem being that the costs (in hosting fees and moderation/admin time) may make it difficult for an optimal number of such instances to thrive.
posted by Not A Thing at 7:15 AM on November 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

I'm on toot.site and I like that's it's tiny. I can click Federated to see a wider variety of toots, but mostly I just want to read what friends have to say anyway. I am still getting the hang of having conversations there. Mostly it's be a useful place to look for interesting links (mostly posted by fellow MeFites I've followed).
posted by joannemerriam at 7:19 AM on November 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

I am on a pretty decent little instance but I kind of don't care as much about my local (except insofar as it's not composed of assholes) because I mostly want to just follow the people I actually follow. It's nice to be *able* to discover interesting people, but there are a lot of ways to do that (my wife is having a great time recreating her Weird Biology twitter feed) and otherwise it's more or less working the way I'd hope it would. I do agree with mhoye that it feels pretty larval at this stage, and could go in a lot of different directions, possibly all at once - which is great!

It also does the thing that I think is absolutely necessary in the current market, which is that the people using it are the people paying for it. This avoids that thing that a lot of content services run into (online or off - see newspapers bought by equity firms as an example) where the people making the decisions are making them based on ad revenue and they tend to see the impact of those decisions on the users as externalities that they don't need to care about.
posted by restless_nomad at 7:20 AM on November 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

Uh don't we have mastodon.social now because mastodon.online got overrun by nazis so the owners decided to nuke the whole thing? (or am i getting that backwards?)

It really depends on the instance you join, how big it is, and what kind of moderation it has. Like discord or reddit. But I think that's a good thing anyway. And I do like that the 'flagship' mastodon doesn't promote hateful instances and you have to work harder to find and join those, which is how it should be.
posted by subdee at 7:23 AM on November 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

My sincerest hope is that, in time, this era of "bigness" in our social media will come to be seen as a relic of a much dumber and worse time.

It's not just a matter of the microblogging format getting worse and worse the more public and loud it is. I used to be a big fan of forums as a medium, hence why I always liked MetaFilter so much. But MySpace had forums, bizarrely, despite having a nine-figure userbase, and those forums were absolute chaos and garbage. It was the ultimate instance of "Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded." It was simultaneously utterly empty and loud as fuck.

Feed-oriented sites hide the problem a little bit better than forums of the same size would, but the problem remains the same. The scope of modern sites is absolutely insane. And it's unnecessary, apart from our weird conviction that there is value to our all holding accounts in the same place at once.

Funnily enough, I've learned that I enjoy any given social media site more when it's cross-posted over to other social media sites. I like reading Tumblr posts and watching TikTok videos on Twitter; I like discovering tweets through Reddit; I like learning about Reddit threads via links on MetaFilter. Cross-pollination is really cool, and really neat. It creates a fertile interconnection between sites, and encourages people to be curious about other places, maybe even causing a bit of drift across platforms as people discover other places they'd like to give a try.

It's neat that some amount of cross-pollination is inherent to Mastodon's design. I personally don't find it appealing as a platform, but that fact is kind of neat in and of itself: it's nice that it's a platform which will appeal to some kinds of people and not others, and there isn't anything inherently bad about that. Obviously we're not out of the era of Big Social Networks, not while TikTok exists, but the fact that Facebook is kind of imploding and that Twitter might literally stop existing does make me hopeful on some level (amidst the pain of just how much is getting destroyed or lost in the process). It would be nice to have a more granular Internet again. Maybe we can start getting our brains back too.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 7:24 AM on November 8, 2022 [8 favorites]

While standards have risen since the early days, I'm sure Mastodon will get over these growing pains quite rapidly, and is showing signs of doing so with impressive alacrity. Remember when Twitter was literally embodied by the "Fail Whale"?
posted by scolbath at 7:25 AM on November 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

Yep, smaller instances are nicer, because they’re easier to moderate and because the people on them are more likely to know each other outside of mastodon and people generally don’t like to be jerks around their real life friends.

There have already been attempts by trolls and such to flood mastodon with hate and spam, there was even a gab instance along with several others with the same mission. Everyone just defederated from them and they became the most isolated servers in the system. In other words all their targets were taken away from them and nobody (else) sees their stuff anymore. These days most instances use large block lists to make sure their users never see anything from those folks. If you did see that kind of thing, talk to your admin or find another instance — you should be seeing none of it, I certainly don’t.

And yeah, another reason to find a small instance, or set one up or get a friend to, is that some instances don’t federate with the very large ones because the big ones don’t always moderate well.
posted by antinomia at 7:28 AM on November 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

I've been on Mastodon for a while now (multiple instances), and it's just fine. I dumped my personal Twitter account with no regrets when the MAGA idiots were in ascendency. But I still have one for my side gig, at least for now. Needless to say, I'm watching this drama carefully and I'm ready to pull the plug on that as well.
posted by tommasz at 7:30 AM on November 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

I'm on toot.site and I like that's it's tiny.

Me too! Just joined yesterday and still finding the ropes, but this has all been very helpful. :)
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 7:30 AM on November 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

Uh don't we have mastodon.social now because mastodon.online got overrun by nazis so the owners decided to nuke the whole thing? (or am i getting that backwards?)

mastodon.social is the original and biggest instance. I don't remember the history of mastodon.online; I know there's been real active mass defederation of some shitty instances in general, which turns out to be a decent way to handle a decentralized "actually, Nazis can fuck off" community consensus as such things go.
posted by cortex at 7:30 AM on November 8, 2022 [7 favorites]

I think that part of what made twitter come to the forefront was the breathless excitement the media showed every time Trump tweeted.

Saw a thread from a former Twitter employee yesterday that stated Twitter was on the verge of shutting down in 2015 - both FB and Google were not interested in buying them and they were out of money. It was the influx of traffic from Trump that saved the company.

So yet another way Trump fucked over the country.

I'm afraid the big lesson we'll learn from this is that any social networking site, once it goes mainstream, will lose it's ability to maintain "nice." The developer of Mastodon has thought a lot about where Twitter went wrong and built in features (or anti-features maybe) to try to protect against the worst excesses of Twitter. I guess we'll see how those design decisions scale in the coming months.
posted by COD at 7:32 AM on November 8, 2022 [10 favorites]

Do you need a domain name to self-host a federateable instance?

Ditto for other Fediverse stuff like Matrix.
posted by genpfault at 7:34 AM on November 8, 2022

Also, I wrote my own Intro to Mastodon blog post this weekend.
posted by COD at 7:34 AM on November 8, 2022 [9 favorites]

my wife is having a great time recreating her Weird Biology twitter feed

...recs?
posted by sciatrix at 7:35 AM on November 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

Remember when Twitter was literally embodied by the "Fail Whale"?

Twitter was so bad at this for a while that it was turned into a children's book as a joke.

I guess we'll see how those design decisions scale in the coming months.

The core insight here is that this, like the "niceness won't last" argument above, s a consequence of vertical growth and monetized incentives, and isn't endemic to social networks as an idea.
posted by mhoye at 7:37 AM on November 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

...recs?

She's here and if you tell her you know her wife from Metafilter she will be absolutely delighted tell you literally everything. Ever. (She's feeling great right now and has a lot of enthusiasm to share.)
posted by restless_nomad at 7:39 AM on November 8, 2022 [10 favorites]

(It occurs to me I have no idea if that link will work, Mastodon is still something of a mystery to me.)
posted by restless_nomad at 7:42 AM on November 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

If you're trying to decide which instance to join, joinmastodon.org has its own list of servers, categorized by topic! I'm on mathstodon.xyz (obviously the instance with the best name), which has a lot of maths / physics / CS type folks.
posted by a car full of lions at 7:43 AM on November 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

Wasn't one of those alt-right-freeze-peach Twitter clones (I can't keep track of them all) revealed to actually just be running Mastodon with the serial numbers filed off?

Anyway, I've been using Twitter exclusively in read-only mode for the last few years. I never really saw any point in participating in a crowd that big, but still found it a nice way to keep tabs on what people I'm interested in are up to. The big Mastodon servers feel that way to me. I'm waiting for one of the preexisting communities I frequent to set up their own instance before really diving in because...well, I dunno, I suppose I'm just like that.

It feels like a combination of the best parts of phpBB-era internet and Discord servers. I hope it takes off.
posted by The Lurkers Support Me in Email at 7:43 AM on November 8, 2022

If you're looking for an incredibly small Mastodon instance, and one where you can be assured of relatively quick approval :) memail me. I set it all up back in April or May when Elon first starting bloviating and finally pulled the trigger and launched it over the weekend. I kinda envisioned it as a sort of Metafilter for friends and friends of friends, actually, folks with my kind of progressive/cynical mindset.

We're just getting started; there's a whopping four people here. The local timeline right now is just stuff from me, and for now I'm following only one outside account, so there's virtually no traffic.
posted by martin q blank at 7:44 AM on November 8, 2022 [18 favorites]

One of the most powerful tools available to a Mastodon admin is the instance block. This prevents any traffic between their instance and another instance, which prevents any interactions between the users of those two instances. Instance blocks are set unilaterally by any admin who is (typically) fed up with the behaviour of multiple shitty users on an instance that the admin of that instance refuses to do anything about (or if the instance ToS itself specifically says it's for stirring shit, natch).

Good admins work diligently to keep shitty users off their own sites as a strong motivation from getting instance blocks against their instance, and thus all of their users. Admins often talk to each other about shitty users and shitty behaviour, person-to-person. It's a lovely form of peer pressure, and is perhaps the most promising aspect of the meta-social aspect of multiple instances.
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:45 AM on November 8, 2022 [13 favorites]

It's a total black box to me too! It's just that I'm essentially waiting for Twitter to crap out at the most inconvenient possible time, and goddamnit I'm just now finally getting the energy back to stir my professional networks back up right as I'm doing a really weird and slightly precarious thing that has me a bit out of touch with people. And, like many academics, Twitter is very much That Space for me.

Anyway having a semi defined place to start is genuinely extremely helpful; I will definitely let her know I dropped by!
posted by sciatrix at 7:45 AM on November 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

I think mostly people don't remember that the birdsite stuff we take for granted now - hashtags, at-referencing other people, etc - basically all of that was invented by its participants, not the company.

Yes! Originally, hashtags weren't even links, they were just a tool that made topics of conversation more easily searchable. (I also remember the SMS-bridge aspect, having sent several of my earliest tweets by sending an SMS message to whatever the Twitter "phone number" was.)

I haven't really been active on Mastodon in almost two years, and I think that may be for the best. That type of social media is just too fast for me and isn't great for my mental health. The Mastodon communities I was part of were infinitely better than Twitter, but the pace was still a bit much. I can only imagine what it'll be like with this relatively large influx of new people.

Coincidentally, prior to the current influx, Mastodon folks would often ask, "What did Twitter do this time?" whenever there was an expected surge in sign-ups. They were never to the numbers we're seeing now, but even 2-3 years ago Mastodon would see small spikes in new users whenever Twitter made an unpopular decision. I suspect the majority of those new users eventually went back to Twitter, though.
posted by asnider at 7:48 AM on November 8, 2022

don't we have mastodon.social now because mastodon.online got overrun by nazis so the owners decided to nuke the whole thing?

Mastodon.social and mastodon.online are both run by Mastodon gGmbH. Neither appear to have been defederated. (The major difference seems to be that mastodon.social has not been allowing new accounts for ages.)

If either one has been overrun by Nazis I imagine the owners would like to know about it.
posted by Not A Thing at 7:49 AM on November 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

anyone here remember Mozilla After Dark?

if we need Reason #1,312 as to why effective moderation is vital to a community. and effective moderation costs money. see Help Fund MeFi for details.
posted by elkevelvet at 7:58 AM on November 8, 2022 [9 favorites]

One of the downsides of all these new users flooding in is that they don't necessarily understand the history of the instance they're joining. I know one person who joined an instance that was blocked by my primary instance a long while back, probably due to some TERFy stuff. Is that instance still problematic? Did the incoming user know it had issues? No idea. This is a weakness of the instance block; it's invisible and unexplained, so it's not trivial to know if you're signing up for a site with problems, or why. (It also kind of sucks that a blocked site is completely invisible, because from the user perspective it just seems like mastodon is broken, instead of functioning as intended.)
posted by phooky at 8:00 AM on November 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

What kerflunk are y'all on? I want to be able to quark your nerps.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 8:02 AM on November 8, 2022 [40 favorites]

Wasn't one of those alt-right-freeze-peach Twitter clones (I can't keep track of them all) revealed to actually just be running Mastodon with the serial numbers filed off?

Yes, in fact both Gab and Truth Social (more) are Mastodon (which seems to be how the latter were able to spin up something so quickly despite the company being a typical kind fake [wapo, sorry for paywall] Trump corp).
posted by advil at 8:04 AM on November 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

One help for new Mastodon users to go to the "about" site associated with a given instance. mastodon.social is the largest one I know, so you can go to

https://mastodon.social/about

and you will find a huge list of instances that are either 'limited' or 'suspended'. It won't say /why/ they're suspended, though.
posted by Roentgen at 8:06 AM on November 8, 2022 [6 favorites]

2022 will finally be the year of Mastodon on the desktop.
posted by Copronymus at 8:07 AM on November 8, 2022 [31 favorites]

Could be that your instance admins blocked journa.host
posted by dominik at 8:10 AM on November 8, 2022

METAFILTER: It's like if a store only sold No Trespassing signs.
posted by philip-random at 8:21 AM on November 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

I like it so far, though I may have gotten lucky and chosen some well-run instances. The two top hashtags right now are about OpenBSD and books.

My advice is to go where your friends go (Debirdify is helpful for this) and maybe avoid the largest instances and also the smallest/newest instances. If you can't pick, mastodon.help has an instance browser that has detailed info and usually a bio/intro from each one's admin. There's a lot more to running an instance than just starting a daemon -- I think the servers run by more than one person are more likely to survive.

I'm guessing there will be growing pains and tough choices. The culture seems very much less broadcast-y than the birdsite. For example, there's a debate whether to #fediblock the journalist-centric servers because they attract unwanted attention/trolls/mischief and commercial activity. Dollars to donuts we see a bifurcation along those lines at some point, or maybe we already have -- users should realize if they're on an insular instance that chooses to block out the world. I'm guessing there will soon be a term that identifies such instances.

Me, I'm excited. The centralized services have shown they have nothing more to offer, and I can't support websites whose owner claims "power to the people" only as long as the power goes through him. It might not last forever, but seems you have to choose fire or ice.
posted by credulous at 8:24 AM on November 8, 2022 [6 favorites]

My Twitter and Tumblr usecase is really resharing interesting posts from other people. Not old school hypertext the way we still do on Mefi. As a result I also like following people with curatorial habits (ta da, hence my being here). Mastodon is basically the opposite of that right? If someone of my habit is to make one, it's really to turn into a type of feed reader, right?
posted by cendawanita at 8:26 AM on November 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

Yes, and if you don't want to join, you can just use your feed reader - each Mastodon account has an RSS feed.
posted by dominik at 8:30 AM on November 8, 2022 [8 favorites]

(BTW, if you want to be found, toot #metafilter in one of your nerps and others can search for the hashtag)
posted by credulous at 8:31 AM on November 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

journa.host got blocked on several instances, seemingly because of their entry policy. There might be a bit of "let's not have journos stripmine our content without consent", too.

I've heard of some instances blocking sites run by Eugen (so mastodon.social and others) for reasons that appear to have been documented on a now-deleted instance. So you can't find out why they're in a snit with someone that neither of you know ...
posted by scruss at 8:32 AM on November 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

I am a Mastodon skeptic for a few reasons, but the big one for me is what a lot of people are praising here: the lack of "bigness."

I totally understand that some people want Twitter But It's Smaller And It's Just Your Friends. I completely understand the desire for that. But the thing that made Twitter so unique and unlike anything else on the internet was that it was effectively universal equal ground for everybody to have their say, which meant that Twitter, unlike pretty much any other social media network, had the potential to expose you to ideas and concepts and people you never knew existed on a daily basis.

Because of its immediacy, it became a better deliverer of immediate news than literally every formal news site out there - a more chaotic and unrefined one, to be sure, but for raw speed about breaking news Twitter was unsurpassed even if it meant learning to be cautious/skeptical of immediate news in real-time because of potential telephone effects (which happen in "real" news as well, but more dramatically on Twitter).

It is not an accident that mass protest movements adopted Twitter as a form of informal organization (both for good and bad), and that activist movements used Twitter to coordinate messaging (both for good and bad).

That mass expression was and is valuable, and its loss - which I think is coming - will be felt. And Mastodon is simply not going to do those things well by virtue of its structure, and relies on the collective balance of a thousand tiny dictator admins rather than one centralized big one, which causes its own set of problems as anybody who has ever followed admin chatstreams anywhere else knows.
posted by mightygodking at 8:33 AM on November 8, 2022 [28 favorites]

Curious to know what instances are blocking journa.host. I feel like that was the best bet for this taking off.
posted by condour75 at 8:35 AM on November 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

Yes, and if you don't want to join, you can just use your feed reader -

Hmm, so if the online discourse ecosystem is now developing a handicap for that curatorial function... (Because i don't just want to read, i do want to share it on my space)...

okay folks! Here's how Metafilter can win --
posted by cendawanita at 8:36 AM on November 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

> I signed up on a big server (mastodon.cloud)
--a complicated history

Mastodon dot cloud has absolutely no moderation after site ownership changed hands.
It is blocked from federating with several other big instances due to the noise from that server. Recent discussion here.
posted by enfa at 8:37 AM on November 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

We’re going to find out how much Twitter journalism was being subsidized by venture capital through Twitters moderation and identity team. But also, *some* of the breadth ascribed to Twitter journalism is due to the spread of smartphones, would have worked with the old wire services' penetration if they were still staffed.
posted by clew at 8:37 AM on November 8, 2022

cendawanita, I boost stuff and see other people’s boosts on my timeline. You can’t automatically quote-retweet, or something, which is a conscious attempt to slow a particular kind of pile-on.
posted by clew at 8:41 AM on November 8, 2022 [5 favorites]

Awful lot of "that admin blocked the other one's instance because of what Our Sharon said about Our Tracy/the Jews". The Balkanization seems to be controlled at the wrong level. If users could follow each other regardless of server, and there was some level of serendipity as well, that seems liked it'd be better.

Maybe I publish who I'm following and you can see a "friends of friends" feed (as LiveJournal used to provide for paying users). Maybe if I re-tweet/boost something and you're following me, the originator becomes a "friend of a friend", as well.
posted by pw201 at 8:47 AM on November 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

Yes, and if you don't want to join, you can just use your feed reader - each Mastodon account has an RSS feed.

Oh, thank you for this. I've been hesitant to switch to mastodon until the dust settles (and until I understand it better). But I've been rediscovering the joys of using an RSS feed reader, and now I can just add the folks I want to keep following to that until I decide if I want to make the switch.
posted by eekernohan at 8:49 AM on November 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

I tried so hard with mastodon in the 2018 boom, but it never clicked for me. I think my weird career and varied interests don’t lend themselves to signing up for a themed server, and the big servers tend towards a shouty blandness.
posted by The River Ivel at 8:52 AM on November 8, 2022 [5 favorites]

I signed up last week (handle in my profile) after looking sideways at Mastodon for a few years. So far the culture seems very different but I have little confidence that it won't all change once big brands, politicians, etc get involved.

And I am not sure federation is actually going to work well long-term. I suspect Mastodon is always going to be niche.

That said, one thing that Mastodon gets right is that small features (or lack thereof) play a big part in setting the culture of a site. Mastodon seems much more "pull" (I select exactly what I want to see) rather than "push" (things get pushed onto me) than twitter. This is both good and bad, Twitter actually got pretty good at showing me things I was interested in but hadn't explicitly followed whereas on M. I have to seek them out.
posted by AndrewStephens at 8:56 AM on November 8, 2022

That's generally what I'm afraid of (eta: oops was building of The River Ivel's last comment), not to mention rl politics has taught me to be wary of, as pw201 says, balkanization at the wrong level. Still, you apparently can move between instances, and limiting QTs might be a good idea -- back to a world of comment islands! But many-to-many communications based on weak ties have been beneficial to my personal development, I'm quite sad to see it go.
posted by cendawanita at 8:57 AM on November 8, 2022

I dunno, maybe I'm pessimistic, but to me all that's gonna happen here is TikTok will win. It was already winning, now Elon just strapped a booster rocket to it.

The TikTok website gets more pageviews than Google. It has >100 million users in the US alone, the average US user watches it for over an hour a day and it's geopolitically useful to a group that will not allow some manbaby like Elon anywhere near the controls.
posted by aramaic at 8:58 AM on November 8, 2022 [5 favorites]

If users could follow each other regardless of server, and there was some level of serendipity as well

That's complicated though. I mean, when I look at the list of servers blocked by my server (most of which have *** in their names in the list because of slurs) then I don't want to encounter anyone who even wants to follow someone on a server with a name like that.

Incidentally, it's possible for an individual to block a server as well. So if you decide you don't want to see anyone from, I dunno, a "We hate cats" server, you can do that, without having to get your admin to do it on a server level.
posted by scorbet at 8:58 AM on November 8, 2022 [5 favorites]

journa.host got blocked on several instances, seemingly because of their entry policy. There might be a bit of "let's not have journos stripmine our content without consent", too.

Received confirmation that toot.site does in fact block journa.host and masthead.social. When the early rush settles down, I'll probably look to migrate to a different instance.
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 9:07 AM on November 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

I get the skepticism, but I'd counter by saying that if we don't figure out how to keep social media from being algorithm-run walled gardens, we're fucked.

The perfect is the enemy of the good. Maybe someone will build a hyperloop some day, but in the meantime we should be cultivating the boring rail system.

Even if the growth were to sudddenly stop now, there's already a vibrant community there and it's attracting better people than its alternatives.
posted by condour75 at 9:08 AM on November 8, 2022 [14 favorites]

Ideally end-to-end encrypted group chats would replace much of social media. There is a place for public forums too, but most people should be posting behind cryptography.
posted by jeffburdges at 9:16 AM on November 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

→ TikTok … [is] geopolitically useful to a group that will not allow some manbaby like Elon anywhere near the controls

Swapping Musk for China was something I was hoping never to have as positive outcome
posted by scruss at 9:27 AM on November 8, 2022 [16 favorites]

The problem with Mastodon is that it's just not ready for this moment. What you want is for people to be fed up with Twitter, download Mastodon, and for it to just work. Instead, they encounter a slow, buggy, clunky platform with a confusing premise. The typical user is going to open Mastodon, see the list of instances to choose from, and simply delete the app. There needs to be a single "main" instance, it needs to be the default, and the concept of "instances" needs to be invisible to most users. And even if they manage to get past the point of signing up for a specific instance, which they are almost certainly going to choose randomly, they will then be using a ghost town of a social network that barely works. When I set up my account it took four or five tries to change my profile picture because it kept timing out. Again, these are things that make people simply delete an app and never go back. First impressions are critically important, and right now, Mastodon's first impression is a bad one.

I can already see in some of the comments above a severe misunderstanding of how people use Twitter and why. I see people say things like "go where your friends go," but Twitter isn't about chatting with your friends. There's a million ways to chat with your friends. Twitter is a platform where I can follow on-the-ground reporting from the protests in Iran, see the football club I support posting photos from training, and read jokes about how Julius Caesar might think the name "Magic Mike XXL" implies they've made 30 of those movies. And I can see all of that in same place. That's the entire premise of Twitter, and splitting people off into their own instances fundamentally undermines it.

Mastodon isn't quite DOA, because Twitter isn't dead yet and there's still time for an alternative to emerge. But if Mastodon seriously wants to be that alternative, they need to make major changes and major improvements, and it needs to happen fast. But unfortunately I don't think the motivation is actually there.
posted by wicka at 9:35 AM on November 8, 2022 [18 favorites]

A million users is nothing to sneer at, but is it possible for it to replace twitter in terms of the same kind of impact and watching by the media?

I am seeing a lot of media people joining Mastodon. I follow Paul Krugman (NYT) and Jennifer Rubin (WaPo). There are a bunch of others. I know of at least 2 servers that are journalism-centric (Masthead.social and Journa.host). There may be others.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 9:37 AM on November 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

The biggest failure of all.
posted by Artw at 9:39 AM on November 8, 2022 [10 favorites]

I get that there are access issues, but wicka I think your experience may be a few days out of date.

Walter's list is above in google docs form, but below is a link to the thread where he names 118 high profile twitter accounts who have managed to successfully sign up. Many of the names I was used to following on twitter are already there.

If you have a mastodon client, paste this in the search:

https://journa.host/@WalterShaub/109305407558020817

Once you're on you instance looking at the list, you'll be able to add people quickly as needed.

This is gonna take some elbow grease, but none of the problems with Mastodon, and ActivityPub, are unsolvable, and there's real momentum right now.
posted by condour75 at 9:44 AM on November 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

I strongly suspect that the niceness that people report from Mastodon is a factor of it being small and relatively inaccessible rather than its design

I disagree. Mastodon is not totally immune from trolls and other bad actors, but its structure is quite different from a site like Twitter, in ways that significantly reduce negative interactions.

Mastodon instances that don't moderate antisocial users will soon be cut off from the network.

Twitter, by contrast, intentionally AMPLIFIES content that generates "engagement" -- and this includes stuff that makes people outraged, scared, argumentative, etc. The same is true of YouTube and most other commercial, ad-driven social platforms. It's inherent to their business model.

Mastodon is not trying to sell ads, or its users' eyeballs. And it has no algorithm. Users can still bring their own garbage, but it's simply much, much harder for them to catapult it to the world.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 9:44 AM on November 8, 2022 [10 favorites]

I agree pretty strongly with cortex above that neither Mastodon nor anything else need to be, or even should be, a Twitter replacement. Twitter's terribleness (and unsustainability - it's not like it's been making a profit) are inherent parts of its scale. It's not a viable scale. It requires huge enormous stupid amounts of capital to get that big, and then it requires huge unethical counter-to-democracy control of the entire advertising space to stay that big. What Mastodon is, or could be, if I'm understanding it correctly, is a whole ecosystem of microblogging sites with some cross-communication. There is no one central landing page on purpose, because there is no one single entity with ultimate control. Nor should there be.

And this does mean that we're going to lose things that Twitter offered that will not be replaced. And that sucks. But I think we'll find ways to get those things in different ways, that are ideal for different kinds of people, and have different drawbacks. Hopefully they won't be quite as much shaped like a funnel to pour money and power into fewer and fewer hands.
posted by restless_nomad at 9:49 AM on November 8, 2022 [13 favorites]

I think my weird career and varied interests don’t lend themselves to signing up for a themed server

This is the thing that is gonna be so hard for whatever is next to solve. I follow a bizarre combination of Weird Twitter, smart sportswriters, Jeopardy! inside baseball, a sprinkle of politics, and then a random teacher in Chicago who posts good and varied miscellany. I read it twice a day and have just the right amount of tweets to cover 15 minutes or so. It keeps me informed but mostly it just keeps me amused. My friend has an entire SEC football feed that has a zillion tweets a day and he just drops in and swims around for a little and hops out.

All of the ingredients are there for you to make a timeline that fits exactly your preferences: mixing and matching among topics or just binging on the one thing you love. Having that breadth of content creators, and consequently that depth of users willing to use/support it, is a trick. When a site or feed options become more narrowly focused it will be less interesting by definition.
posted by AgentRocket at 9:49 AM on November 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

I'm finding that I'm unable to follow certain people, most of whom are journalists on journa.host. If I search for them from my main page, nothing turns up. I can go directly to their profile on their own server, but when I try to follow them from there, I get an error message.

Ben Trismegistus, exactly what error message are you getting? And what interface are you using (desktop web, mobile web, or an app)?

At first, I had trouble figuring out how to follow people also (using the desktop web interface), so I'm wondering if you're having the same problem I did.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 9:50 AM on November 8, 2022

If anyone has recommendations on how to find funny people to follow I'd love to hear them. Searching hashtags like #humor, #funny, etc. has been of only limited use.
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:50 AM on November 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

If anyone has recommendations on how to find funny people to follow I'd love to hear them.

Cortex is doing puns again so don’t follow him.
posted by Artw at 9:54 AM on November 8, 2022 [5 favorites]

If users could follow each other regardless of server

I mean, they can? With relatively few exceptions.

If you really want to follow someone that your server blocks, for some reason, then move your account to another server more in line with your own sensibilities. It's not that hard to do.

I doubt this is a problem of any significance for most users.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 9:55 AM on November 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

every so often I'll think about what the demand might be for a service where you click one button and end up with a twitter clone of their own that fits into the free-tier offerings of AWS or GCP or whatever. I feel like containerization is easy enough and hosting options are plentiful enough that anyone should be able to spin up a server with storage and a db and put something on the public internet that's zero-maintenance, zero big-tech privacy issues, and zero ads. connect with your friends via their public hostnames, hit their APIs with your credentials, and get a blob of JSON with posts and links to photos and stuff.

(even less often I'll work on one of my side-projects that aims to provide such a service, but it's slow going.)
posted by Old Kentucky Shark at 9:58 AM on November 8, 2022

Cortex is doing puns again so don’t follow him.

Actually he's posting math stuff at the moment...personally I'd prefer the puns. ;)
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:59 AM on November 8, 2022

I can already see in some of the comments above a severe misunderstanding of how people use Twitter and why.

Quoted for emphasis. I'm a very heavy twitter user across three accounts. I looked once at Mastadon, and it was far to opaque for me. The simple fact that I can't browse it without creating an account, plus the fact that some of the first words I see when hitting the site are "preparing your machine." I'm sure very cool communities are there, but its incredibly different from Twitter.

I feel a tiny bit like one of the selling points of Mastodon is how actively difficult it is to use - a bit like "you have to be this tall to ride this ride" - and that's not selling it to me.

This reminds me a lot of the mad rush to dreamwidth when Livejournal finally crashed. dreamwidth was explicitly engineered to copy most of the LJ funcationallity, but it still never caught on. I'm sure there is an audience for Mastodon, but it is a very different audience than twitter.

For what I use twitter for (fandom stuff, mainly) twitter continues to work, and when it doesn't, well, Tumblr is still there and very stable and does a lot of what we need it to do.
posted by anastasiav at 10:03 AM on November 8, 2022 [5 favorites]

Before I used to think about gender I thought it was funny to call "asshole" that gender of which we refuse to call a gender.

That and I thought that this third gender could be conned into being "given the chance to live on a land of people just like them!" And that we sell it as a constant land of love and honey called AI. All of them would clamour onto some giant AI steam vessel convoy and left for AI. The rest of humanity would not tell them that it was Asshole Island that was their destination until we wer left screaming from the docks, waving, "Goodbye, Assholes! Goodbye! Enjoy Asshole Island!"

But there was the rub. Not the condemning huge swaths of humanity to go piss off; I'm fine with that. But, where would that be island be ? What giant piece of this world lush and vibrant world would I want to leave to those assholes ?

Well, I would like to thank Elon Musk for finishing that philosophical dilemma for me.
posted by NoThisIsPatrick at 10:04 AM on November 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

Mastodon isn't quite DOA, because Twitter isn't dead yet and there's still time for an alternative to emerge. But if Mastodon seriously wants to be that alternative, they need to make major changes and major improvements, and it needs to happen fast. But unfortunately I don't think the motivation is actually there.

LOL. Not only is Mastodon "not quite DOA", it's been adding hundreds of thousands of users in recent days.

You are absolutely right that the motivation to turn it into a perfect Twitter clone isn't there. Thank God.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 10:05 AM on November 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

@wicka:
> And I can see all of that in same place. That's the entire premise of Twitter, and splitting people off into their own instances fundamentally undermines it.

I think you are basing this judgment on an incorrect premise. In Mastodon, you can follow anyone on any instance, and your "home" view is just the content produced by all the people you follow. If you use Twitter by following people you like or are interested in, Mastodon is the same.

What you can't do as well is discover new content by global content search or algorithmic push. If you depend on those for populating your feed, it's going to be frustrating. That's something a decentralized system will never be able to do well. But that's also the avenue by which the social apps have historically done all their damage to our psyches. I'll learn to do without it.

The "instance feed" that you can get in your Mastodon app is sort of cute and random and might lead to some discoveries IF you happen to be on an instance with people who share your interests, but honestly I would have zero expectation of that.
posted by bgribble at 10:07 AM on November 8, 2022 [7 favorites]

Ben Trismegistus, exactly what error message are you getting? And what interface are you using (desktop web, mobile web, or an app)?

I was searching on desktop and just not finding anyone at all, or getting something about a connection with the remote server. I did learn upon asking that my local instance blocks those two journalist instances, so that's what was happening.
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 10:09 AM on November 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

Actually he's posting math stuff at the moment...personally I'd prefer the puns. ;)

Those squiggly blobs are going to make for some TERRIFYING puns.
posted by Artw at 10:15 AM on November 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

I get that there are access issues, but wicka I think your experience may be a few days out of date.

I'm genuinely not sure what you're responding to in terms of my "experience." I never said there were "access issues." I said it's a clunky platform that doesn't work all that well, and I stand by that. I'm using it right now and the experience is still clunky.

Walter's list is above in google docs form, but below is a link to the thread where he names 118 high profile twitter accounts who have managed to successfully sign up.

118 is a nothing amount of users and signing up alone is a nothing act. Many people are signing up just because they're aware of it as a potential alternative, they're not actually using it. I've had my account since 2018 and I've written one post. You don't just need people signing up. You need people signing up, using it, and liking it. Several of the people I follow on Twitter have discussed signing up for Mastodon. Many simply gave up when they saw the instance list. Many gave up when they had technical issues within the app, as I did. And many managed to sign up, share their username just so people would have it, and maybe post one thing on Mastodon.

Many businesses fail because they focus too much on raw metrics and ignore actual user feedback. Mastodon's present hyperfocus on cheering their user growth is distracting from the fact that the vast majority of people signing up are having a negative or apathetic experience. It's anecdotal, sure, but not a single person I follow on Twitter is discussing Mastodon in any positive way beyond it being Twitter's most direct alternative.

This is gonna take some elbow grease, but none of the problems with Mastodon, and ActivityPub, are unsolvable, and there's real momentum right now.

They're not unsolvable from a technical perspective, but in my experience getting projects like this to adapt to how real users want to use them is an overwhelming task. Elbow grease is not the hard part. The hard part is getting folks who have proudly devised a federated social media platform to accept that, if they want it to truly work as a Twitter replacement (and I'm not sure they do!), they pretty much need to abandon that federated concept.
posted by wicka at 10:16 AM on November 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

You will hear people tell you 'it doesnt matter which server you join'. This is true but also not true:
You can interact with accounts on any server (if you can find them).
The local timeline will show posts from your local server, the quality of these varies hugely, on the larger servers (>100,000) it is too much to follow. On small servers (<5000) the local feed is often empty.
The federated timeline is not a firehose of everything, it shows all public posts from all users who are “known” to your instance. That is, it includes every user on your instance, but it also includes everyone that users on your instance follow. On large servers this may be close to all of the active fediverse but it is never 100%.

I found https://instances.social/ helpful in finding a good instance.

https://twitodon.com/ can find your twitter friends on mastodon.

Mastodon is not Twitter, you will probably never go viral, this is a good thing, quality not quantity.
posted by Lanark at 10:19 AM on November 8, 2022 [5 favorites]

As far as finding people to follow on Masto, it's been just sort of a slow process of accumulation for me over the years, punctuated by occasional bursts of social network exodus/immigration (e.g. MetaFilter people coming over from Twitter, XOXO folks starting up their own instance). Most of the folks I follow on Mastodon at this point besides MeFites are:

- People whose art I found interesting at a glance while browsing various hashtags
- People talking about interesting things or posting interesting imagery while I was occasionally drinking from the firehose of the federated and local feeds (on mastodon.social even local is a firehose)
- People who folks I was already following were boosting

This is one of the challenges for folks moving to a new platform: it's more work than just exporting your existing network en masse from another service. It's an understandable frustration! But it's worth bearing in mind that that's basically how it always, always works. Every social graph on every platform is different, and they basically all require individual work from a starting point of zero. The effort of doing that work may be enough disincentive to not want to try, which is okay; nobody has to change platforms if they don't want. But it's same as it ever was; that's not a Mastodon thing, that's a change-is-hard thing.

Cortex is doing puns again so don’t follow him.

DON'T CALL IT A COMEBACK
posted by cortex at 10:23 AM on November 8, 2022 [7 favorites]

Apparently journo.host was attacked last night and went down or out but is up again? But this went by on a feed that is now extremely full, I’ve lost the details, and I need to de-screens for a bit.
posted by clew at 10:24 AM on November 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

Honest question - what are we even discussing here? Why are we discussing it? Because if we're discussing Mastodon as a Twitter alternative, but everything that would make it a Twitter alternative is considered a bad idea or antithetical to the concept of Mastodon, then it's not a Twitter alternative and never will be. Case closed, I guess?

Honestly, I'm kind of glad there's a bit of a learning curve. It took me a couple of days to get the hang of it, but maybe Mastodon is better off without users who will get angry and give up on it after 30 minutes of fiddling.

Just an exceptional description of exactly how and why Mastodon will never be anything more than what we all joked about whenever Twitter struggled.
posted by wicka at 10:26 AM on November 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

wicka, maybe people can discuss it as not a 1-to-1 replacement, but an alternative?

Like, yes, it is different than Twitter. No, this does not mean we should completely give up on it, and just resign ourselves to Twitter or nothing.
posted by sagc at 10:29 AM on November 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

I think we're discussing Mastodon in a broader scope than just "will it be a 1:1 twitter replacement/successor", regardless of how much major media takes on it are almost always going to revert to that myopic horserace vibe.
posted by cortex at 10:29 AM on November 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

Also, I think you're making a lot of pronouncements as fact, when they're more of your experience? I've found it surprisingly easy to replicate, pretty much exactly, my twitter experience.
posted by sagc at 10:30 AM on November 8, 2022 [5 favorites]

What I’ve said elsewhere:
I dunno if Mastodon is going to be or really wants to be a Twitter replacement, but my slow steady trickle of posts in my feed there has turned into a torrent and people are actually having conversations and more importantly having conversations about things that are not Twitter, Mastodon or Elon Musk. Even with significant dieback that’s reached a level where it’s going to be self sustaining and, frankly, a good enough scrolly clicky thing to fiddle with for me.
posted by Artw at 10:31 AM on November 8, 2022 [5 favorites]

Also, I wrote my own Intro to Mastodon blog post this weekend.

This was helpful thanks.

One thing I'm left wondering: could a local instance function as something like a Metafilter-style site? IOW could people make posts/topic groups that they could post to, and others could react to in a structured way (that's not as completely awful as twitter threats are). Could there be moderation?

I think that's possibly the best of both worlds---incorporating the trust of long time membership on certain groups and federating that more widely. It would be interesting if I could use Metafilter and cross over to a Reddit or a Discord instance, for example.
posted by bonehead at 10:32 AM on November 8, 2022

metafilter: everything that would make it a Twitter alternative is considered a bad idea or antithetical to the concept
posted by joeyh at 10:34 AM on November 8, 2022 [10 favorites]

soo I help run a medium sized mastodon instance and this has been a weird week, to say the least! We're still open for signups, and every time I check the queue there are dozens or even hundreds of new people waiting to get in. A year ago, the local timeline had a couple of posts every hour - now there's one every few seconds. We've had to do two server upgrades and add a moderator in the last week just to handle everything. It's exhilarating, but a little frightening, too - this was kind of my comfy place to just post about my life and random bullshit for the last few years, and I don't want that to go away. Luckily there hasn't been too much friction that I've seen, and the new people seem mostly amenable to learning the whole network of cultural norms about CWs and image descriptions and not screenshot dunking on people. But things are definitely changing, and all I can do hope the magic of pre-Elon mastodon isn't totally swept away. (and worst case scenario, it's always possible to jump to a smaller or self-hosted instance and block all the big ones..)

It's funny to read the "here's why Mastodon can never work" takes because I've been on there for years and it works pretty well for me! I got a ton of support and advice and love from there early in my transition, without really ever experiencing any harassment on that topic, and I've made multiple friends there that I've met irl. I don't want to argue that it's a drop-in twitter replacement or that it's perfect for everyone or that it's easy to figure out at first, it's not any of those things. And it's definitely not going to "beat twitter" in any sense, since it's not trying to, and it's also not really a single entity that works that way. But it's a pretty special place and it's totally surreal to see it in the news like this.
posted by theodolite at 10:35 AM on November 8, 2022 [12 favorites]

What you can't do as well is discover new content by global content search or algorithmic push. If you depend on those for populating your feed, it's going to be frustrating. That's something a decentralized system will never be able to do well. But that's also the avenue by which the social apps have historically done all their damage to our psyches. I'll learn to do without it.

Agree on all of this. But also: Hashtags seem to be a pretty good way of making stuff widely visible across servers, for people who are looking for it.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 10:37 AM on November 8, 2022

Definitely feel like someone's been drinking the haterade and it's not a good look.
posted by seanmpuckett at 10:37 AM on November 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

There are a lot of use cases for Twitter. My wife uses it as a fast-cycling dopamine source and mostly follows people who post excellent weird biology pics and stories. I use it as a low-touch way to find out what my writer friends are up to, and generally to have a finger on the pulse of the Discourse around my particular interests. I have a local-journalist acquaintance for whom Twitter has been invaluable both for information- and contact-gathering and for outreach to her audience. I have other friends that use it for organizing or disseminating information about and among special interest groups that do not get mainstream media attention. Some folks post microfiction. Some folks role-play. Some folks just shitpost.

All of these things are valid use cases of Twitter. Some can work as well or possibly better on Mastodon, some could in the future but can't, really, right now, some just won't ever quite work there. We probably won't know about all of them until the current Twitter upheaval reaches some kind of new plateau, and until we see what sites and concepts survive the stress test. All of this is really interesting and worth talking about, at least in my opinion.
posted by restless_nomad at 10:37 AM on November 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

Ben Trismegistus, thanks for the confirmation that toot.site blocks journa.host and masthead.social. I'll have to migrate - maybe to the writing-focused instances my writer friends keep telling me about. I'd like to be able to follow journalists, that was why I read Twitter generally (that and Black Twitter, if anybody has a source for that I'm all ears - I plan to sit down and try to get things together soon but haven't had a window in which to do it).
posted by joannemerriam at 10:39 AM on November 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

My only use case for Twitter was tracking news trends (and it was far from perfect there). I asked a good friend who is a long-time journalist for a major U.S. newspaper about this:

Q: As twitter descends into madness is the journalism community already figuring out how they re-tool? is there actual talk of migrating to e.g. mastodon, or is that just equivalent to "yeah, pretty soon everyone's gonna be using linux"?

A: Think it's more of the latter esp since Twitter already was a cesspool and is way less useful for us as a business than we pretend (e.g. a Facebook link still generates 10x more web traffic than a twitter link). Kinda fun watching Elon getting clowned rt now. But it will be interesting to see what kind of disinfo mayhem happens on election night since he has fired all the gatekeepers

I was honestly surprised about the FB point he made.
posted by mcstayinskool at 10:42 AM on November 8, 2022

Ed Burmila: If this is what it takes for more people to realize that mastodon literally means “nipple tooth” then so be it
posted by General Malaise at 10:48 AM on November 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

All of these things are valid use cases of Twitter. Some can work as well or possibly better on Mastodon, some could in the future but can't, really, right now, some just won't ever quite work there. We probably won't know about all of them until the current Twitter upheaval reaches some kind of new plateau, and until we see what sites and concepts survive the stress test.

Agree. I think a bad aspect of Twitter (and centralized social media in general) is how it's trained us to expect instant results, instant information, instant satisfaction, etc. This is why the denunciations of Mastodon for not being a drop-in Twitter substitute bug me. No, it isn't that, it isn't trying to be, it couldn't possibly be, and that's all to the good.

To understand Mastodon -- how it works, and its unique features and strengths and vibe(s) -- takes time. Not months or weeks, but maybe a day or two.

I don't mean to sound like I'm celebrating it purely for being technically a bit difficult to get into (but not all that difficult, really). I'm just trying to express that patience is required to fully appreciate it, and patience is a virtue all of us have unfortunately neglected (or been trained to neglect) in the era of Borgified social networks that are optimized to deliver immediate dopamine hits.

So the patience required to figure out how to use Mastodon, and to build up a network there, seems to mean that most people who are doing the necessary work are bringing a much better energy and a better set of expectations with them. And many of them, at least, seem to be ready to hang around for a while... which feels different from the previous abortive feints toward centralized alternatives like Ello, MeWe, etc.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 10:49 AM on November 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

→ The problem with Mastodon is that it's just not ready for this moment

Neither was Twitter, if it looked the way it looked in 2007
posted by scruss at 10:50 AM on November 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

For those looking for a good Masto follow, everywhereist (of the Bros restaurant review and various previouslies) has made the leap to Masto:
@everywhereist@mastodon.social

(And you don't need to be on mastodon.social to follow her, I'm following her from the smaller instance I joined and her toots show up in my home timeline)
posted by umber vowel at 10:51 AM on November 8, 2022

Don't miss the #catsofmastodon hashtag, by the way.
posted by umber vowel at 10:54 AM on November 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

Alright, I think this one thread has filled my lifetime quota of MetaFilter commenting. I expected this would be a better place for productive discourse but it's clearly just three Reddits wearing a trenchcoat.

At no point have I or anyone ever said Mastodon needs to be a "Twitter clone" or a "1-to-1 replacement," and yet I am inundated with liars responding to me as if I did. All I said was that it needs to be more user friendly, and apparently expecting user friendless means I'm "angry" and give up after "fiddling for 30 minutes" and Mastodon is better off without me. Thanks for that.

At no point have I or anyone ever said Mastodon "can never work," as it obviously does work, only that it's being discussed as an alternative platform for folks fleeing Twitter and is clearly not suitable for that purpose. I'm sure some small niche groups will be able to decamp to Mastodon, and that's great for them, but Twitter has like 200 million active users and very few of them will find what they need on Mastodon.

Virtually all open source projects have two main qualities: a weird sense of elitism, and a buffoonish unawareness of how the typical person engages with technology. I'm sensing the former is a huge problem here because the worst platforms online all have an undeserved sense of superiority over Twitter, for reasons I've never been able to fully understand, and it leads them to be entirely dismissive of Twitter's value and the fact that a lot of people rely on it. There are lot of freelancer-types on Twitter who would lose their livelihood if Twitter went away and there was no real alternative, and I'm pretty sure their landlords don't care if you wear Mastodon's complexity as a badge of honor.

I don't cheer Twitter's potential demise, because it will hurt far more people than it will benefit. And neither do I cheer Mastodon's stubbornness, because it has an opportunity to be an incredibly useful tool that could help those hurt folks, and instead it has apparently chosen to stay small-time. It's their right to choose to operate that way but it's not a decision I particularly respect. And it's not just an opportunity to move from one platform to another. It's an opportunity to move from a shitty corporate platform to one built by the people, for the people. And we're pissing it away because we think needless complexity is cool. Shameful.

Finally: This is not a zero sum game. We can do both. We can improve Mastodon, we can make it better and simpler out of the box for those folks who prefer simplicity and user friendliness (i.e. the general public), AND it can continue to work in the exact same way as it currently does for you folks who clearly enjoy it. We can do both! We can be the best of all worlds! And you're refusing to do so out of elitist spite. Again, it's just shameful, and it has no value to society.
posted by wicka at 10:55 AM on November 8, 2022 [10 favorites]

does she even go here
posted by theodolite at 10:56 AM on November 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

How are Mastodon instances funding moderation? Is it all volunteer work, or can an instance show ads to its local users in the sidebar or whatever? Can an instance charge a signup or membership fee?

Seems like if there's a way for a small group of people to make a bit of money running an interest group instance the whole thing is more likely to stick around and expand.
posted by echo target at 10:57 AM on November 8, 2022

And you're refusing to do so out of elitist spite.

Who do you think "we" are? There's almost no one here that's actually running a Mastodon instance. There are a lot fewer people here who are programmers who could actually "do" anything to Mastodon's code. Mostly we're just users trying to figure out how to use a tool and getting excited about some of the possibilities.
posted by restless_nomad at 10:59 AM on November 8, 2022 [11 favorites]

Alright, I think this one thread has filled my lifetime quota of MetaFilter commenting. I expected this would be a better place for productive discourse but it's clearly just three Reddits wearing a trenchcoat.

It's actually a whole bunch of MeFites, some of whom are probably wearing pants. I'm sympathetic if you're feeling frustrated about getting pushback on some of your arguments, but we're really all having a rambly conversation about a bunch of stuff and most of it isn't directed at you or focused on the specific things you've been preferring to focus on. That's okay, conversation's a soup. If it's not making you happy right now, give it a miss for sure. (Which is kind of my thesis for all forms of social media too, to bring it back around.)
posted by cortex at 11:01 AM on November 8, 2022 [7 favorites]

Ed Burmila: If this is what it takes for more people to realize that mastodon literally means “nipple tooth” then so be it

Credit for that goes to Monday's NY Times Crossword puzzle, 10 down: Extinct megafauna species whose name derives from the Greek for "breast tooth"
posted by chavenet at 11:02 AM on November 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

Virtually all open source projects have two main qualities: a weird sense of elitism, and a buffoonish unawareness of how the typical person engages with technology. I'm sensing the former is a huge problem here because the worst platforms online all have an undeserved sense of superiority over Twitter, for reasons I've never been able to fully understand

Personally, I've been a Twitter user since 2008. I only started using Mastodon a couple days ago. I think I understand how "the typical person engages with technology" as well as any reasonably aware layperson. I'm not a Linux geek and can't stand CLIs.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 11:07 AM on November 8, 2022

Think of the freelancer-types who can't pay their rent without Musk's company being successful. Get back on twitter and watch an ad ASAP.
posted by Wood at 11:07 AM on November 8, 2022

I don't pay enough attention to know what else is going on, but bot activity has definitely increased. I have a Mastodon account dated 2017, and in the past month or so my number of followers has doubled. It's now 8. That may not sound like much, but my post count has remained constant at 0.
posted by swr at 11:07 AM on November 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

I don't cheer Twitter's potential demise, because it will hurt far more people than it will benefit. And neither do I cheer Mastodon's stubbornness, because it has an opportunity to be an incredibly useful tool that could help those hurt folks, and instead it has apparently chosen to stay small-time. It's their right to choose to operate that way but it's not a decision I particularly respect.

It would probably behoove you to at least do a very basic level of research to understand what Mastodon is and isn't, because you keep talking about what Mastodon "should" do as if it is a single entity with a president or board of directors, akin to a commercial social network.

Mastodon isn't being "stubborn" or "choosing to stay small-time". It's a big, distributed system with no central decision-making body. It literally can't do what you are angry at it for not doing. It's like getting mad at email.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 11:11 AM on November 8, 2022 [13 favorites]

What kerflunk are y'all on? I want to be able to quark your nerps.

Seeing a lot of dunking (mostly on Twitter, natch) on the jargon Mastodon uses-- as if "I added a hashtag to the subtweet in my mentions from the thread where that user with the checkmark was shadowbanned after she was ratioed" has always been part of the Queen's English.
posted by gwint at 11:12 AM on November 8, 2022 [16 favorites]

MetaFilter: conversation's a soup
posted by chavenet at 11:13 AM on November 8, 2022 [7 favorites]

Seeing a lot of dunking (mostly on Twitter, natch) on the jargon Mastodon uses

Toots. Come on, man. Toots.
posted by restless_nomad at 11:15 AM on November 8, 2022 [10 favorites]

Toots. Come on, man. Toots.

Yeah, I'm never calling 'em that. They're just "posts". I'm "posting", not "tooting". Unless I've had a lot of beans.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 11:17 AM on November 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

One thing I'm left wondering: could a local instance function as something like a Metafilter-style site? IOW could people make posts/topic groups that they could post to, and others could react to in a structured way (that's not as completely awful as twitter threats are). Could there be moderation?

Darius Kazemi has a great explanation of how to run a community site (technically and, mostly, socially) using his Mastodon fork, Hometown: runyourown.social
posted by john hadron collider at 11:18 AM on November 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

This admin on one of the larger instances has just recruited a handful of (unpaid, I assume) moderators and also takes donations for server costs. They've been having a heck of a week, it seems. They've had to move stuff around to make the Ruby/Node/Postgres goop work. It'll be interesting to see how the esprit de corps holds up.
posted by credulous at 11:20 AM on November 8, 2022

How are Mastodon instances funding moderation?

I'm sending $5 a month to help fund the instance I'm on - but that is just going to server costs. I don't think any instance was large enough prior to last week to worry much about paying moderators - the server admins and a couple of volunteers have been handling it. That's probably changing as we speak for some of the larger instances though.
posted by COD at 11:20 AM on November 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

Yeah, the one I'm on is frantically trying to put together a payment portal for donations. Moderation is currently a handful of volunteers, but we'll see where that goes.
posted by restless_nomad at 11:24 AM on November 8, 2022

Toots. Come on, man. Toots.

I remember having EXACTLY the same reaction to "tweets" in 2008. And yet.
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 11:33 AM on November 8, 2022 [11 favorites]

I'm another Twitter user (private acct on purpose because I don't owe randos my time) but instead of leaving, I just took the app off my phone, which was my main vector of use. I likely won't bother with Mastodon just because I am too tired to figure out a new system right now. But I really don't like the dismissive tone I've been reading from folks which is really starting to feel like "If you can't figure out Mastodon, or if you think Mastodon is hard, that's your own fault."

If you want to use Mastodon and it works for you, that is awesome. But it isn't one size fits all approach.
posted by Kitteh at 11:36 AM on November 8, 2022 [6 favorites]

It's pretty great how we're now having a discussion about paying for our social media sites as users of those sites. It's about frigging time we were treated like customers. Or at least, not like extruded eyeball product.
posted by seanmpuckett at 11:37 AM on November 8, 2022 [10 favorites]

Take the Twitter app off the phone (it’s a security threat now anyway) and only go to it in browser if you need something specific, logging in and logging out each time, it’ll break the habit of idle scrolling pretty quickly.
posted by Artw at 11:40 AM on November 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

the thing that made Twitter so unique and unlike anything else on the internet was that it was effectively universal equal ground for everybody to have their say
The idea that Twitter's algorithm is a magically egalitarian place, even with 200 million users is a fiction, the feed is heavily manipulated often by a literal 'man behind the curtain' deciding which posts to promote.

I can see all of that in same place. That's the entire premise of Twitter, and splitting people off into their own instances fundamentally undermines it.
This is linked to the issue above, if you want a true date ordered feed with no algorithm getting in the way, then a single platform, hosting as many users as Twitter, would be showing you 6000 posts per second. That is just not usable for anyone.
posted by Lanark at 11:41 AM on November 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

Honestly, I am mostly not super worried about the friction around Mastodon right now, because it's pretty clear the fediverse as a whole doesn't have the current capacity to take every mildly interested user. It is going to have knock-on effects for the communities - it's going to select for people who have a little more tech knowledge or a little more free time/brainspace to move to a new platform. And those are the people who, in an open-source environment, are the right people to write explainers and improve onboarding and figure out how to make the experience friendlier. The availability of guides and walkthroughs seems to have exploded in direct proportion to the new users, and that's great! It's going to take a lot longer for actual tech fixes, though, and we-the-internet have gotten really bad at waiting for things that don't move at the speed of Twitter.
posted by restless_nomad at 11:45 AM on November 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

6000 posts per second

Suggest following a few less accounts, maybe putting some in lists.
posted by Artw at 11:45 AM on November 8, 2022

Metafilter: just three Reddits wearing a trenchcoat
posted by Ahmad Khani at 11:46 AM on November 8, 2022 [14 favorites]

theodolite > soo I help run a medium sized mastodon instance and this has been a weird week, to say the least! We're still open for signups, and every time I check the queue there are dozens or even hundreds of new people waiting to get in. A year ago, the local timeline had a couple of posts every hour - now there's one every few seconds. We've had to do two server upgrades and add a moderator in the last week just to handle everything. It's exhilarating, but a little frightening, too - this was kind of my comfy place to just post about my life and random bullshit for the last few years, and I don't want that to go away.

I feel this, yeah. I run a small instance that I have quite deliberately kept small because I don't want to worry about bringing in other moderators, doing constant server upgrades, and having the local timeline become unreadable. I kinda feel an obligation to the overall network to turn on the application form (right now it's off, if you want in you need to ping me elsewhere, or get someone already on the instance to ask for an invite, and if you pass my quick vibe check then you'll get an invite code) but really I do not want to suddenly find myself dealing with a teeming mass of new users instead of a quiet backwater instance that very rarely requires me to put on my Moderator Hat.
posted by egypturnash at 11:53 AM on November 8, 2022 [6 favorites]

Suggest following a few less accounts, maybe putting some in lists.
If you are only reading posts from accounts you already follow, well thats exactly what the Mastodon feed gives you!
posted by Lanark at 11:56 AM on November 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

I don't understand the instance/server terminology. So hypothetically if a Mastodon community about Jordan Peterson and another community about the works of Slavoj Zizek mutually block each other, am I forced to pick a side?

Or if a bunch of academics have their Mastodon, and then a bunch of FAANG techies have theirs, do I need to choose between the two? Thus constraining my social interactions?
posted by polymodus at 12:01 PM on November 8, 2022

No to both, polymodus, unless you've chosen to base your account in the Slavoj server and want to follow people on the Peterson server.

In the second scenario, you'd just... Follow people from both, like you normally would on twitter.
posted by sagc at 12:04 PM on November 8, 2022

How lucky i am that i can still follow the hypotheticals of payment, just like the $3 a month I donate to Metafilter, knowing that I can afford it, considering that's about a cost of a meal in my currency. How lucky indeed, considering I lurked here for a decade before i could afford both the cost and the payment method to do so. How lucky to still remain included in the idea that it's just too bad if you can't pay to be part of a community (and for good reason, i agree!), that my being able to pay has a 1:1 relationship with my sectoral expertise and education level. Certainly can't imagine there may be people otherwise....
posted by cendawanita at 12:09 PM on November 8, 2022 [6 favorites]

I mean, there are a ton of servers where there *isn't* an expectation to pay, ones that are donation-based, running your own for the cost of computing resources...

I think I'm missing something, but I personally don't think that the existence of paid Mastodon servers (which I haven't even seen - link to what you're referring to, please?) is a significant issue at this point? At least not one that can be ascribed to the whole fediverse, I don't think.
posted by sagc at 12:13 PM on November 8, 2022

Certainly can't imagine there may be people otherwise....

The problem is that somebody has to pay for things. You know, just in general. (I'd like this to be different!) I really do tend to think that major social media infrastructure is, well, infrastructure and should be paid for accordingly, but until that extremely large change to how society works, we're pretty dependent on people who *can* afford to keep communities running doing so vigorously enough that the communities can exist without hard paywalls. It's a shitty situation! I'm personally glad that a couple people clubbed together to pay the $200-$300 a month it's costing them to run the instance I'm on, and when I have money to spare, I'll throw them some. I hope everyone else who can does too.
posted by restless_nomad at 12:14 PM on November 8, 2022

Merely responding to this representative comment: It's pretty great how we're now having a discussion about paying for our social media sites as users of those sites. It's about frigging time we were treated like customers. Or at least, not like extruded eyeball product.
posted by cendawanita at 12:15 PM on November 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

To understand Mastodon -- how it works, and its unique features and strengths and vibe(s) -- takes time. Not months or weeks, but maybe a day or two.

It's occurred to me while reading this thread (slowly getting the hang of Mastodon and having recently read the Monk & Robot series) that Mastodon (at least for me and for now) has kind of a Becky Chambers vibe.
posted by fogovonslack at 12:16 PM on November 8, 2022 [7 favorites]

I'm personally glad that a couple people clubbed together to pay the $200-$300 a month it's costing them to run the instance I'm on, and when I have money to spare, I'll throw them some. I hope everyone else who can does too.

Exactly. I know I'm lucky. I didn't even wait for the MF steering committee to be elected to even begin my monthly donations. But I'm not missing the ones who are nicely settled on mastodon. I'm missing the voices i wouldn't have realized I was missing (INCLUDING my own people).
posted by cendawanita at 12:17 PM on November 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

Do you know how the costs change for a server hosted entirely in your country, cendawanita? Or managed in your country but the server is somewhere else?

Seems like it could be good for lots of places to have side-jobs running their own Web 1.5 neighborhoods.
posted by clew at 12:17 PM on November 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

Yeah! It really is good that we're actually talking about paying, rather than unthinkingly and possibly unknowingly paying with our personal data or access to us as consumers. Those may be valid ways to fund a community, but heretofore it's been done in the shadiest possible ways. Let's talk about actual costs. Let's talk about access. Let's make it our business, rather than leaving it solely as the business of those who are profiting.
posted by restless_nomad at 12:21 PM on November 8, 2022 [11 favorites]

I'm having a lot of fun on Tumblr at the moment but maybe I'll dig up my Mastodon login I have around here somewhere.

(Tumblr attitude toward Twitter refugees: "it's like switching from buying your groceries at Walmart to the cursed gift store from Needful Things.").

What it's really like is if you could suddenly only access Weird Twitter.
posted by emjaybee at 12:22 PM on November 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

Do you know how the costs change for a server hosted entirely in your country, cendawanita? Or managed in your country but the server is somewhere else?

Let's just say I'm not at all worried about technical capacity. I linked to a thread by a Singaporean journo in another thread. Where I'm from we don't lack technical knowhow. If only we wouldn't be politically terrorized and arrested every goddamn time. I had a back and forth once with a local host, who won't commit to protecting me should my blog content is found to contain such sensitive stuff like talking about religion, politics, queer life, or communists.

Tumblr (and PayPal) is banned in Indonesia. My country had a ban on fanfiction.net of all places (all the gay porn) as well as patheos (eta: decided against fixing my tenses. It's all still current).

I've said it elsewhere and I'll say it again: don't forget about us. That's all I ask.
posted by cendawanita at 12:24 PM on November 8, 2022 [8 favorites]

And that's part of the thing, is looking at costs as a built-in part of the process, which doesn't need to and in an economic justice sense really shouldn't translate directly to "everyone pays the same flat rate" when it's totally possible to use sliding scales and opt-in support to subsidize a service for folks less able or unable to contribute directly financially.

One of my regrets with MetaFilter is that we didn't much sooner and much more loudly make a point of making waiving the signup free painless. The option was always there in theory, but for a very long time only as a "well, if you decide of your own volition to ask someone nicely" secret off-menu option. Then it moved to explicitly saying "you can drop us a line" during the signup process, which was better. Then it moved to "click this button to request it automatically", which was better still. And the key thing is signup fees weren't keeping MeFi going; the explicit voluntary choice by those able to to directly support the site at whatever level they're able to is what did. Losing a little bit in signup revenue for fee waivers to make this place a little more economically just was an easy call to make.

I suspect as masto and other more user-funded platforms grow and evolve we'll see a similar maturation and evolution of how opt-in direct support mechanisms function, but right now we already see with most instances the most basic version of that: someone with the money/time to run an instance does it, and then asks for some support as necessary from others who can also help out, and if it works out it works out.
posted by cortex at 12:30 PM on November 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

Indeed. The switch in American/Western soft diplomacy** to be almost totally private solutions driven isn't invisible from where I stand. Like I said, I'm just lucky enough to be vaulted in time that I can afford to chip in.

**Even with the anglophone countries having their own reckoning e.g. the UK, the queer people from my region aren't just applying for Chevening scholarships because they really like a British degree.
posted by cendawanita at 12:34 PM on November 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

The political dangers are a wicked* problem, though, aren’t they? The technical and legal and maybe political strength to survive a government’s disapproval is going to be large enough to be dangerous to other groups. Certainly I know people who host in Germany because they think it’s slightly safer for their users.
posted by clew at 12:34 PM on November 8, 2022

I don't understand the instance/server terminology.

You have access to three different feeds on Mastodon. One (Home) is the equivalent to a Twitter feed. It shows you the people you follow, from all various servers. The second (Local) shows you posts from all the people who share your server. The third (Federated) is the second plus the posts from all the people they follow.

The server you choose has an direct or indirect impact on all three feeds. Servers blocking each other will affect your Home feed. So using your Peterson-Zizek example, if you're in one of them, you can't follow someone in the other. If you're in a different server, you should be able to follow people from both (unless they're not Peterson or Zizek fans either). To some extent, however, you are judged by your server - which is why looking at the rules/policies is important. A server that doesn't have a rule against racism, sexism, etc., or doesn't properly apply the rules it has,may find itself being cut off from other servers.

The server has a much more obvious impact on the other two feeds. In a large server, they are more like a firehose of posts, and there's no real way of interacting. On a smaller server, it's easier to interact with people, and it'll be more likely to centre around a common theme. This is where the Academics vs FAANG techies bit comes in. You can choose to hang out with either, and they will be in your Local feed and their follows in your Federated, choose a different server, and just follow who you want, or even have two separat accounts on both.
posted by scorbet at 12:37 PM on November 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

I don't understand the implications reading the Reuters piece's hypothetical example:

If an extremist voice emerged with their own server, they say, it would be easy enough for other servers to cut ties with it, leaving the account to talk to its own shrinking band of followers and users on the isolated server.

The article mentions this is an anarchic system. But what stops the account user from making a new account on the servers that excluded the extremist server? And the dual of that, if an admin makes a call to block off a server doesn't that punish/force every user with an account on the server? Is that the best granularity of control for designing a distributed social network?
posted by polymodus at 12:38 PM on November 8, 2022

polymodus, moderation - extremists will be modded off servers that don't tolerate them and which have blocked their previous servers.

As for granularity, it's about as granular as it can get - an individual can block individuals and servers, servers can block servers (and individuals, I think?). If nobody was allowed to block servers, federation makes less sense; it's just Distributed Twitter. But people don't want Distributed Twitter, they want something with more granularity in terms of user experience/environment/etc. Hell, I don't know how you'd even enforce a no-server-bans distributed social network, other than it being entirely closed-source.
posted by sagc at 12:43 PM on November 8, 2022

But what stops the account user from making a new account on the servers that excluded the extremist server? And the dual of that, if an admin makes a call to block off a server doesn't that punish/force every user with an account on the server?

Nothing stops them. Except that they should be banned by the new server if they continue to act as they did on the extremist one, and if they don't get banned, then probably that new server will get cut off. Yes, it does punish everyone else, but they can also open a new account somewhere else without issue, provided they follow the new server rules.
posted by scorbet at 12:46 PM on November 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

The Reuters example chose extremism, but I don't think that is the substantial issue. The issue is whether this kind of system results in a kind of cliquishness and that that is not a substitute for public society, i.e. how discursive commons (or anarchy) can be structured. So from a systems design and sociological perspective this is not clear. Probably some grad student is already working in this area.
posted by polymodus at 12:49 PM on November 8, 2022

I'm considering resuscitating my long-dormant mastodon account just so I can play around with toot, a CLI and TUI client...
posted by jim in austin at 12:56 PM on November 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

When you get a round tuit, Jim in austin- - -
posted by clew at 1:00 PM on November 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

Assuming Mastodon does become big, and that I understand the setup, I would assume the natural evolution leads to a "blue check mark" equivalent of invite only servers that are run by "old media" (NYT, New Yorker, LA Times, and the like.) and, in some cases, cliques of writers/freelancers/podcasters/etc. who all trust either other.

You need to be sure (as both a member of the server and another server admin) that the feed won't blow up with Nazi posters, either as trolls or as a coordinated attempt to get the server blocked. Or as a bot attack.
posted by mark k at 1:00 PM on November 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

Professional associations could well do it, getting back to their self-governing stage. And any field might have two-three associations, with relevant flavors or politics.

On terminology - instance instead of server is good for a particular tech shift, but I prefer to revive host for its social as well as PDNTSPA sense.
posted by clew at 1:05 PM on November 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

"blue check mark" equivalent of invite only servers

There are already servers set up by the EU (social.network.europa.eu) and the German government (social.bund.de) that are used like this. (For institutions at the moment, rather than individuals).
posted by scorbet at 1:05 PM on November 8, 2022 [5 favorites]

I think the problem most people are hitting is that they're flocking to the same few enormous servers. I was fortunate enough to have a friend who ran a small server who invited us on, and then we all got together and decided to spin up a new one together that met all our needs.

The fallacy that people from The Bird Site bring to Mastodon is the notion that things must scale up, becoming ever bigger and more trending or something. But Mastodon's strength is its ability to scale out, welcoming new servers that are only built to host the West Bipperton Bicycle Repair Cooperative members, and nothing else. Federation means they can see the wider fediverse and follow Stephen Fry or whatever, but their local streams will 100% be local topics relevant to the co-op.

This is harder, even, than "choosing a good server" for the majority of punters, to be sure. But this may change soon. People are already working out pushbutton deployments on common hosting platforms, and the demand is clearly there now.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 1:17 PM on November 8, 2022 [8 favorites]

And the "blue check" doesn't come from joining some huge popular server. The "blue check" of authenticity is coming from the hostname used for your recognised institution. So someone who works for the BBC isn't "blue checked" because they're on mastodon.social or whatever, but they would be if they were on social.bbc.co.uk or equivalent.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 1:18 PM on November 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

Also, you can "blue check" yourself if you own a domain name - in much the same way you prove to Google Analytics you own a server before it lets you see stats for it. You drop one line of code in the root directory (IIRC) and Mastodon sees that code and gives you the checkmark confirming dude.com and @dude@mastodon.server are the same person.
posted by COD at 1:23 PM on November 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

As someone who never got into twitter, but watches a few users from the web portal, and uses FB as a locked down, friends & family only site, I did a little bit of research and hopped on to Mastodon last night. I'm there as an anonymous user to follow some interests and post finished projects and random nature photos I've taken.
The big instances were closed while I was looking, so I poked around and found @artisan.chat, which contains knitters and other artists in a smallish group. Signing up wasn't too hard (deciding on a new user name took the most time), and now it's mostly starting to follow people from hashtag searches, and seeing if the titter people I watched move over. It is helpful that there are a few power users who are reblogging people from other instances, so I can check those users out and see if I want to follow them. If you're looking for an interest-based instance to land, maybe try doing a hashtag search and see where posters are coming from.
So far it feels pretty cozy, mostly because people post their in process knitting photos and photos of cats. I really like the idea that nazis and terfs are locked behind their own servers, but as it stands, it appears that this instance isn't interested in controversial topics, so I doubt the mods aren't being tested right now (could be wrong).

An interesting cultural effect today is that a lot of the big art instances are telling people to put politics-related posts behind content warnings, which I'm sure would rub some twitter users the wrong way, but it is kind of nice to skim through the list of posts and decide what I want to see. Apparently you can also autohide posts based on filters, or choose to have CW posts opened up as a default.

Anyway, as someone who never signed up for twitter, Mastodon seemed pretty intuitive, but I could see how it's close-but-not to mess up twitter power users.
posted by Hermeowne Grangepurr at 1:46 PM on November 8, 2022 [7 favorites]

I've pretty much given up on social media (except MeFi and a couple of such things) for mental health reasons. However I do use Facebook extensively, and Twitter and Instagram somewhat, only for business purposes. Those things are pretty essential - and expected - nowadays for the type of business we do.

So I have been trying to puzzle out whether or why to create a business account on Mastodon and then close the Twitter (business) account.

However I have been thinking and thinking, and for our particular type of business I cannot think of one single reason we would want to be on Mastodon. Maybe if it gets much, much bigger and has a regional server or servers for our region? But for now, there is literally nothing there business-wise. It would be a complete waste of time - none of the people we are trying to reach are on it.

So then I thought, "Hmm . . . . it's COMPLETELY USELESS TO BUSINESS is it?" and made myself a personal account (on qoto.org, just FYI). We'll see how it plays out.
posted by flug at 1:55 PM on November 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

"...is signup fees weren't keeping MeFi going"

Never thought they were when I came here. Just thought they were a way to (partially) filter out the spam/bots. Knew there was some Ad revenue but didn't know how much as (once I'd been lurking for a while) I'd always made donations when the fundraising came around.

I've increased my donations since (to me) the surprise of how down we were and I really hope we can keep it going.

Also I'm fine with waiving the signup fee.
posted by aleph at 1:56 PM on November 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

The real appeal of twitter always was that you could call some muppet of a politician or media personality bald when they posted some extraordinary bit of racist or transphobic dogwhistle and see how much it hurt them. I'm not sure kinder, gentler Mastodon can be a replacement for this and it's a pity because these fools need to know we hate them.

On a more positive note, Twitter for me is a place in which all my various interests and obsessions come together to mix and match. If you have a large enough list of people to follow Twitter is a never ending cornucopia of wonders. Like a lot of people I started with a list of people I already knew from elsenet as well as the various UK comedians and other vaguely famous people that looked interesting. That last group was a mistake but a decade or so of adding people because they wrote interestingly about anime or comics or politics or trans matters or whatever and then seeing them evolve is what made twitter great to me.

That's the experience I want from Mastodon.
posted by MartinWisse at 2:11 PM on November 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

What I want, as a former Twitter power user and a current Mastodonian, is (unsurprisingly) more power tools. I want Tweetdeck + Better Twitter for Mastodon, and I'd happily pay (actually quite a lot) for it. No current Mastodon client for MacOS is there yet, nor is the default Mastodon web UI.

I want the Tweetdeck ability to filter a list down to only posts with links -- I did a lot of keeping-current work that way on Twitter. (Mo' filters mo' betta. Filter by language, filter to only posts with images, Tweetdeck has a LOT of filters and I want 'em back.) I want the Better Tweetdeck ability to clear a column with a single click. Please. Please please.

I will happily praise the Mastodon feature that allows me to get rid of boosts from a specific user, though! It's good! It gets a lot of stuff I don't wanna see out of my eyeballs!

And Mastodon culture around content warnings (CWs) is a blessing, it really is.
posted by humbug at 2:17 PM on November 8, 2022 [7 favorites]

I quit Twitter last week after the first wave of dumb Elon BS; now I'm internet homeless, lurking around here more because that's what I used to do, but it doesn't quite work for me around here anymore.

I got a lot of value out of Twitter every day and I don't have the bandwidth in my life to find or make a suitable replacement. I'm pretty bummed!
posted by Kwine at 2:18 PM on November 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

MartinWisse, I'd say that's exactly one of the joys of Mastodon? Discovering new people and following them?

One of the problems with Mastodon that's apparent from this thread is that it's not very clear you can follow anyone you want.
posted by sagc at 2:18 PM on November 8, 2022

Yeah, I'm never calling 'em that.

Regardless of silliness, calling them that obvious knock-off of "tweets" seems to imply that they DO want Mastodon to be a Twitter replacement. While vehemently denying it if anyone dares to accidentally suggest such a thing.

I like Mastodon, so far. But let's face it, whatever "culture" there is is going to be overwhelmed by Twitter refugees just like top-posting took over email.
posted by ctmf at 2:20 PM on November 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

So, Debirdify has been mentioned a few times as a way to migrate from twitter to Mastodon.

But, I never did twitter in the first place. I stopped doing Facebook when it became impossible to get chronological feed from people in my small academic field (which was why I joined originally). It kind of sounds like Mastodon might have the ability to get such a feed (at least via RSS even if I don't join myself). Is there something like Debirdify for those of us who never birded in the first place?

I'm specifically interested in seeing who of my Facebook "friends" might be on Mastodon somewhere. But I imagine there's people who'd like to do some other search of a sizeable list to find out where "their" people are on Mastodon. What tools are there for that?
posted by nat at 2:47 PM on November 8, 2022

As soon as my follows regarding baseball make the move, I'm gone from Twitter
posted by Ber at 3:35 PM on November 8, 2022

The sticking point I'm seeing, myself, is the simultaneous "It doesn't matter which server you pick, you can freely migrate!" and "but also, here's all these cases where it matters what server I'm on".

Given the reports from people I trust about ongoing structural racism within the Fediverse, that's an issue. So I want to avoid that, naturally.
But I'm also seeing reports of a common cultural pattern of requiring content warnings on anything that mentions politics. So I'll want to avoid places that require that.
But admin can read my DMs, so I need to make sure I trust whoever's running an instance that much.
But I need to make sure I don't land in an instance that's blocked anybody I want to follow, so I need to figure out the union of blocks there.
But so many instances are interest-based, so I need to figure out what I'm declaring as my primary/home interest here.
etc.

Some of this is resolvable, but I've also seen some of this get a lot of "Why would you want to do that? That's not something you should want", and that *exhausts* my enthusiasm/appetite for figuring stuff out.

So I'll keep watching, & maybe eventually it'll clear up.
posted by CrystalDave at 3:52 PM on November 8, 2022 [13 favorites]

Mastodon reminds me of ICQ

Interesting but not enough to bother learning how to use
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 4:02 PM on November 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

Reminder to re-toot* liberally; that's how I'm finding a lot of the people I should be following but aren't yet.
posted by ctmf at 4:57 PM on November 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

My favorite track is More Than I Could Chew ;)
posted by screenname00 at 5:20 PM on November 8, 2022

This explainer worked for me.
posted by maudlin at 5:54 PM on November 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

I'm on octodon.social. The link goes to their about page, which includes some policies and a long list of instances they block. Regular signups are closed, but I'd be willing to share a handful of invites. If you're interested, memail me.
posted by thedward at 6:09 PM on November 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

Wow, thedward, that is a long list of suspended servers. My impression up until now was that Mastodon had less of that. How foolish I was! I don't know why I read the list. I suggest not reading it. Sounds like octodon is a nice place tho.
posted by Glinn at 6:26 PM on November 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

Finally: This is not a zero sum game. We can do both. We can improve Mastodon, we can make it better and simpler out of the box for those folks who prefer simplicity and user friendliness (i.e. the general public), AND it can continue to work in the exact same way as it currently does for you folks who clearly enjoy it. We can do both! We can be the best of all worlds! And you're refusing to do so out of elitist spite. Again, it's just shameful, and it has no value to society.

The biggest problems with Mastodon as a Twitter replacement aren't really technical or cultural, they're financial.

If you want to create a real replacement for twitter it will cost hundreds(?) of millions of dollars a year to run because that's how much it costs to host, algorithmically feed, and moderate tens of millions of users on one shared platform. As the user base grows the costs will too

If you replace the elitist jerks running the local food co-op it will still lack a logistics chain that can match Amazon or Walmart.
posted by zymil at 7:25 PM on November 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

I, too, am on octodon.social, although rarely and mostly to be depressed and weird. Octodon is safe and friendly and well-moderated from my perspective.

Happy to farm out invites to mefites. I did just see that Stephen Fry, Neil Gaiman, and Felicia Day have all made the jump - I only have Tusky on my phone and sharing profiles directly is impossible, it seems. Apologies for not linking ...
posted by prismatic7 at 7:30 PM on November 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

If you want to create a real replacement for twitter it will cost hundreds(?) of millions of dollars a year to run because that's how much it costs to host, algorithmically feed, and moderate tens of millions of users on one shared platform. As the user base grows the costs will too

And that's the easy part! Then you have to figure out the DMCA takedowns, subpoenas for user data, various speech laws in various jurisdictions, international incidents because some country is mad that your site won't censor discussion on %TOPIC%, spammers, scammers, people who are using your platform to trade CSAM...
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 8:15 PM on November 8, 2022 [5 favorites]

I was clicking around some science-y tags, and it looks like ecoevo.social is a hub for ecology, biology, and other science stuff.

(Link goes to ecoevo.social/explore , which on this instance looks to be directory of users. I haven't seen that feature on other instances.)
posted by umber vowel at 8:17 PM on November 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

esi@merveilles.town:

On the Icelandic fediverse/Mastodon I've started seeing people using the word "tútta" for "toot". "tútta" (pronounced toot-ta) is normally a slang term for a boob/tit.

Please reboob this.

posted by prismatic7 at 9:59 PM on November 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

I too signed up for Mathstodon.xyz and migrated over a basically stale mastodon.social profile from 2018 (when we thought Twitter was going down the tubes for a different way less real reason that I can't even remember now). I really like the vibe on Mathstodon, it currently feels more like a Discord than a tiny Twitter, and I am actually hesitant to "refollow" everyone I currently follow on Twitter as many of them migrate over.
posted by 3j0hn at 10:22 PM on November 8, 2022

So, “Irish Twitter” has migrated en masse to Mastodon, which prompted me to return to my own neglected handle. I joined mastodon.cloud back in 2017 for reasons I can no longer remember, I think there was some wave of ‘Mastodon is the cool new thing’ at the time but no one I knew was there, so I left it fallow. I’ve found picking it up again relatively easy, because now there are people there that I’m familiar with.

I agree with Matt’s blog post about his own move from T to M in that the local and federated timelines don’t really matter; you curate your own feed from people you follow (most likely, fellow Twitter emigres), find more people to follow through the people the boost, and grow from there. Which was how I approached Twitter since I started and never really changed my habits in that regard. Therefore being on a larger instance/server doesn’t bother me. Others may prefer a home base that’s more tailored to their interests/reflects their personality. That’s fine.

I’m still working out my thoughts about this, but at the root of it all is something like ‘what if Twitter were a web forum’ or something along those lines. So there’s certainly an off-putting cliqueyness to some of it, but that’s balanced by a transparent approach to moderation (on the whole; I have my doubts about the server I’m on right now but it’s so big that maybe it doesn’t matter?) that feels a lot like what happens here.

One little issue I’ve found, and it may not be an issue to others, is that the RSS feed hides any post with a CW, so you only get the headline and have to click through to the post. That’s not great if you were, like me, planning to pull the Mastodon feed into your own blog for posterity. But it’s relatively early days and maybe someone out there has or is working on a solution for boring nerds like me.
posted by macdara at 12:56 AM on November 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

I was on Twitter from 2009 to 2017, when I switched to mostly using Mastodon.

If you want to understand the perspective of Mastodon users, two things you need to bear in mind about Mastodon is that it's not Twitter and it's not new. It's specifically designed to be not like Twitter in several ways. Quote-tweets and text searches are deliberately not included, to make it a bit harder to spread hateful content in orer to dunk on it, and for trolls to search for people to offend. It's federated not because it's a prototype, but because Nazis are gonna Nazi and if they're on a Nazi instance/server you can just block them and let them do their own thing.

For the last five years, every time there's been a wave of discontent at Twitter, Mastodon got an influx of new users. A lot of them say things like: "This thing will never take off unless you give up this stupid federation nonsense, and get off your asses and implement full text search and quote-retweets". Generally most of the new users go back to Twitter, but a fraction of them do stay.

What might be different this time is that Twitter may not exist in the same form to go back to.

I spent 10 minutes scrolling through a Twitter search to find out what Twitterers actual complaints about Mastodon are. There are dozens of vague complaints about how complicated it is. There are dozens more about how hard it is to find a server/instance. There were were three complaints about being asked to put Content Warnings on things. And one person saying they couldn't post images, which is generally pretty easy, I think that must have been a problem with their instance/server's image host.

So generally the complaints don't seem to about actual bugs in the UI. The complaints are mostly about the nature of Mastodon itself: primarily that it's federated.

What's also relevant is that the right-wing ecosystem have poured money into trying to build their own Twitter-like social networks, but have given up and used Mastodon code instead. Gab put 4 million USD into writing their own code before giving up. TruthSocial raised 22 million though I'm not sure if they even tried to roll their own.

So it's not really the case that Mastodon is cruddy amateur code that could be easily superseded by a slick VC-funded corporate alternative. That's already been tried and failed. Maybe Jack Dorsey's BlueSky project will be the one to do it, but so far it's proving hard to build a better Mastodon than Mastodon.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 1:09 AM on November 9, 2022 [7 favorites]

Wow, that is a long list of suspended servers.

I don't think you have to worry too much about those limiting your ability to communicate, I checked a few and 90% are no longer online, one which did respond had just 3 users.
The red flag is if an instance is not blocking anything.
posted by Lanark at 1:28 AM on November 9, 2022 [3 favorites]

I've noticed an odd dynamic where some people are vociferously resisting moving to Mastodon, as if there is some kind of massive pro-Mastodon campaign. There are definitely a lot of people talking about Mastodon, but not so much as it being "the next Twitter", unless you're talking about overheated headlines.

If you don't fancy using it, that's fine! It's definitely slower and less polished than Twitter, it has far fewer active users, and the interface and terminology will be very unfamiliar. And if you don't know many people who are already there, it might not be a great experience. This past couple of weeks have seen the biggest increase in users on Mastodon in its history, so while there are a lot more conversations happening on it, it's also the slowest it's been for a while as server owners catch up with demand and optimisations are made.

Then again – if you dislike the fact that Elon now owns Twitter, that he can literally do anything he likes to it now, that it's filled with ads and is seemingly designed to promote hot takes and dunks, then it's worth looking at alternatives. There are many, Mastodon is just one. And I think it's worth considering why there are communities that have made Mastodon their home, not just recently but over the last few years. What is it that people like about it, that makes them put up with all these problems and limitations?

I've used Twitter ever since it was founded, and I've used Mastodon since it was founded. I owe a lot to Twitter's massive audience in meeting interesting people and it's been really helpful promoting my book. But there are certain topics that are extremely difficult to discuss on Twitter, and I'm upset at the turn it's taking. Mastodon is not going to be a place where I'm as likely to have my posts appear in front of, say, international politicians. But it's also a place where I feel much more comfortable having different kinds of more thoughtful discussions.
posted by adrianhon at 2:09 AM on November 9, 2022 [9 favorites]

This article Home Invasion explains a bit more about how some on Mastodon see things.

For those of us who have been using Mastodon for a while (I started my own Mastodon server 4 years ago), this week has been overwhelming. I've been thinking of metaphors to try to understand why I've found it so upsetting. This is supposed to be what we wanted, right? Yet it feels like something else. Like when you're sitting in a quiet carriage softly chatting with a couple of friends and then an entire platform of football fans get on at Jolimont Station after their team lost. They don't usually catch trains and don't know the protocol. They assume everyone on the train was at the game or at least follows football. They crowd the doors and complain about the seat configuration.

It's not entirely the Twitter people's fault. They've been taught to behave in certain ways. To chase likes and retweets/boosts. To promote themselves. To perform. All of that sort of thing is anathema to most of the people who were on Mastodon a week ago. It was part of the reason many moved to Mastodon in the first place. This means there's been a jarring culture clash all week as a huge murmuration of tweeters descended onto Mastodon in ever increasing waves each day. To the Twitter people it feels like a confusing new world, whilst they mourn their old life on Twitter. They call themselves "refugees", but to the Mastodon locals it feels like a busload of Kontiki tourists just arrived, blundering around yelling at each other and complaining that they don't know how to order room service...

I hadn't fully understood — really appreciated — how much corporate publishing systems steer people's behaviour until this week. Twitter encourages a very extractive attitude from everyone it touches. The people re-publishing my Mastodon posts on Twitter didn't think to ask whether I was ok with them doing that. The librarians wondering loudly about how this "new" social media environment could be systematically archived didn't ask anyone whether they want their fediverse posts to be captured and stored by government institutions. The academics excitedly considering how to replicate their Twitter research projects on a new corpus of "Mastodon" posts didn't seem to wonder whether we wanted to be studied by them. The people creating, publishing, and requesting public lists of Mastodon usernames for certain categories of person (journalists, academics in a particular field, climate activists...) didn't appear to have checked whether any of those people felt safe to be on a public list...

posted by TheophileEscargot at 2:42 AM on November 9, 2022 [25 favorites]

that is a great article and everyone should read it

The tools, protocols and culture of the fediverse were built by trans and queer feminists. Those people had already started to feel sidelined from their own project when people like me started turning up a few year ago. This isn't the first time fediverse users have had to deal with a significant state change and feeling of loss. Nevertheless, the basic principles have mostly held up to now: the culture and technical systems were deliberately designed on principles of consent, agency, and community safety. Whilst there are definitely improvements that could be made to Mastodon in terms of moderation tools and more fine-grained control over posting, in general these are significantly superior to the Twitter experience. It's hardly surprising that the sorts of people who have been targets for harrassment by fascist trolls for most of their lives built in protections against unwanted attention when they created a new social media toolchain. It is the very tools and settings that provide so much more agency to users that pundits claim make Mastodon "too complicated".

posted by kokaku at 3:04 AM on November 9, 2022 [9 favorites]

Metafilter:
“The Linux of social networks”
posted by beesbees at 5:34 AM on November 9, 2022 [4 favorites]

Can I set up mastodon to push my content to instagram?
posted by rebent at 5:50 AM on November 9, 2022

I've found it very interesting, these last few days, to be flipping between Twitter and Mastodon. It takes a while to see that the absence of things like quote tweets and text searches have made the latter seem less confrontational. It is easy, indeed to become blind to the way that Twitter has shaped discourse by headlining outrage. I may choose to not follow and ignore and mute or block somebody there - but that doesn't stop them showing up on my timeline as outraged quotes from people who do.

What Mastodon does have, compared to Twitter, is an indifference to fame. So, yes, we can find Stephen Fry (@stephenfry@mastodonapp.uk) - who had 12 million Twitter followers - turn up on there. We can follow him on the new platform - and we can look to see what he is saying - but his fame is not going to get him a disproportionate amount of attention on people's timelines unless they choose to actively seek out what he has written. Encouraging conversation which less dominated on the famous, the algorithm gamers and the obnoxious but which is which is more focused on topics of interest seems a good thing, also.

However, this does leave those who wish to make a reputation or living as "creators" in a weaker position on the platform. Marcus Brownlee published a video "Dear Twitter" which talks about how the platform does relatively little to reward the people who (accidentally or otherwise) create the most compelling content. Youtube will give you all kinds of rewards for driving traffic to the platform - indeed can make creators rich; Twitter doesn't do so by omission, Mastodon by design.
posted by rongorongo at 6:03 AM on November 9, 2022 [14 favorites]

It sounds to me like you couldn't import "pitch wars" to Mastodon. This is when writers and creators all take a certain day to give their elevator pitches and log lines for work, hoping to catch the eye of agents. There's different types of pitch Twitter games, but they would all rely on everybody being more or less visible when the hashtag is searched, which doesn't seem possible on Mastodon. I never did a pitch thing on Twitter, always feeling like it wasn't the right time, etc., etc., and now I probably never will, if things go as badly as they seem like they're going. Alas.

But then, this is probably too "corporate" a concern for Mastodon as envisioned, and if it won't work then it won't. Expecting to find a nice new Twitter on Mastodon seems like trying to peel a potato with a wooden spoon. Still, I'd like to sign up and have it for what it is, so long as it's free.
posted by Countess Elena at 7:08 AM on November 9, 2022

FYI if you do not want to see the content warnings and want to see full posts, there's a setting for that in your preferences: "Always expand posts marked with content warnings".

I was on Twitter mostly lurking to follow journalists and artists/writers I liked. And it's been interesting to follow them on the Mastodon side, as they just basically just replicate their habits from Twitter. Which, I don't mind, but apparently a lot of people who were already on Mastodon do.

One of the people I follow, a black astrophysicist, has indicated that she misses quote tweets because of its importance to #blacktwitter, and because it was a fun thing for #blacktwitter. So even as there are reasons for things not to be available on Mastodon, there are also other reasons why it might have been a valuable thing to implement, too.

And honestly, I'm not so sure about using the content warning tag for all posts that are "political". What if your entire existence is political or reason for operating on Mastodon is political? I don't know how that would be resolved.
posted by toastyk at 7:29 AM on November 9, 2022 [6 favorites]

Actually, I think pitch wars would work better - a hashtag for discoverability would be fine, and it wouldn't get all janked up by the algorithm. (I have always thought pitch wars an extremely imperfect fit for twitter, anyway, as they seemed to involve increasingly frantic exhortations to one's followers to behave entirely differently regarding likes and retweets during the event, which one's followers are presumably not participating in or aware of, than normal.)
posted by restless_nomad at 7:30 AM on November 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

I have a Twitter account but I've never used it. I'm not on Mastodon.

I had an interesting talk with one of the more tech-savvy people I know yesterday re: what's been going on at Mastodon. He revealed that though he appreciated Mastodon, his plan of setting up an instance didn't get very far. Just too much trouble, technically. It wasn't that he lacked the skills etc -- more the time. Or as he put it, "I don't need another Rube Goldberg in my life right now."

Which doesn't mean he saw no light in the proverbial tunnel. In fact, he was quite hopeful of one possibility. Which is that "... finally, we may just be ready for some actual social networks (note the plural). Not corporate driven vacuum monsters whose only real reason to exist is remorselessly suck up users information toward shareholder profit yadda-yadda-yadda by any means necessary. But rather platforms that will actually do what it says on the label: connect people, because given the state of the world, people do need connecting."

With the caveat that vulture capital enabled, Silicon Valley situated initiatives will NEVER get us to this. It's not in their DNA.

Here's hoping.
posted by philip-random at 8:42 AM on November 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

One of the people I follow, a black astrophysicist, has indicated that she misses quote tweets because of its importance to #blacktwitter, and because it was a fun thing for #blacktwitter. So even as there are reasons for things not to be available on Mastodon, there are also other reasons why it might have been a valuable thing to implement, too.

And i do wonder if such examples are indicative of how (in general) people are talking past each other. As much as the charge is accurately levelled that Twitter users overgeneralize Mastodon culture, there seems to be little reflection that there are multiple Twitter cultures too. At least it sounds like on Mastodon queer people (unmarked by other identity axes?) were having a nice safe enclave even if it's largely a function of size -- and even then I'm still thinking how uncloseted can someone be, especially if the choice begins from the very instance you're on, where you run the risk of being tarred by association (eta: I'm not thinking of social penalty. Where I'm from it's prison). Even if you can move, there's a cost associated to it.

If we do go back to a more blogging-type of ecosystem, where inevitably certain accounts generate a lot of interesting follow-up chatter and become nexus/node accounts, I really don't want to understate how much existing privileges exert themselves. The world was a lot more normative just before the easy many-to-many comms infrastructure of web 2.0. again, just using myself as a measure - up to 2000s i would consider myself extremely, even too much so, fluent on a certain type of American minutiae (self-selection bias resulting from lurking in certain forums or known busy comment threads). That changed when my spaces keep being interrupted by new information (Tumblr more than Twitter for me). I recognize that that fact has been repeatedly described as a negative (e.g. as confrontational), but I have to throw my lot with those few comments who've been describing it otherwise.
posted by cendawanita at 9:10 AM on November 9, 2022 [7 favorites]

That bit in the Home Invasion article about people not necessarily wanting their posts or profiles to be archived or publicized puts me in mind of some old MetaTalk discussions dealing with similar issues (which I do not seek to dredge up here).

In both cases, my initial thought was "don't publish things on a public website that you don't want to be public" -- but I guess if there's a lesson to be gained from what happened to the Internet it's that the public/private binary is as artificial as many others. (And of course the gender binary and the sharp public/private distinction have an intertwined patriarchal history.) The real work is not in picking "public" or "private" but in finding optimal ways to negotiate that multi-dimensional continuum of openness.

It seems like a distinguishing feature of the fediverse is that the choices of where to introduce friction into the sharing and discovery processes, and how much friction to introduce, have been made with a primary concern for the quality of human interactions rather than profit.
posted by Not A Thing at 9:14 AM on November 9, 2022 [3 favorites]

Everyone who is thinking about joining Mastodon or who has joined in the last few weeks should read the Home Invasion article. Mastodon is not “just like Twitter”, but more importantly, it doesn’t want to be. A lot of new members are acting like Americans who go to Europe and get mad because everyone doesn’t speak English, or like people who move to a funky, artsy neighborhood and then try to bring in upscale grocery stores and expensive boutiques. Remember, you’re the intruder. Maybe sit back and observe for a while, before jumping in and trying to change it.
posted by MexicanYenta at 9:24 AM on November 9, 2022 [3 favorites]

I guess I had hopes, but digging into Mastodon and reading this thread has pretty much ended that. It seems that Mastodon is not a safe place to be a childhood sexual-abuse survivor, since not just an individual but the entire instance they are on can been banned just for mentioning who did the abuse and what they were trying to accomplish by it.
posted by CyberSlug Labs at 9:26 AM on November 9, 2022

Mastodon is not a single place
posted by Wood at 9:40 AM on November 9, 2022 [4 favorites]

It seems that Mastodon is not a safe place to be a childhood sexual-abuse survivor, since not just an individual but the entire instance they are on can been banned just for mentioning who did the abuse and what they were trying to accomplish by it.

If the instance you’re on bans something you don’t think should be banned, you can switch to another instance that doesn’t ban it. That’s part of what makes it work - you can find an instance whose world view aligns with yours. You’re not stuck in a place that you don’t like just because it’s the only thing available.
posted by MexicanYenta at 9:48 AM on November 9, 2022 [3 favorites]

That is indeed a positive feature but let's not talk of it like an orthodox economist. Moving involves opportunity costs, psychological or technical or social. Perhaps non-Mastodon users and newbies overstate the pain, but aren't we all in agreement the friction in the infrastructure is deliberate?
posted by cendawanita at 9:51 AM on November 9, 2022 [3 favorites]

aren't we all in agreement the friction in the infrastructure is deliberate

Not at all, and in fact I suspect if this usage pattern continues, it will decrease as more people figure out solutions.
posted by restless_nomad at 10:06 AM on November 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

aren't we all in agreement the friction in the infrastructure is deliberate?

No. Just the opposite, in fact.
posted by MexicanYenta at 10:10 AM on November 9, 2022

He revealed that though he appreciated Mastodon, his plan of setting up an instance didn't get very far. Just too much trouble, technically.

And socially. Administering a Mastodon instance is like administering a Usenet server. Or a Discord server.

Absolutely joyless experience if the people you serve aren't totally in your circle and on your side.
posted by ocschwar at 10:18 AM on November 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

There’s multiple kinds of friction.

All the servers are getting a massive and overwhelming stress test right now, so everything is slower and clunkier than it should be - that’s a (hopefully temporary) technical friction.

“You have to pick an instance” is also a friction, mhich will probably solved by “join a big instance and figure it later” once the technical friction clears up.

The social friction is a bigger more long term one. It does not work like Twitter, deliberately, and the social mores are not like Twitter, deliberately. There are going to be clashes, some people are not going to like the clashes.

There is also going to be the social stress test of trolls figuring out it is worth their time and seeing if current moderation techniques scale up to that. Not a given but it mostly seems to be hanging together so far?

(I’m not actually seeing UI as a big friction point. Seems largely covered by the above. People seem to be vaguely referencing it to refer to general unhappiness)
posted by Artw at 10:36 AM on November 9, 2022 [3 favorites]

I was going to say, Twitter is the only giant VC funded site that fails to pay its authors. People are due a raise.
posted by eustatic at 11:32 AM on November 9, 2022

Yeah, I'm never calling 'em that.

I've heard that in the next major release of Mastodon the toot button is renamed as post or submit, I forget which one.
posted by COD at 11:39 AM on November 9, 2022

Yeah, the 4.0.0 RC I’m on has “Publish”, and the official app uses Posts and Publishing.
posted by adrianhon at 11:50 AM on November 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

Trying to figure out what activityPub calls it. I guess it’s a POST of a “type:Note”.
posted by Artw at 12:10 PM on November 9, 2022

Aw, I was just getting used to thinking of the text entry field as my toot box.
posted by ctmf at 12:16 PM on November 9, 2022 [3 favorites]

They will be toots in my heart forever. I'm fully ready to embrace my role as a crotchety old-timer.
posted by cortex at 12:22 PM on November 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

The story behind the Toot button.
posted by credulous at 12:26 PM on November 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

I’m going to go with this on tooting terminology.
posted by Artw at 12:46 PM on November 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

At least we're not adopting the semantic web retread Solid, on which Tim Berners-Lee blew all W3C's money, thereby resulting in W3C pushing evil DRM crap to get Hollywood money. Toot are much preferred to Solids.
posted by jeffburdges at 2:01 PM on November 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

Either the same thread chain or a different astronomy professor talking about her experiences going from Black Twitter to looking at Mastodon; but it's highlighting some worrying cultural issues.

Some presumably guy I don’t know on mastodon is explaining to me that I need to content warning my posts so that I can fit in with the culture
Yes he has a Northern European flag in his name

I just asked the second one to do this if he can content warning his mansplains

I’m intrigued and horrified by what is evidently a “the immigrants are ruining the local culture” attitude on mastodon
It's literally "go back to where you came from" shit

someone in my mastodon mentions just said of mastodon, "So it's designed to be 'separate but equal'/exclusionary in a good way" while discussing that mastodon is not for people who like to quote tweet, but is good for people who don't want to deal with nazis

Trying to talk about Mastodon about the problem of addressing racism on Mastodon is recalling memories of all my terrible experiences with facebook groups, and I think the reason is that people on Mastodon have the confidence of people who are saying stupid stuff in private

Sure, "Not All Fediverse instances", but yikes.
posted by CrystalDave at 3:21 PM on November 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

Hi, she's the same one I was talking about, got her profession mixed up. Sorry about that. She's now going to take a break from Mastodon.

Overall...she's not wrong. I think asking people to content wrap so much of their content is annoying, especially for people who are inherently political and by the very nature of their professions or identities, are going to talk a lot about controversial topics. I think Josh Marshall of TPM also said he thinks Mastodon is also not for him due to this particular cultural norm.

And...I wish it was easier to find people of color on there. You really have to search intensively.
posted by toastyk at 3:53 PM on November 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

Trying to figure out what activityPub calls it. I guess it’s a POST of a “type:Note”.

Mastodon docs > ActivityPub > Status Federation:

The first-class Object types supported by Mastodon are Note and Question.

Notes are transformed into regular statuses.
Questions are transformed into a poll status.
Some other Object types are converted as best as possible.

posted by zamboni at 3:54 PM on November 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

Wait, do you mean the real Parler was the Mastodon instances we moved through along the way?
posted by jeffburdges at 4:28 PM on November 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

From the server rules at the astrodon instance, emphasis added:

Please add CW's (content warnings) that are accurate and descriptive enough to enable reader consent to the following types of posts:

strong language,
rants,
selfies,
current events (includes: US or non-US, local, national, international, and should be applied regardless of whether sources are academic or non-partisan),
high-conflict or otherwise exhausting issues of popular debate (e.g. techbro billionaires, privacy issues, elections, etc.),
mentions of death or violence,
references or links to Facebook/Twitter/other big tech companies,
spoilers of popular and recent TV shows or other media,
ASCII art (this one is important to ensure that someone using a screen reader doesn't have to listen to an attempt to read out a bunch of obscure symbols)
stress sources, particularly complaints about personal life, work, academia, and study.
anything else where another user might want to decide for themselves whether or when they want to interact with your post.

I have never ever earnestly wanted to call someone a "snowflake" until I saw this
posted by secretseasons at 4:31 PM on November 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

Guess you shouldn’t sign up for that server, then.
posted by zamboni at 5:10 PM on November 9, 2022 [7 favorites]

I know some admins are talking about servers that federate by allowlists, not everything but blocklists. Might be enough of a change to be not Mastodon afterwards (though it would still be interoperable with ActivityPub AIUI). Probably leads to even slower post diffusion (or islanding, I don’t know the reflexive/transitive choices they’d be making).
posted by clew at 5:35 PM on November 9, 2022

Yeah, I don't really see a problem with that list of rules created by a people who manage a community that they'd like to be part of.

Mastodon/Fediverse instances vary wildly in their positions on speech and the responsibilities and consequences thereof. As noted above, Gab and Truth.Social are Fediverse instances, even if nobody actually federated with them very much. At the same time, there are instances that ban government employees and cops from interacting. It's a pretty clear example of a principle of free speech that is often forgotten: you can speak, but no-one actually has to listen (or put up with your bullshit).
posted by prismatic7 at 5:35 PM on November 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

After all, we’re all writing on a very tightly normed and moderated site.
posted by clew at 5:37 PM on November 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

Yeah, ok, fair, and "snowflake" is harsh. I guess I'm someone who thinks there are political dimensions or aspects to just about anything, so when you take that away, and my ability to use cusswords, and my ability to complain, then there's like nothing I could say that wouldn't need a content warning. But as you said, I don't have to join that server, so that's fine
posted by secretseasons at 5:49 PM on November 9, 2022

But let's not act as though the concerns that now is clearly having an aspect of being a political minority (that's not fascist) are unreasonable.
posted by cendawanita at 5:49 PM on November 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

ASCII art (this one is important to ensure that someone using a screen reader doesn't have to listen to an attempt to read out a bunch of obscure symbols)

One of the things I am finding I really like about Mastodon communities is they do pay a lot more attention to the needs of folks with screen readers. I don't need that level of help but it bodes well for broader disability interest that Twitter was at best indifferent to and sometimes totally hostile toward.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 5:53 PM on November 9, 2022 [4 favorites]

people can repeatedly declare that mastodon's got a very fussy and specific and huffily regulated culture(s), and therefore is not for everyone, or they can have towering fits of belligerent pique whenever someone notes that they don't like this or that aspect of it & therefore do not care to touch it with someone else's ten-foot pole.

but when they do both in quick succession it looks very silly. sort of like they cannot stand to be agreed with.
posted by queenofbithynia at 5:53 PM on November 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

CWs are Mastodon aren't taking away your ability to say anything. It's more like an email subject line, so people have some idea what's in a message before they click it.

(My favorite thing about Mastodon is never worrying about inadvertently giving or receiving spoilers for current movies, TV shows, sporting events, etc., since the CW functions as a natural spoiler tag.)
posted by mbrubeck at 5:56 PM on November 9, 2022 [6 favorites]

There's a ecology and evolution instance with a couple thousand users. I found it by searching for the #botany hashtag, which would be a good feature for an instance-chooser.
posted by credulous at 6:33 PM on November 9, 2022 [4 favorites]

Honestly quite like everyone putting their election shit under UsPol until that shit is over with so I don’t get stressed about every hope and fear along the way.
posted by Artw at 6:53 PM on November 9, 2022 [4 favorites]

(My favorite thing about Mastodon is never worrying about inadvertently giving or receiving spoilers for current movies, TV shows, sporting events, etc., since the CW functions as a natural spoiler tag.)

This I like and appreciate.

CWs are Mastodon aren't taking away your ability to say anything. It's more like an email subject line, so people have some idea what's in a message before they click it.

The unstated implications of this I like much less. I didn't survive the polite pearlclutching that eventually became Racefail and even 2000s Metafilter when what is then contentious topics were continually coming up (racist/sexist norms) for it to come back and be held up as a model.

Can I confirm that moving instances involves exporting/importing your history or else you start on a new instance wiped fresh?
posted by cendawanita at 6:54 PM on November 9, 2022 [3 favorites]

You can bulk-migrate your followers, follows, and block/mute lists to your new account. (You can also selectively choose which of these to import, if you want.) Your posts will remain in the old account and will not be copied to the new one. The old profile will be marked as inactive and will display a link to the new one.
posted by mbrubeck at 7:09 PM on November 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

Note that astrodon also has the following:

Do not attempt to weaponize our Community Standards or anti-abuse tools/policies against marginalized groups such as people of colour, women or queer people. Users of Astrodon Social are expected to have the literacy to understand that "reverse discrimination" is not real, and so attempts to re-centre discussions of marginalized people around the feelings of the privileged will be taken as manipulative behaviour undertaken deliberately in bad-faith. (E.g. white people should not demand that people of colour put CW's on every discussion of race; a straight person who reports a queer person for writing "I hate straight people" may find their own account suspended.)

posted by zamboni at 7:27 PM on November 9, 2022 [10 favorites]

Sahdya Darr: As many folks leave Twitter for Mastodon, I want to draw attention to thoughts being shared and discussions taking place about Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter beyond white, left leaning accounts👇🏼
posted by cendawanita at 7:38 PM on November 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

Following that thread lead me to a 2018 thread by Mefi's Own divabat: (I'm sharing select tweets)
So. Mastodon. I've advocated for it publicly (via an Autostraddle article) & have gotten some good out of it. But I'm hesitant to really recommend it due to its epic whiteness and also it being a strong example of devs assuming decentralization fixes everything, which I abhor.

I became really famous on Mastodon because in my first few HOURS on there, after I commented about the lack of PoC, I was dogpiled by an instance run by a guy with a known podcast who thought I was some kind of SJW harpy. This harassment went on for about a week if not more.

[...skipping the incident tweets for length but do read it...]

I also have qualms with how Mastodon's hide-everything-under-a-CW culture stifles the voices of PoC. White members want PoC to hide any discussion of racism under a CW because THEY find it "triggering" and "overwhelming". Even stuff like "hey racism is a thing that happens".

They claim they don't want to retraumatize PoC, but the only people really calling for CWing every possible thing are white people, using their mental health as a shield against criticism. I've seen this very dynamic play out in many other spaces before.

posted by cendawanita at 7:55 PM on November 9, 2022 [8 favorites]

Note that divabat has further updates in that thread from this week:

Hi hello! This thread is gaining traction again after like 4 years.
posted by zamboni at 8:24 PM on November 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

Some TW exodees might be interested in Project Mushroom, a focused Mastodon+ community initiative.
posted by progosk at 10:18 PM on November 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

Hmm alerted by Naomi Wu, apparently the counter.social instance has a policy of outright banning country-specific IPs.

Lemme preempt the advise about VPNs. Aye, yes. *makes notes in my 'subversive element/dissident' notebook* naturally will have to avoid that instance in my consideration.
posted by cendawanita at 10:34 PM on November 9, 2022

apparently the counter.social instance has a policy of outright banning country-specific IPs.

Counter.social isn’t really a Mastodon instance/server and is instead separate - if you were to want to use it, then you need a separate account on it. You can’t follow someone on it from e.g. mastodon.social, and vice versa.
posted by scorbet at 11:11 PM on November 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

Mefi's Own divabat has now returned as Maybe Mefi's Own creatrixtiara, hello

Thank you for posting my Twitter thread on here, I was going to chime in with pretty much that exact story but now I don't have to rehash it.

Mastodon isn't "nice". It's fine, but thinking of it as somehow better than Twitter or any other site is folly. And it's not like the hate only comes from Nazis - I went back to Mastadon a few days ago (I'm now at @creatrixtiara@mage.town) and started a discussion by and for BIPOC about how they feel about the CW policy. Most of the discussion was pretty productive, but one person kept accusing me of claiming that neurodivergence is a "white man's thing" (despite me being neurodivergent myself) because I said that 99% of the discussions I've seen about CWs came from White people, but neurodivergents had come up with the concept of CWs, so therefore I think neurodivergent people are White. ?!?!?, but also it speaks to a very particular-to-Mastadon (and also honestly Metafilter) phenomenon of "I'm a marginalised White lefty, I can't be racist, but I don't wanna deal with anti-racism either" which is frankly more annoying.

It's been good to get those discussions started, it's helped me find more people (Toastyk, the #BIPOC and #POC hashtags will get you more POC to follow, or try to find that CW discussion thread) though I've been fully overwhelmed with follows!! Including from some decently big names that found my Twitter thread!! Part of the reason I faded out of Mastadon the first time was because I was starting to feel like I was only really seen as The Race Resource rather than my own person, so hopefully that doesn't replicate itself the second time around.
posted by creatrixtiara at 12:17 AM on November 10, 2022 [21 favorites]

I'm not white, I'm on Mastodon, and I think Content Warnings are sometimes presented in an odd way.

A lot of the posts/toots on Mastodon are behind CWs. It's a normal thing. From the point of view of the poster, you see two textboxes, a one-line box at the top labelled "Write your warning here", and a multi-line box labeled "What's on your mind?" If you're posting about a TV show, you put the name of the TV show as a content warning. If you're posting about racism, you put racism as the content warning. When I post my daily Wordle, I put Wordle in the content warning as non-Wordlers get annoyed by it.

From the point of the reader, you see the name of the TV show then a "Show more" button, or the word "racism" and then a "Show More" button. (If that bugs you, you can switch it off in your settings and view everything). If you want to read the post/too, you click the button.

Content Warnings are not censorship. You're not hiding the existence of racism. But if you're not white and just want to scroll through and not have to deal with racism that particular day, often because you're exhausted with it, you don't have to.

People of colour are not a homogenous bloc, and don't agree on everything. It's a legitimate opinion to think that Content Warnings are bad for a number of reasons. But my impression is that in general, these days, people of various minorities are broadly in favour of Content Warnings, because they let you engage when you have the energy, but don't force you to engage if you don't want to. Or even if you're just not interested.

Wordle

Wordle 509 3/6

⬜⬜⬜🟨🟩
⬜⬜🟩⬜🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

posted by TheophileEscargot at 2:09 AM on November 10, 2022 [5 favorites]

Can I set up mastodon to push my content to instagram?

moa.party used to do this until API changes at instagram broke it, it can still link Twitter and Mastodon.
posted by Lanark at 3:29 AM on November 10, 2022

The Vagina Museum have made this Toot about mastodon vaginas. I feel a landmark has been reached.
posted by rongorongo at 3:34 AM on November 10, 2022 [1 favorite]

Counter.social isn’t really a Mastodon instance/server and is instead separate - if you were to want to use it, then you need a separate account on it. You can’t follow someone on it from e.g. mastodon.social, and vice versa.

While it was a while ago, here’s my memory of the deal with counter.social. It’s a modified mastodon server that initially allowed some federation with other servers. Some of the modifications caused technical problems for those instances. Add in the xenophobic blocklists and a history of interesting behavior by the admin, and counter.social quickly found themselves blocked by the majority of fedi, at which point they petulantly returned the favor.

There was a contemporary Mefi post which has some of the context.
posted by zamboni at 4:23 AM on November 10, 2022 [2 favorites]

I'm not a huge fan of the way content warnings are currently used in my corner of Mastodon. They currently seem to be taking the place, culturally, of filters (which exist!). Filters are under the viewer's control, content warnings are under the poster's. There seems to be a strain of Mastodon poster that would prefer anything that isn't of a bright, cheerful tone, and contains any content that anyone might find objectionable, be under a content warning. This caused me to last about two days before I turned on "auto-expand content warnings." Which is annoying! I should be able to get some value out of the system, too! But if fully half the conversations that I have access to require a separate click for each entry in the conversation, that's too much friction.

And it is a *lot* of pressure against posting at all. That pressure is going to land harder against anyone who's life and daily conversation contains anything other than sunshine and puppies (but not puppies who are looking at the camera, because cw: eye contact.) I am genuinely not really sure how to navigate that other than to do my best not to be an asshole, as usual, and see how much actual static that generates. The nice thing about federation is that it *is* possible for folks who really need a highly limited feed to create "safe space" servers (some of them probably had, until the current Eternal September) and for people who want a little more narrow interpretation of content warnings to have a space that doesn't have what feel like onerous posting requirements.
posted by restless_nomad at 5:09 AM on November 10, 2022 [5 favorites]

Two questions (derail, sorry)

1. I clicked the link above to the Mastodon vagina post. Opens masto.ai in browser, and says I need to log in to interact. I'm logged in over on social.coop, but I can't follow / interact on masto.ai. How do I fix this?

2. Where are all the folks that talk about nature, cool bugs and plants and stars and stuff?
posted by rebent at 5:20 AM on November 10, 2022

But if fully half the conversations that I have access to require a separate click for each entry in the conversation, that's too much friction.

I like the look of the new filtering system that essentially allows you to create your own CWs based on pattern matching, but it’s a v4 feature, and will take a while to appear everywhere. I hope this issue eventually gets implemented- a block/allow list for CW subjects.
posted by zamboni at 5:32 AM on November 10, 2022 [1 favorite]

I'm logged in over on social.coop, but I can't follow / interact on masto.ai. How do I fix this?

You need to follow the masto.ai accounts from your home server. Some instances have a field on the follow page where you enter your home server account and it redirects you to the right page. It’s probably simpler to go to social.coop and search for the relevant @account@masto.ai address.
posted by zamboni at 5:38 AM on November 10, 2022 [2 favorites]

2. Where are all the folks that talk about nature, cool bugs and plants and stars and stuff?
FediDirectory's Nature and Animals page may give you a good starting point. That site is brought to you by the same person you created the useful Fedi-tips. However - with a massive influx of people - it may be easier to find them by a hashtag search - remembering that a search on Mastodon for "nature" will return nothing (for deliberate reasons of privacy) - it must be "#nature"
posted by rongorongo at 6:00 AM on November 10, 2022

Is there a way to preview an instance?

Instances can control how much is visible from the browser while not logged in. On ecoevo.social in particular, you can get a sense of the vibe by going to explore and viewing the posts of specific users.

If you’re using a client, it’s often possible to add a server without creating an account, so you can see the local and federated timelines. Specifics will vary depending on the client and/or server.
posted by zamboni at 6:21 AM on November 10, 2022 [3 favorites]

Question keeps coming up: How do I interact with someone on their server, or when I follow a url to someone's profile?

Answer: You don't need to interact with them on their server (where you would need an account), because you can already interact with them on your server (where you already have an account).

On your server while logged into your account go to the search field and type in the user's handle: @something@something.something

Click follow from that page, or scroll down and find the post you want to interact with -- you'll be able to boost, favorite, and reply. If search doesn't bring up the user you're looking for, the user or their instance might be blocked by your instance. You'll need to talk to your admin to sort that out.

The thing is that if you want to post a link to someone's account, you're going to be posting a link that is being hosted by their server. But everyone isn't on everyone else's server, so while you can view their stuff from that link, you have to look them up from your own server to interact.
posted by antinomia at 6:48 AM on November 10, 2022

Just giving anyone complaining about CWs a good long mute now. It’s fucking tedious and they have nothing of interest to say and make the site a vastly more stressful experience.
posted by Artw at 6:59 AM on November 10, 2022 [8 favorites]

Note that, on the desktop version at least, it is possible to “follow a hashtag” - so you can search for #metaFilter and then click subscribe have anybody who uses that tag appear on your timeline as if they were an individual person posting. .
posted by rongorongo at 8:01 AM on November 10, 2022 [1 favorite]

Answer: You don't need to interact with them on their server (where you would need an account), because you can already interact with them on your server (where you already have an account).

Now that I am attempting to actually use Mastodon instead of just vaguely wandering around, this seems like a giant pain point, and a pretty unnecessary one. I wonder if there is, or could be, a browser extension that would replace links to profiles on other instances with links to the domesticated profile on the user's signed-in instance?

Even if this would sometimes be a dead link due to blocks or defederation or lag or whatever, it would be a significant improvement on the whole "copy the profile URL, go back to your home instance, paste the URL into the search box and see if anything comes up" thing.
posted by Not A Thing at 8:09 AM on November 10, 2022 [1 favorite]

Are you ctrl-clicking their profile name? That opens a link to their profile on their server -- while if you just click the name it shows their profile and a follow button on your server.
posted by credulous at 8:34 AM on November 10, 2022

I mean, if I visit e.g. mastodon.scot/public/local and see an interesting account (or more plausibly, follow a direct link to a particular account posted on MeFi or elsewhere), as someone who is not a member of that particular instance I have to go through the above complex process. It seems like there should be a browser-side workaround for that, but I guess it doesn't exist at the moment.

Perhaps there are reasons why that's considered to be a necessary and valuable form of friction, but the reasons aren't obvious to me (and it gets especially silly when trying to follow an account on one bland generic instance from another, e.g. from mastodon.social to mastodon.online, which is probably the most common experience at present).
posted by Not A Thing at 10:01 AM on November 10, 2022 [2 favorites]

Some instances offer a pop-up where you type in *your* handle, and it'll redirect you to the follow page on your own instance, then close. That's a much better solution to just saying "copy this and go back to your home instance to find it"; once you've used it for the first time, it'll autocomplete, too.

Of course, the fact that there are two in-the-wild solutions for following other users doesn't exactly help with the more general possibility for confusion.
posted by sagc at 10:21 AM on November 10, 2022 [2 favorites]

From the discussion in a recent GitHub issue I filed, I believe that the "popup and redirect" approach to following is being phased out in favour of the "copy and search" approach. This seems less user-friendly, but maybe the multiple popups were too confusing. We're still seeing both methods because not all instances have upgraded to the latest version of the software.

In my personal experience, the string you're supposed to copy (which is the profile URL) doesn't actually work in the searchbox on my instance (mastodon.social), but the username@domain.suffix string does work, so I copy that from the profile page instead. The URL is clearly supposed to work (and so are post URLs); to the best of my knowledge this is a temporary bug or resource issue of some kind (possibly only affecting some instances).

It's pretty easy to interact with posts when you see them on your own server in the first place (because you're following a user or because someone boosted the post into one of the timelines you're looking at there). The more people you follow, the easier it is to follow more people, because if someone already in your timeline boosts something cool, you can click on the user's name to see their feed on your server, and then follow them from there if you want.

I agree that the experience is currently a bit janky when you are viewing a page hosted on another server. I also think that there's some missing glue that would make it easier for people to participate equally on multiple small topic-focused instances. But there's already some stuff you can do with e.g. hashtags and the advanced UI which may be good enough to work around some of the limitations.

A lot of this is being discussed in the very active issue tracker -- solutions are going to take some time, both because development is being done by a limited number of volunteers, and because changes are evaluated carefully for the potential of adverse side effects. I can appreciate the thought that's being put into this even if I'm annoyed by some of the jank.

So far I've followed a surprisingly large number of people and I'm having fun.

Cool instance recommendations:

sauropods.win is mostly paleontologists and paleo artists. This is a social media hobby I somehow acquired by osmosis; I followed some people here from Twitter and now half my timeline is dinosaurs.
mastodon.art is exactly what it says on the tin.

To locate my Twitter contacts I use a combination of debirdify (can also search your lists) and searching Twitter for "Mastodon" and limiting the search to people I follow (and looking at the latest results). I repeat this every day or so and get more people every time.
posted by confluency at 11:43 AM on November 10, 2022 [5 favorites]

mastodon.art is exactly what it says on the tin.

.art's admin, WelshPixie, is the coolest person. So talented. So kind. So encouraging to artists. And a badass when it comes to handling assholes.
posted by terrapin at 11:53 AM on November 10, 2022 [3 favorites]

Debirdify was shockingly easy to use. Suddenly my feed (or...trunk...or...whatever it's called on this thing) is full! Thanks to everyone who is recommending interesting instances too.
posted by mittens at 11:58 AM on November 10, 2022 [1 favorite]

Suspect if you follow pretty much any Mefite and then check out who they follow you’re going to find most of us that way as well. #topTips
posted by Artw at 12:03 PM on November 10, 2022 [1 favorite]

One click follow is one of those things that seems simple, but has been difficult or confusing to implement in practice. There have been various attempts at protocol handlers and a browser extension, but there's currently no magic wand for following people.

overexplainy wall of text follows - apologies if it goes over anything you already know

Each mastodon server runs its own software. The mainline release is the major one, but there's also forks (modified versions), like glitch-soc or hometown which have different features or design elements. This means you can't be sure that every mastodon server will behave the same, or have the same interface.

(For purposes of this discussion, I'm ignoring compatible ActivityPub networks like pleroma, pixelfed, etc.)

You don't want a remote server to be able to make changes to your own account- you don't want sketchy servers causing you to follow spammers or whatever. When you want to follow someone, that needs to happen on your home server. Since the remote server doesn't know who you are, it can't automatically point you to your home server - you have to make that happen somehow.

mastodon.social is run by Mastodon gGmbH, the non-profit that develops the mainline mastodon software. There have been four versions of mastodon so far - mastodon.social always runs the latest version, currently v4. Not everyone likes all the features, which is why people make the modified versions like glitch-soc.

I think mastodon v3 and hometown have the "popup and redirect" behavior that confluency mentions. v4 changed it to the "copy and search" functionality. This is why you still see both versions, but "copy and search" is becoming more common.

The current version of Mastodon Simplified Federation (linked above), is a Firefox extension that works with v3 by auto-entering your mastodon account:

Simplifies following or interacting with other users on remote Mastodon instances in the Fediverse. Basically, it skips the "Enter your Mastodon handle" popup and takes you directly to your own "home" instance, saving you from cumbrously entering your Mastodon handle again and again in that input box when you click on a “Follow”, “Retoot”/“Fav” or other remote interaction button on another instance.

v4 breaks Mastodon Simplified Federation because the popup is no longer there, so it won't work in most places.
posted by zamboni at 1:15 PM on November 10, 2022 [2 favorites]

It seems to me this is what the URI type is for; why hasn't Eugen put out a spec for something like mastodon://dope.site/@followme or whatever, gosh that would make it so simple?
posted by seanmpuckett at 1:31 PM on November 10, 2022

Metafilter: just three Reddits wearing a trenchcoat

It'll be 18 years in March and I just came in to say I'm flabberghasted to read this. That too from someone with 3 tweets and zero followers.

more later
posted by infini at 1:55 PM on November 10, 2022

btw, y'all remember we have our own mastodon user lists on the grey? that's how I found my own account
posted by infini at 1:57 PM on November 10, 2022 [5 favorites]

why hasn't Eugen put out a spec for something like mastodon://dope.site/@followme or whatever

That’s basically the protocol handler link above. URL scheme for remote follow, share buttons #2291
Implemented: Add protocol handler. Handle follow intents #4511
It was apparently eventually reverted for bad user experience.
posted by zamboni at 2:58 PM on November 10, 2022

> that's how I found my own account

I found mine by setting up a new one, going to log in to it, and my browser recommending the password for my account from 2017 that I'd completely forgotten about.
posted by The corpse in the library at 3:07 PM on November 10, 2022 [2 favorites]

People talk about how hard it is to find an instance…

I spent two hours last night scrolling through instances.social and found a half-dozen different instances in case the first one I tried didn’t work out (the admin had screwed up a firewall and inadvertently blocked mastodon.social and one of the other huge instances). Took a lot of scrolling, but those were all instances that were accepting new registrations for free, generally with volunteer mods.

Mastodon.art looks interesting in the long run, but based on what I’ve inferred, it’ll be a while before the backlog clears. No biggie. If I’m still interested in a couple months, maybe I’ll move.

As for seeing what an instance is like, there’s a couple-sentence description of many on instances.social, and most instances I saw last night had a pretty good intro if you just went and looked. Do it through a browser, not an app, though. But even a browser on an iPhone is plenty good. After 24 hours poking around, it looks like I’ll be using a browser about as much as an app, mostly because there are different things each does well.

But I’ll probably stick around on Twitter for a while too, if only to find out whether a sinking dumpster fire will go out or set the river in fire, since I’m old enough to remember that happening.
posted by DaveP at 6:06 PM on November 10, 2022

Its not very granular (i.e., it's not granular at all) but you can adjust your Mastodon profile settings to automatically show you all content hidden behind warnings, so all you get is a bit of visual noise that says "Show Less" at the top of a post someone has CW'd.

Also, much of the talk about easily moving your profile between servers/instances anytime has left out the notice I saw when I was reading FAQs (can't find it again now) that you can only migrate your profile from one server to another once in a given 30-day period. Can anyone verify that?
posted by mediareport at 7:26 PM on November 10, 2022

Ah, here it is, from Fedi-tips:

You can move your Mastodon account to another server if you want. Moving lets you transfer your followers, follows, bookmarks, mute lists and block lists...

Also, there’s a 30 day “cooldown period” after the transfer is complete when you cannot do another transfer. Be reasonably sure that your destination server is the one you want, because you’ll have to wait 30 days to try again if you want to do another transfer.
posted by mediareport at 7:50 PM on November 10, 2022

FWIW, Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko just weighed in on content warnings in a couple of posts a few minutes ago:

Having been here since 2016, I can tell you there is definitely no such thing as a consensus on usage of content warnings on the fediverse. It's a decentralized network that doesn't belong to any one party, so by definition there is no single culture on it. Different corners have different expectations and customs.

For my part, I've always seen them as something at the discretion of the author. As the reader, you have a plethora of tools to disengage from unwanted content on Mastodon—with even better filters coming in 4.0—and harassment is not one of them. People who are arriving now have as much right to be here and bring their own culture as the ones who came before them.

I know nothing about him (except that some longtime Fediverse folks are mad at the way he's blurred the distinction between Mastodon and the larger Fediverse in the past) but the above seems like a good sign.
posted by mediareport at 8:28 PM on November 10, 2022 [3 favorites]

Also, @CaribenxMarciaX@scholar.social, a woman of color who says she invented the #fediblock tag and popularized it with @gingerrroot@kitty.town, a queer disabled woman, had this to say yesterday:

Use CWs pls.
But if I choose not CW a post about racism or misogyny, don't police me about it either
I said that in 2019
And it seems to me that new users to #blacktwitter or #Blackmastodon think that they have to do that. You don't
If you're concerning about fellow Blk folks mental health and wanna CW I get that. Do it. But don't hide for white fragility. Forget that
posted by mediareport at 8:38 PM on November 10, 2022 [2 favorites]

Experiences are so different that you almost can't give the same advice to white people and PoC. There are plenty of exceptions, diffident white people exist, hyperconfident black people exist. But a lot of the time, if you're a PoC entering a new space, you are very aware that you are surrounded by a complicated web of invisible and unspoken rules, and may be reluctant to say anything in case you break them. And a lot of the time if you're a white person entering a new space, you assume you already know the rules, and any you don't know must be stupid rules that deserve to be broken.

That seems to me to be part of the dynamic of the current migration from Twitter to Mastodon.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 1:14 AM on November 11, 2022 [12 favorites]

Thanks to this thread I've been introduced to the black academic who shared her concerns about some functionalities, and uh I'm only caught up on my TL but it seems like I'm observing in realtime how harassment can work on a federated system.
posted by cendawanita at 2:15 AM on November 11, 2022 [3 favorites]

That is an example of how harassment works on Mastodon.

If you go to the about page of a Mastodon server (instance), you can see the list of servers it blocks.

She's on the c.im server which only completely blocks one other server, and partially limits 6 more.

I'm on the oldest server mastodon.social which completely blocks 167 other servers.

She is complaining about harassment from a user on the eveningzoo.club, which is completely blocked from mastodon.social for "hate speech", but not blocked or restricted by c.im at all.

So when choosing a mastodon server you do need to check its policy and make sure it fits your needs. If it doesn't have a pretty big block list then you are open to harassment.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 2:45 AM on November 11, 2022 [1 favorite]

yeah, it looks like c.im plays lip service to the mastodon server covenant but doesn't seem to be actually doing it, based on how they describe their block list + strategy (ok on spam, but not so obviously on hate speech etc). My instance also blocks the harassment source there -- the reason is more directly stated as "Nazi shit", so I suspect it's not subtle. For better or worse, to work, mastodon instances need moderators/admins who actually attend to this stuff. (Not actually so different from twitter in that respect, as I suspect we're about to find out...)
posted by advil at 5:56 AM on November 11, 2022 [3 favorites]

She is on mas.to. She is saying that the moderators of c.im blocked her, and she wants anyone who's on c.im to know that they won't see her posts, and why.
posted by umber vowel at 7:44 AM on November 11, 2022 [3 favorites]

One of her larger points is that on Twitter, she would have automated tools to block the harasser, *and all of their followers*, in one click. Because of the federated nature of Masto, she can't find out who all of the followers are to block them. (Still not sure how that all works, but that's my understanding of what she's saying here.)
posted by umber vowel at 7:50 AM on November 11, 2022 [2 favorites]

If you go to the about page of a Mastodon server (instance), you can see the list of servers it blocks.

Not always. Toot.site's about page says they block instances that are in conflict with their rules, but it doesn't say who.
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 8:19 AM on November 11, 2022

She is on mas.to. She is saying that the moderators of c.im blocked her, and she wants anyone who's on c.im to know that they won't see her posts, and why.

Ok, thanks for the corrections, I have to admit I didn't try to figure out what was going beyond what was said here. I get an error when I try to look at mas.to's server block list, so I don't know if the same point still stands, but I suspect it might. (Actually I notice that c.im says their rules are forked from mas.to.)

Trying to follow the backstory a bit more, I don't think that c.im blocked her, but rather auto-CW'd her posts for anyone viewing them via c.im, but I didn't spot any obvious reason why. This seems unrelated to the harassment, which is coming from eveningzoo.club?
posted by advil at 8:19 AM on November 11, 2022

On Mastodon there isn't a "block all someone's followers" option, but there is an "block that person's entire instance" option. You can do that as an individual user, even if your instance doesn't.

I have no idea what c.im is like as it's a closed instance without a public timeline.

But there are about 4,600 mastodon instances according to joinmastodon.org, of which 187 are blocked by mastodon.social, the oldest instance where a lot of other instances take their block list from.

c.im blocks only one instance, and has other restrictions (like no images without a click) on 6 others. So it sounds like a pretty bad server to be on if you care about blocking bad content. It could well be run by freeze peach types who are giving her a hard time.

In terms of her blocking experience, if she was on a site with a better block list, I don't think the extra blocking ability she wants (all the followers of a harasser on a different server to the harasser) would be that useful, because those followers are probably on other blocked instances anyway.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 8:23 AM on November 11, 2022

Note that Twitter also doesn‘t offer a way to block all followers of an account. Users had to build their own tools to do that. They can (and definitely will) do the same for the Mastodon if it doesn’t end up built in.

Mastodon does have the ability to export and import block lists as CSV files, which is useful for sharing block lists with other users or doing other sorts of automated bulk-blocking. Twitter used to have this feature, but disabled it a couple of years ago, breaking many of the blocking tools that users had built, and making the remaining ones work somewhat less reliably.
posted by mbrubeck at 12:08 PM on November 11, 2022 [8 favorites]

"I do not want a mastodon" in which you are given a mastodon you do not want by well meaning people who do not understand that you do not want a mastodon.
posted by Artw at 3:36 PM on November 11, 2022 [1 favorite]

OK, can you help me with my work flow? I click that link, laugh at the attached single-page rpg, and want to rngage with the content. But I can't because I'm not logged in to that server. Do I need to.... Go to. My profile and searchtthat user, scroll their toots until I find it, and engage that way? Or is there a browser plug in to use? (I'm on Firefox mobile).
posted by rebent at 4:53 PM on November 11, 2022

I clicked the star button. A little popup asked me to enter my username & instance in the @_@_ format.

I did so, and clicked "Proceed to favorite."

The little window showed a version of the post that's based on my instance:
https://mas.to/@Ed_Fortune@dice.camp/109326751413993498

Then I clicked the star and I could favorite it. I could also respond or boost it, presumably.

So it's:
1. Click star
2. Enter my username@instance
3. Click 'Proceed to Favorite'
4. Click star again

Not a smooth process. It has felt less cumbersome to me as I've done it several times.
posted by umber vowel at 5:57 PM on November 11, 2022

OK, can you help me with my work flow? I click that link

rebent, are you "middle clicking" the link so that it opens in a new tab? If so, that takes you to the link at its original instance where you are not necessarily logged in. If you just regular click on it, it will open it as viewed from your current instance, and you can fav/boost/comment or whatev. The in page back arrow will then, mostly reliably, get you back to where you were when you're done.

I find it a little awkward -- works more like an "APP in a web page" than a real web page -- but since non-mastodon links open in a new tab automatically, I just have to be sure not to suppress my habitual middle-click
posted by 3j0hn at 10:01 PM on November 11, 2022

rebent, are you "middle clicking" the link so that it opens in a new tab? … If you just regular click on it, it will open it as viewed from your current instance, and you can fav/boost/comment or whatev.

This would apply if rebent encountered the post on their Mastodon server. However, we’re on Mefi, and I suspect opening the link from Artw’s comment will take you to dice.camp, no matter what you do with your mouse.

I suspect umber vowel’s instructions will only work with servers who aren’t running mastodon v4, which got rid of the home server pop up.

To restate some of what I’ve been getting at in previous comments in a different way, It may be a vaguely helpful analogy to think of your home server as a mastodon web browser- in order to interact with other parts of mastodon, you need to connect to them from your home system.

While mastodon doesn’t have full text search (I.e. searching for a specific word or sentence won’t find anything), URLS like
https://dice.camp/@Ed_Fortune/109326751405555807 or usernames like @Ed_Fortune@dice.camp are valid searches, and should return the post or user respectively.

The following should always work, modulo system flakiness or server blocks:

Copy link.
Go to your home instance’s search field
Paste in the URL you copied and hit search
The post should appear, and you can interact with it normally.
posted by zamboni at 5:50 AM on November 12, 2022 [2 favorites]

Thought at the end of one week on Mastodon.

I can remember in the early days of Twitter that people dismissed it as people talking about what they had had for breakfast. This was meant pejoratively for both self-regarding (authors vanity publishing to an audience of basically themselves) - and perhaps to those who were vacuous enough to go looking to read and comment on such drivel. Over time Time Twitter has become very much not like that: after 10 years on the platform I follow about 500 hundred people and am followed by maybe a tenth of that number. I care about the first group, not really the second at all - but the emphasis goes in the other direction for many of those I follow "celebrities" such as academics, journalists, politicians, analysts, designers, musicians, comedians and generally those in the business of being "creators". I make vigorous efforts to avoid fights and toxic people on the platform - but that conflict is still being served up to me via quote tweets and via hounding of prominent posters in their replies. I am aware that none of the creators I follow are getting rich from Twitter alone: they have a book or a show or a Patreon account or some other side gig. I have noticed that I have been using the platform more and more like a sort of newspaper: collect people to read and make occasional comments in the manner of somebody writing to the letters page.

Mastodon is like going back to that world of people saying, in so many words, what they had for breakfast: and it is wonderful for all that because it boosts the idea of serendipity and the idea of taking part rather than watching from the sidelines. In the last week I have seen a number of massively high profile figures cross over from Twitter to Mastodon - I have found their account and followed them - and.... that is pretty much the last I have heard of them on my timeline. I could seek them out to be sure - but I find myself more interested in the people I follow - the people on my server and the friends of people I follow. They are telling me unexpected things that I could reply to, ignore or boost. It is a reminder that social media should be ... social. Conversation for its own sake, with those who you share a locality or an obscure interest - is what it is all about. This is not to say that current events and particularly compelling toots can't get quite wide traction on the platform - but anybody looking for fame or fortune here is not going to thrive, I suspect. Also - mainstream media trying the mine the platform for outrage or pile-ons or scandal - are going to have a much harder time here.

The other great thing about the platform is that it has been built and tested in the shadows by exactly the right kinds of people: those who are technically fussy enough to want to make something well thought out and robust - and those who have felt marginalised enough by other platforms to seek out a place where trolls, abusers marketeers or narcissistic billionaires find it hard to make an impact. This particular cocktail is what gives the place the feeling of communal friendliness that many have remarked on.
posted by rongorongo at 10:05 AM on November 13, 2022 [7 favorites]

I'm feeling similarly, rongorongo.

I joined a random Mastodon server and then hand added a bunch of people I followed on Twitter who have Mastodon accounts. I don't look at the server's "feed", just the small number of people I follow, and it makes a huge difference from Twitter, which recently has forced so many people I don't follow into my feed (most posting some form of outrage) The vibe is relaxed, almost giddy, because it feels like a chance to start over again. It absolutely doesn't work for following breaking news, etc. but I'm hoping it can reduce my social media usage in general, and my outrage social media usage by a lot.
posted by gwint at 12:26 PM on November 13, 2022 [2 favorites]

I'm not getting why so many (reportedly) are defederating from journo.host? It seems like exactly what I think would be a good thing, verifying journalistic credentials so the name @journo.host can mean "not some rando" like a blue check.
posted by ctmf at 12:42 PM on November 13, 2022 [1 favorite]

“Because they act like assholes” would seem to be the answer.

Latest gimmick from them is spreading kiwifarms material on instances that have blocked them.
posted by Artw at 12:47 PM on November 13, 2022 [2 favorites]

I woke up this morning to nine new followers, all UK/Irish pro-EU folks. My profile clearly indicates that I'm just there for the jokes (also I'm American, so not embroiled in UK/EU politics), and none of those people have posted any jokes nor even hinted that they're seeking out humor (pardon, humour), so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
posted by Greg_Ace at 1:06 PM on November 13, 2022

For the record, the instance in question is journa.host, not journO.

It's like the opposite of people who misspell mastodon as mastadon.

Personally, it seems like the journa.host admin is genuinely trying to do right and learn and is just stepping on landmines that they didn't know were there.

And it's not just them. The entire instance is a bunch of people new to Mastodon who just have no clue. Hopefully they will get their shit together.

But they will get shit nonetheless also because there are a vocal number of people who do not want news/corporations/etc to get involved. They see political Twitter as part of the problem. Whilst the number one thing many of the people coming from Twitter in the latest wave want to see is breaking news. IMO the dust will settle and people will learn they can block people and instances without their entire instance blocking that other instance.

As others have said, it's the Fediverse's External September.

There is another new journalist instance named newsie.social. I can't vouch for them, but I have added the instance to my browse list. (I just learned that MetaText app allows one to follow the public timelines for instances on which one does not have an account. I made a post on my account with the short instructions.)
posted by terrapin at 3:30 PM on November 13, 2022 [1 favorite]

I can't wait for the mefi instance because I'll park myself there methinks. But in the meantime, THE Lynda Carter choosing Tumblr? The visionary.
posted by cendawanita at 7:40 PM on November 13, 2022 [1 favorite]

… it's going to select for people who have a little more tech knowledge or a little more free time/brainspace to move to a new platform. And those are the people who, in an open-source environment, are the right people to write explainers and improve onboarding and figure out how to make the experience friendlier.

The thing that's been frustrating for me is that even though I have the technical wherewithal to host my own instance, the onramp for it is almost entirely missing. What little documentation exists is pointed at the audience of people who are already administrators and/or members of the community. It uses lingo a newcomer won't know; it refers to past conflict (some real, some simply smear campaigns) that sometimes has been memory-holed (and may also depend on jargon); it places priority on the needs and expectations of the people who already know the rules and not on making newcomers welcome.

For example, while feeling my way around I kept reading all the "about" pages for various instances, with big long lists of other instances that have been blocked. Like, if I fire up a new instance am I just supposed to copy somebody else's list? Is there a standard list somewhere? If so, who's responsible for maintaining it and how do they reach consensus? How do they prevent it from being used maliciously? Do I just start without a list and wait until the assholes find me and then block them one by one? Is there a best practices document somewhere?

And that's just on the technical side, without considering the needs of moderation. Like, I don't think a local/regional instance exists where I live, and I have the skills to fire one up, but I sure as hell don't have the time or energy to moderate it. I'm not sure I have the time or energy to find people willing to moderate it and manage them as they (inevitably) burn out. Self-determination is awesome; being the one guy everyone else depends on is not.

Anyway. I chose the Akkoma platform for my own little instance and I hope I didn't choose wrong. I honestly don't know, and I don't know how I'd know.
posted by fedward at 12:39 PM on November 14, 2022 [2 favorites]

Janelle Shane: "Had trouble choosing a mastodon instance? I got GPT-3 to generate some new possibilities.

flounder.club
Members discuss all different forms of flounder, from deep-sea to land-based.

dinosaur.pocket
All messages must consist of the two letters 'D', for fear that the dinosaurs will eat people's pocketbooks.

frozen.forest
Users must provide a source of warmth in order to post."
posted by mittens at 1:58 PM on November 14, 2022 [6 favorites]

What little documentation exists is pointed at the audience of people who are already administrators and/or members of the community. It uses lingo a newcomer won't know; ... it places priority on the needs and expectations of the people who already know the rules and not on making newcomers welcome.

*sigh* I see this depressingly often, and wonder whether it's true of documentation outside of a software/IT context. So many IT folks are great at what they do, but seem to have forgotten how to write for people who don't already know what they do, and how to avoid (or at least also explain) technical jargon. Viewing the documentation you're writing from the standpoint of a beginner seems to be a rare skill.
posted by Greg_Ace at 2:38 PM on November 14, 2022 [1 favorite]

Like, if I fire up a new instance am I just supposed to copy somebody else's list? Is there a standard list somewhere? If so, who's responsible for maintaining it and how do they reach consensus? How do they prevent it from being used maliciously? Do I just start without a list and wait until the assholes find me and then block them one by one? Is there a best practices document somewhere?

Not blindly, no, N/A (they argue on #fediblock instead), they don't, that seems like a bad idea, let me know if you find one.

There is no standard list, although there have been a few popular attempts (e.g. blockchain, fediblock.org) that have fallen by the wayside. In the end, the "fediverse" is just a bunch of people running servers, all maintaining their own lists, with their own concerns, conflicts, priorities, etc. Having a 'standard list' is seen as a short path to centralization, which the average mastodon admin abhors. In theory, you'd carefully consider each offending server on their own merits as you hand-craft your catalog of proscription, but that leisurely pursuit may be constrained by how much time you have on your hands.

Not all servers publish their blocklists openly. If you're going to copy someone else's blocklist, try to make it someone that you trust to have made decisions similar to your own. If you're already on a server, and you've been happy with what you've seen on their federated feed, that'd be a place to start.

defederate is one script folks use to manage blocklists, which, in the readme, points to this discussion of the tension between federation and automated blocklists:

I understand the benefits of automation but this type of moderation should really be done by humans, in my opinion. too many servers have ended up blocking other servers that were blocked on another instance for personal beef and such and that would just propagate endlessly.
…
That every server makes its own rules and moderation decisions is often cited as one of the biggest advantages of #fediverse but tools to blindly copy blocklists eliminate it entirely. It leads to re-centralization and once someone's instance gets on a single blocklist, it can close down, basically. Even if it was just a mistake or personal dispute. There's no recourse or way to appeal. And it's impossible to contact every server and ask them to stop blocking it.

With that said, if you don't have a starting point in mind, there are servers that publish their blocklists with reasoning or documented examples (shudder):

e.g.
chaos.social
vulpine.club

and attempts to define recidivist servers by volume:
list of 500 most defederated fediverse instances

Use with due consideration and caution.
posted by zamboni at 2:39 PM on November 14, 2022 [1 favorite]

Speedrunning comp.mail.sendmail
(did I do that right?)
posted by ctmf at 2:49 PM on November 14, 2022 [3 favorites]

And honestly, I'm not so sure about using the content warning tag for all posts that are "political". What if your entire existence is political or reason for operating on Mastodon is political?

A little over a week into my Mastodon experience, I'm still not using CWs for political posts... and neither do lots of people I follow (some of whom have been there long before I arrived).

It's worth noting that the creator of Mastodon makes a point of saying that there is not a consensus among Mastodon users about how and whether CWs should be used.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 3:01 PM on November 14, 2022

I've used it for election shit and been thankful for other people using it for election shit, since a flood of that can be stressful and overwhelming.
posted by Artw at 3:06 PM on November 14, 2022

Not all servers publish their blocklists openly. If you're going to copy someone else's blocklist, try to make it someone that you trust to have made decisions similar to your own. If you're already on a server, and you've been happy with what you've seen on their federated feed, that'd be a place to start.

Yeah, but if you’re a new admin (hi!) how do you determine that another site’s admins are trustworthy, or if there are grudges expressed by blacklisting? I defaulted to no list for now. I’m not happy about it, but I’m the only active user on my instance at the moment so it doesn’t matter much.
posted by fedward at 3:31 PM on November 14, 2022

and attempts to define recidivist servers by volume:
…
Use with due consideration and caution.

Coming in at #297: mastodon.social. Great work, everybody.
posted by fedward at 3:44 PM on November 14, 2022 [1 favorite]

Something that's going to be interesting is when the Mastodon v4 filter features (1, 2) start getting popular, and whether there'll be disputes about whether someone should have CW-ed, or the complainant should have had their filters on.
posted by zamboni at 3:45 PM on November 14, 2022

I have never ever earnestly wanted to call someone a "snowflake" until I saw this

Hey, I feel you. In the last 24 hours, I have seen photos on Mastodon marked as "sensitive content" that featured:

1. A cozy fire in a backyard firepit
2. A paperback copy of "1984"

How silly. If those things are "sensitive content", then what isn't? I would find it exhausting to follow either of those users, because while I can enjoy a good Advent calendar, I'm not looking for a social media experienced based on that paradigm. People like that actually make content warnings useless.

The solution, of course, is that I am can simply not follow people who use CWs that promiscuously. And they are welcome not to follow my account with its un-CW-ed politics posts. Heck, they can even block me if they want! 'S'all good, man.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 3:51 PM on November 14, 2022 [3 favorites]

Coming in at #297: mastodon.social. Great work, everybody.

Welcome to mastodon! Remember what I was saying about the average mastodon admin being agin centralization? A lot of servers won't federate with m.s because:

they think it's too big/filled with people who don't understand the culture
they fear centralization
they just don't like gargron (or how he's running things)

posted by zamboni at 3:52 PM on November 14, 2022

or possibly netnews, ctmf. Some of each?
posted by clew at 4:01 PM on November 14, 2022 [2 favorites]

So my week+ at Mastodon notes: It's actually pretty much what I want. Not everyone I follow on Twitter has moved, but a lot of folks have, and a lot of folks I know and like but did not enjoy their Twitter presences are there, and I'm giving them a second chance. I'm on a small and mostly-closed instance run by people I know (by reputation and casual acquaintance) in person, and my friends are all over so when they boost stuff, it's usually stuff I haven't seen and am interested in. I'm not using the app (I have decided that for as long as I can, I'm not going to have fast-refresh social media on my phone at all) but the browser interface is just fine. And the updated filter stuff went in today and that helped me a lot with the CW issue - I can just turn them off (which I'd already one) AND I can set up filters for the stuff I, personally, don't want to see. (I think this will help a lot of people and hopefully turn down the heat a little on this particular discourse, because if you can't bear the idea of, say, frogs, you can just filter that out with something close to the same functionality as the poster putting a CW on it.)

So yeah, I'm ok with this. I'm @devinsinger@wandering.shop, if anyone wants to find me. (I do not promise to follow back. I tend to keep a pretty slow timeline and add people gradually. It's (probably) not personal.)
posted by restless_nomad at 10:19 AM on November 16, 2022 [9 favorites]

History Scholars, Teachers, and Graduate Students on Mastodon

NatSec people on Mastodon

Mastodon users working in infectious diseases (clinicians, researchers, journalists, etc)

Journalists on Mastodon and Fediverse

All from @JayWeixelbaum@universeodon.com, who is posting lists like this to his timeline.

@georgetakei@universeodon.com: "I haven’t grown 26K fans in a day since the early days of social media! Welcome to all who are now here with me. Let’s make new adventures together."
posted by clawsoon at 4:46 AM on November 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

I like how it's been going so far. Lots of new people joined following the latest birdpocalyptic news.

One thing I'm a bit sick of is... a particular set of attitudes I see in some arrivals/non-arrivals: a combination of impatience and unwillingness to change (things aren't working 100% correctly / the way I expect right now, and that's a dealbreaker), and an unfamiliarity with open source software projects which manifests as two extremes: "I hate $thing, and there's nothing I can do about it except complain loudly and aggressively" / "I can talk to the people who write the code directly, so why aren't they fixing the thing I hate immediately?!"

A lot of the problems (both technical and social) will inevitably be resolved one way or another as a consequence of this sudden influx of users and interest. I'd say that the speed of adoption is directly proportional to the kind of comfort with tech (if not actual programming ability) that makes for helpful contributions to a project.

The CW issue is tricky; some of it can definitely be fixed with a technological change (e.g. account- or instance-wide CW defaults which can be unset per-post or per-account, for accounts all about food or instances all about politics), and some of it definitely cannot (e.g. privileged people yelling at marginalised people to CW conversations about their normal daily lives). I don't have a horse in this race but I'm carefully following the conversation.

I haven't seen the same kind of controversy around adding alt text to images. I think it's a sensible and polite thing to do, and I'm glad that it seems to be enjoying widespread adoption.

(General intertubes / social media observation: I've realised how much of my online attention has been dominated by Twitter. My RSS feed reader used to be the centre of my universe, but after Google Reader died and I tried a series of replacements I gradually stopped using it, and Twitter filled a lot of that news-and-random-stuff gap. I have a curated Twitter timeline and use Tweetdeck to avoid all the non-chronological nonsense, but as soon as I read the replies to any sufficiently popular account it's a cesspool on the level of YouTube comments. How long has it been like that? I don't know, but I can't say that I'm entirely sorry to be stepping away from it. I have made an effort to start following feeds properly again, and I have already discovered a new SFF writer just by actually reading the magazines I'm subscribed to instead of just marking them read. I'm going to try not to paint myself into the same media consumption corner again.)
posted by confluency at 5:14 AM on November 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

Oh, and there's a new Firefox extension for simplifying remote follows, which works a bit differently and works for both the old and new follow process. You have to allow popups once per remote instance, but other than that annoyance it Just Works.
posted by confluency at 5:34 AM on November 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

How silly. If those things are "sensitive content", then what isn't?

There's no AI on Mastodon, especially any involved in content moderation. "Sensitive content" is used for literally any image that the user and/or instance decides to hide from view before loading, it doesn't matter what the picture is about. (for example. you and/or your instance may decide to hide all media by default) It is a misleading term for sure but that's just the exact sentence used for any hidden image.
posted by creatrixtiara at 5:39 AM on November 18, 2022

I like Per Axbom’s guide to choosing a Mastodon instance. Earlier this week I went on a walking tour of Cambridge given by a student. She explained the relationship between colleges, faculty and university- and in particular the notion that your choice of college can greatly influence your experience. An 800+ year old federated system that is rather like Mastodon. The trick is probably not to choose the biggest but the one that is “most you”.
posted by rongorongo at 9:52 AM on November 18, 2022

It took me a bit over an hour to run up an instance of Pleroma yesterday and it's running happily in about 1 GB of RAM in a 1 vCPU vm. Pleroma is another Fediverse server that more or less does what Mastodon does, but is considerably more lightweight. If you were thinking about running up a server of your own, I'd encourage people to investigate it.

I'm digging the idea of my own Fediverse server. Self-reliance! Authenticity! Fuck shit up myself!
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 11:04 AM on November 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

fyi there's some distrust of Pleorma amongst Mastodon users because it's the favoured build of really terrible folks such as Kiwifarms
posted by creatrixtiara at 12:39 PM on November 18, 2022 [2 favorites]

I dug into that distrust when I was picking my own build, and as far as I can tell without going full pushpins-and-yarn it's overblown at this point. There was a guy with admin privileges on the Pleroma build who is (among other things) anti-trans, but he didn't build it in the first place and wore out his welcome after making too many changes that other people had to revert (and also his personality belatedly doesn't seem to have helped). His own anti-Pleroma rant can still be found online but I won't link to it, or to his anti-trans rant. It seems he took most of the people like him off to the Soapbox fork, but they're easy enough to spot and block from the whole "free speech" thing in the instance info.

The software I chose (Akkoma) is also a fork of Pleroma but at least for now it seems to be under more active development. I wasn't able to find anything that scared me away from it (unlike, say, Soapbox) in some cursory search.
posted by fedward at 2:16 PM on November 18, 2022 [2 favorites]

A decent framing for certain subset of internet users: Mastodon is just blogs by Simon Willison (they're a fan). Was looking at spinning up my own at masto.host per the rec, but looks like they are way overloaded with users and the shop is closed atm.
posted by lazaruslong at 2:19 PM on November 18, 2022

I'm idly browsing through macaw.social, the one with former Twitter employees, and I'm seeing discussion of how to tune Ruby on Rails performance.

...which reminds me that Twitter was originally built with Ruby on Rails, too, until they hit scaling problems. I wonder how many former Twitter engineers are Having Thoughts about all the things they did to help Twitter scale and how they might be able to apply them to Mastodon.
posted by clawsoon at 2:24 PM on November 18, 2022 [2 favorites]

Uh, so what do I do if i can't add people because the search/explore section has no search bar? If the person happened to show up on my feed then at least i can add them there.... I'm just trying out the mefi instance that Pronoiac just set up following the MeTa here. Am on web browser still.
posted by cendawanita at 11:04 PM on November 18, 2022

Interesting (Twitter only AFAIK) thread from Mosquio Capital- a Systems Reliably Engineer, itemising 56 different ways Twitter could run into serious trouble soon; why it is doomed in fact. These concerns are also an issue for Mastodon- not only because of the massive rise in migrating users - and the technical problems of scaling far and fast - but also because of the waves of lawyers, litigious corporations, governments and bad actors that turn up and have to be dealt with. It’s going to be an interesting time.
posted by rongorongo at 2:07 AM on November 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

In this highly aware tech community of Metafilter members I find it surprising that there is no mention of the Indian micro blogging site Koo which stands second (after Twitter) in terms of user downloads.
posted by adamvasco at 3:29 AM on November 19, 2022

With consumate timing Koo has now launched a Portuguese supported interface (Pt) for Brazil as the World cup kicks off. This is interesting not least for the fact that Koo pronounced Cu in Portugueses is not the normal word most people associate with Social Media. However this will not deter the locals; let the memes begin
posted by adamvasco at 4:00 AM on November 19, 2022 [2 favorites]

so what do I do if i can't add people because the search/explore section has no search bar?

On a desktop (or large tablet) web browser, the search box is at the top of the left-hand sidebar, and is not part of the "Explore" section. (This may also depend on your settings and the version of Mastodon your server is using... It’s hard to give instructions that apply everywhere.)
posted by mbrubeck at 7:00 AM on November 19, 2022

Don't worry i figured it out for the mobile view, it's the damndest thing: on my unfolded inner screen (tablet view, or it should be), the search bar element completely disappears under some sizing snafu (but not for other masto devs), but if I revert to my folded cover screen or work on multi-window it shows up. And indeed on the desktop it's where you see it, but I'm not that demographic (anymore).
posted by cendawanita at 8:49 AM on November 19, 2022

@anildash@mastodon.cloud:

I’m still struggling to unlearn the habits I’ve built up over 20+ years of being on social media. There’s that weird mix of performativity and anticipatory defensiveness that both serve to color and mute my voice and diminish my thoughts here. I’d like to revisit that. What are the things I’ve forgotten how to say on the internet?

"Performativity and anticipatory defensiveness" is an Internet thing (hmm, maybe a feature of how politicians talk, too?) that Twitter took to an extreme.
posted by clawsoon at 1:51 PM on November 19, 2022

In her intense post-canceling video, Lindsay Ellis talks about how she was driven into spending more and more of her time threat modeling, rather than interacting or creating. I think she lays out that dynamic very well. It's very hard to stop that from feeding on itself even as a moderator, when that is a substantial part of the point of the job.
posted by restless_nomad at 1:58 PM on November 19, 2022 [4 favorites]

Ugh, entire instances blocking entire other instances is getting potentially confusing. I joined mastodon with the expectation of being able to follow anyone I want to. Is that not the case? If my instance blocks journa.host can I still follow people on journa.host?

Overridable defaults would be one thing, but having to shop around for an instance that doesn't block instances of individual people i want to follow is going to make this an untenable mess.
posted by ctmf at 9:43 PM on November 19, 2022

If my instance blocks journa.host can I still follow people on journa.host?

No, is the short answer. An instance being blocked means exactly that. It's off the grid as far as your instance is concerned. There are plenty of "hate speech" instances that I am sure your local instance blocks and for good reason. I checked some of the sites my local instances has blocked/defederated and oh boy, they are the cesspits you can imagine. There is no way I want to see even the merest hint of a toot from those sites.

But your question is a very good one and will be asked more and more I think. What happens if your instance blocks an instance that you personally like? What if you don't agree with what your instance has done? What if they defederate an instance based on what you perceive as the arbitrary prejudices of the mods? My only response to this is: your local instance is owned by somebody and it is their call. It is their private property and they get to make these calls. If we don't like that, then we can join another instance that better suits us. And yes, that will mean shopping around. And maybe this will be messy, but I am not sure what the alternative is.
posted by vac2003 at 10:29 PM on November 19, 2022

But it bothers me that that someplace non-offensive like journa.host would be regularly blocked

The reasons I have seen for blocking them have included being tolerant of transphobia, and banning a trans journalist for criticising them. (I don't know any of the details.)
posted by scorbet at 5:02 AM on November 20, 2022 [2 favorites]

If my instance blocks journa.host can I still follow people on journa.host?

Depends on if your instance limits (formerly known as silences) or suspends them. Let's consider two instances, example.social and example.club. If example.social limits example.club, then @alice@example.social could still follow @bob@example.club, but posts from @bob@example.club would not show up in example.social's federated timeline (which would otherwise display all the posts from every account followed by users of example.social). If example.social suspends example.club, then @alice@example.social will no longer be able to follow @bob@example.club at all.

The limit relationship is not symmetrical; if @bob@example.club follows @alice@example.social, he will still see her posts if example.social limits example.club. In fact, her posts would still show up in example.club's federated timeline unless the example.club admin also limited example.social. The suspend relationship, on the other hand, is symmetrical by fiat. If example.social suspends example.club, Bob would no longer be able to follow Alice or any other example.social users, because example.social would already be blocking all traffic to and from example.club. The example.club admin could retaliate by suspending example.social, but it would have no additional effect. ("You can't block me, I'm blocking you!" is as ineffective as it sounds).

Because every instance has its own administrator with his or her own tolerance for … well, anything, some instances may choose to limit example.club, some may choose to suspend it completely, and some may have decided against moderating example.club at all (or simply may not have gotten around to it yet).

The reasons I have seen for blocking them have included being tolerant of transphobia, and banning a trans journalist for criticising them. (I don't know any of the details.)

Before that mess happened (and the fallout still seems to be happening) there were already "some" instances suspending journa.host basically on the ideas that (A) journalists were a major contributing factor to how terrible twitter was, and/or (2) the admins wanted to send a message that their users were being protected from use/abuse by journalists who wanted to quote them out of context, cause pile-ons, etc. How many instances suspended journa.host for those reasons? No idea! More than zero, but it's hard to know how many of anything exist (or don't) across the fediverse. This week's "forum drama" (as I saw it described) isn't making journa.host any more popular, but it's hard to tell how unpopular it really is, and it's still early days.
posted by fedward at 10:27 AM on November 20, 2022 [2 favorites]

Ah man, and because of the general advice of going to an instance that represents your interests, i know Malaysian journalists setting up space there. So much of the reflexive distrust of journalists seem untenable, as I build my readlist to not be so specifically western of a certain class. And i have no clue how to decide on statements that 'using a tool to scan instances of blocklists' is bad, and that such a tool is developed by KF (and i feel there's a collapse of two things here - is it bad because it's KF or because scanning for blocklists is bad?)
posted by cendawanita at 10:35 AM on November 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

It’s certainly indicative of a person who has no business running a large instance and has terrible instincts for it, given that alone it’s likely to be a car crash worth avoiding.

the reflexive distrust of journalists seem untenable

Let’s face it, what we are talking about here is the Very Important Opinion Column people, and they do bring with them a culture of being total assholes.
posted by Artw at 10:59 AM on November 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

I guess. I guess also even if it might feel tiresome to me, I'll still have to pipe up occassionally that Opinion Columnists aren't who I'm talking about, so who's the 'we' here?
posted by cendawanita at 11:26 AM on November 20, 2022

And so because someone thinks someone is a total asshole, and may even be right, I can't follow any journalists. (exaggerating). Thus forcing me to choose an instance that isn't admin-ed by someone who has hissy fits and uses the blunt tool. Which may, as an unintended consequence, drive me to support an instance that doesn't respond *at all* to abuse, which is no good either. Like Teegeeack AV Club Secretary, I think an over-rideable default, with a warning reason, makes more sense. The 'limit' feature seems reasonable, I'm not insisting everyone I like has to show in the federated timeline for everyone else.

The thing is, we WANT the gab types to self-segregate. Ok,well they like it too, so everyone's happy. But let's say, a spammer. Their strategy now is to not self-segragate, but to choose the biggest, busiest, can't afford to block instance out there so when you block their instance, your own users get outraged and leave. Like email black-holing yahoo, back in the day. You just can't do it. Once again, this blackhole list/collateral damage problem is a repeat of the RBL/DNSBL/etc days of email spam fighting.

That said, I think I need an instance that's small enough for me to have an influence on the admin with my preferences, maybe mefi's. I can't live with blocking all the independent journalists, because that's one of my primary needs with social media - to hear the contrary voices and choose who to trust. Which might change from event to event! If blocking Greenwald takes out JJ MacNab (contrived example) that's not ok with me. I'll block Greenwald myself.
posted by ctmf at 11:28 AM on November 20, 2022 [2 favorites]

I can't live with blocking all the independent journalists, because that's one of my primary needs with social media - to hear the contrary voices and choose who to trust. Which might change from event to event! If blocking Greenwald takes out JJ MacNab (contrived example) that's not ok with me. I'll block Greenwald myself.

The broader body of Mastadon culture, at least pre-Twitter influx, generally doesn't go for the "both sides must get to tell their story" culture of Twitter and the New York Times, so may be a poor place for you to do that. The reaction to journa.host, which has an owner and users who seem all in on that, seems pretty predictable in that light.

In your example JJ McNab is probably better off going and finding an instance that doesn't have Greenwald on it.
posted by Artw at 11:57 AM on November 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

Like, this next one is about mastodon.social actually, the big one most people dipped their toes in, and one that I'm seeing notices that it'll have more defederating from it soon. Mekka Okereke is commenting on Tracy Chou's post about white novelists being taken down (which seems to be a consequence of a big instance and an overwhelmed mod responding quickly to what seems to be bad faith reports) even though he himself is having a better time than this: Important note for Black folk joining Mastodon.

Well meaning white folk will tell you that it doesn't matter which instance you join. Just like well meaning white folk might tell you that it doesn't matter which East Texas town you move to, or which Boston neighbor you move to.

(...) There are lots of folk involved with Mastodon that see and recognize this problem, and are trying to make it safer. But this problem space is Hard(tm). It is not a few features or lines of code away.

I'm advocating that folks find their Twitter alternative, for several reasons.

(...) Content moderation is hard. Policy is hard. I would say harder than engineering. The people working in these roles didn't do nothing.

I know there are many engineers that disagree with me on "How hard could content moderation be?" I don't want to debate. We can disagree.

My experience on Mastodon has been better than a lot of Black folk, simply because I randomly chose an instance that doesn't suck for Black voices.

That's not good enough.

"If you don't like the moderation policies, just choose another instance!" also not good enough.

Anyway i must protest, my concern isn't about "both sides needing to tell their story". I'm pointing out (and i guess ctmf too) there're non-establishment (by western standards) journalists and media people there. The distaste for journalism is reflexive, as I've said, and it's not like my media here didn't get called out for being sloppy in their cites when doing online-sourced vox pop pieces. But ok, fine, masto isn't the place for this. But why is it so hard to acknowledge that that hellsite has been functioning as a public space and if that place is going down with the Nazis, then where else?
posted by cendawanita at 12:09 PM on November 20, 2022 [2 favorites]

Yeah that Tracy Chou thing is hot garbage, and a much bigger problem. Journa.host is basically the result of a single bad actor taking a run at Mastadon and dragging a couple of hundred people in with him on it including your malaysian journalist friends because he wants to stand up for the Jesse Singals of the world - it's going to suck for anyone caught in the immediate blast zone but the blast zone is small. "Move to a different instance without that guy" actually works as a reasonable response.

Mastadon.social exibiting the similar disfunction is much, much worse. It's a large instance that's become a default landing spot for new users - and despite most people thinking that's bad that any instance would be a "default" the practicality of it is that probably won't change in the near term - certainly not during the Twitter influx. It getting the sazme treatment as journa.host is going to cause a lot of problems and big rifts between instances, not that some people won't do it anyway, and could very well destabilize the whole project.

I very much hope a lid gets put on whatever was going on there with that moderation sooner rather than later because if it isn't, or if it *is* a deliberate choice rather than some fuck up based on rapid scaling, then it means things are going to get very fucked very quick.
posted by Artw at 12:28 PM on November 20, 2022 [2 favorites]

I expect there will be a lot of shaking out (some good, some neutral, and some really awful stuff) in the next few weeks and months as refugees figure out what they want, new instances are built for different communities with different tolerances, and disagreements/bannings/defederations happen for all sorts of reasons running the gamut from misunderstandings to seriously bad actors. Some people will find what they want, others will build what they want, and still others will go back to what's left of Twitter.

I've watched enough fandom relocations to have seen this kind of thing before. That sounds dismissive but it's not. More that I've learned that what looks super important in the early stages of a community dispersal may turn out to be less important in the long run than things I can't yet see.

So I'm eyeing things warily but not doing anything yet; the one thing I wanted to do was stake a claim early (which I did when the original Twitter purchase happened, on mastodon.social) so I could find a place I vibed with, which I have now done (thanks pronoiac). From here I'm just going to let it shake out and not judge immediately, and find my own new vibe on the instance where I've settled. I can't control how other people do things on Mastodon any more than I could at Twitter. I need to remember that.

About Black Twitter, I have no idea if it's any good/what its policies are, and as a fishbelly-pale person I am absolutely the wrong person to assess it. But I've heard some parts of Black Twitter are moving to blacktwitter.io which might be useful for some folks to explore.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 12:46 PM on November 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

Teegeeack AV Club Secretary: “But it bothers me that that someplace non-offensive like journa.host would be regularly blocked.”

scorbet: “The reasons I have seen for blocking them have included being tolerant of transphobia, and banning a trans journalist for criticising them. (I don't know any of the details.)”

“Spent about an hour today talking with @adamdavidson, the creator one one of the mods over at journa.host.

“It was a very good, very productive conversation that I'm very glad to have had. I want to clarify a few things related to the drama over there:

“1. Obviously, admins of different instances can make their own calls, but I'm suggesting that people take a beat before blocking all of journa.host. I believe the people over there are coming from a good place, 1/4”— @parkermolloy@masto.ai, Nov 20, 2022, 14:53

posted by ob1quixote at 1:56 PM on November 20, 2022

Update on the Tracy Chou post: Chou’s post has been reinstated, and mastodon.social writes:

This post was removed by mistake and we apologize. We’ve recently hired more moderators and the post in question was falsely interpreted to be implying something it was not.

To be clear, we do not believe that the post violates the rules in the screenshot and this was made clear to all moderators of mastodon.social.

posted by mbrubeck at 3:15 PM on November 20, 2022 [2 favorites]

Question: how do I turn off reblogs/boosted content in my home feed? I only want to see what people write, not what they like that their friends wrote.
posted by rebent at 5:18 AM on November 21, 2022

You can turn off boosts on a user-by-user basis but I don't see how you can do that globally.
posted by octothorpe at 6:04 AM on November 21, 2022

rebent: On the Mastodon web site, click the "settings" icon in the header of the "Home" feed (not the "Preferences" gear in the sidebar, but the one that looks like a set of sliders) to find the option to turn off "Boosts."
posted by mbrubeck at 7:01 AM on November 21, 2022

Moderation appears to be an increasing problem.
posted by Artw at 8:05 AM on November 21, 2022

..yeah. Moderation is a problem. It's always a problem. Comparing it to Reddit isn't bad, actually, because Reddit's moderation is set up very similarly, although it has (theoretically) some top-down control as a centralized organization. This is like saying "forums are bad because moderation is a problem." Yeah. They are. And it is. It's fundamental to the medium. It was a problem on Twitter, too, there were just fewer identified people to blame.
posted by restless_nomad at 8:55 AM on November 21, 2022 [4 favorites]

I fully expect it to be the biggest scaling issue rather than anything technical, and that’s assuming perfect behaviour from all mods and any problems are just mistakes and oversights.
posted by Artw at 8:57 AM on November 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

It always is! This is my #1 rant - moderation scales geometrically, not linearly, with the number of users. No one believes this until they try it.
posted by restless_nomad at 9:05 AM on November 21, 2022 [7 favorites]

I'm seeing more servers moving to defederate the `mastodon.social` instance in response to these visible moderation issues, so that'll be interesting to observe. On the one hand, there being a 'default instance' helps onboard people; on the other that's how we got "Gmail as default email".
posted by CrystalDave at 10:04 AM on November 21, 2022

r_n, if you post that comment about moderation scaling geometrically on Mastodon, I will boost it to my [checks notes] 31 followers.
posted by fedward at 12:17 PM on November 21, 2022

Heh, I did, at substantially greater length.
posted by restless_nomad at 12:22 PM on November 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

Weird. It wasn't visible to me without the direct URL.
posted by fedward at 12:27 PM on November 21, 2022

Ha. Turns out I already boosted a message from that threat.
posted by Artw at 12:32 PM on November 21, 2022

It definitely seems like so far, the most popular posts on Mastodon are posts about Mastodon.
posted by restless_nomad at 12:34 PM on November 21, 2022

This last month or so I’ve been trying pretty hard to talk about things other than Twitter or Mastodon, but recent events have broken my resolve on that, it is true. Hopefully normal service can resume shortly.
posted by Artw at 12:36 PM on November 21, 2022

(I am also mostly talking about Twitter and Mastodon here and on Discord as well, so there is symmetry. I am not talking about shit or fuck all on Twitter though, and do not expect to be ever again)
posted by Artw at 12:37 PM on November 21, 2022

I’ve been trying to keep all my Twitter metacommentary on Twitter and my normal social media nonsense on masto as usual. It’s been easier for me to not dig in on masto metacommentary this time around because (a) I’m on vacation with only my phone and (b) I’ve done it like three times before during past migrations.

But once I’m home with a keyboard and very non-tropical weather I’ll probably lose my resolve.
posted by cortex at 12:48 PM on November 21, 2022

You say this now but the first time a Menger sponge based controversy comes along on either…
posted by Artw at 12:56 PM on November 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

@gargron@mastadon.social There were two notable moderation incidents on mastodon.social and mastodon.online in the past 24 hours that I would like to address. In the first, a post was wrongfully removed due to a report claiming it contained a dogwhistle, and in the second, a person was wrongfully suspended due to a report claiming it's an impersonator. Both were undone and apologies issued.

The moderation team is bigger than ever and so is the amount of reports we have to process. We're dealing with unprecedented growth despite having closed registrations on these servers weeks ago. Some false positives are unavoidable, but we understand these mistakes are upsetting and unacceptable, and we are trying to do better. Luckily all moderator actions can be appealed and reversed.
posted by Artw at 4:53 PM on November 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

Tumblr to add support for ActivityPub, the social protocol powering Mastodon and other apps

If Tumblr were to add ActivityPub support, it means users on Mastodon could follow Tumblr users’ posts from their own Mastodon instance — without having to use the Tumblr app. It could also provide Tumblr users with an entry point into the so-called fediverse without having to face some of the complexities that are involved with signing up for Mastodon for the first time.

I have no idea what this would mean for either community/set of communities.
posted by clawsoon at 7:59 PM on November 21, 2022 [6 favorites]

“Boobs are back, baby!”
posted by Artw at 8:05 PM on November 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

Moderation appears to be an increasing problem.

Moderation is hard.

So what happened seems to have started with this tweet in which @wickdchiq said "Apparently I already have an impersonation account on Mastodon so." Someone replied "I hope I'm following the real one" and she replied by posting her actual mastodon account on mastodon.online.

Someone misunderstood this conversation and reported to mastodon.online that her actual account was the impersonation account.

The mastodon.online team then suspended her actual account.

@wickdchiq then posted this tweet "Good morning and what the fuck????" with a screenshot of her suspended mastodon.online account.

Mastodon.online then unsuspended her account and replied with this tweet saying "Hi Erika, we're very sorry. Your account was suspended by mistake, and we've just unsuspended it. It was reported as an impersonator linking to a tweet you made where you said you had an impersonator on Mastodon; both the reporter and the mod misread the tweet."
posted by TheophileEscargot at 7:35 AM on November 22, 2022 [3 favorites]

As someone who just joined Mastodon, I'm disheartened but not surprised about its moderation issues from this thread.

Also, funding - the regional instance I've joined has been offline more often than not. I've seen another smaller instance post their costs and they are non-trivial, while my instance doesn't mention anything about funding. It's plausible that it may shut down for no reason at the owner's whim.
posted by meowzilla at 3:29 PM on November 22, 2022

relatively large. That indicates that it's been around for a while

I guess you missed the growing pains on my instance, haha. I'm sure it's not the only example. About page - see server stats. Admin account - see join date.

They've already been de-federated and re-federated once. Which is not a recommendation to go sniff all the dirty laundry! But this surprised me: They chose to announce a certain famous transphobia leader would be welcome if she followed the rules within the site, and then admitted their mistake.

They've now fielded an impotent legal threat, from someone who clearly falls foul of the improved policy.
posted by sourcejedi at 3:37 AM on November 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

I think "Mastodon's moderation problems" are being exaggerated by a bit of a culture clash.

Twitter was reported to have had about 1500 moderators before Musk, and had vastly more users than Mastodon.

There are about 7700 Mastodon instances, each of whom has an administrator who acts as a moderator. Maybe some aren't doing their job, but other instances have multiple moderators as well as an administrator.

Considering the Mastodon fediverse is a tiny fraction of the size of Twitter, there seems to be a much better ratio of moderators to users on it.

In the @wickdchiq incidence above, from the point of view of a Twitter user, she acted reasonably I guess. She found her mastodon account had been suspended for no apparent reason, so she immediately went back to Twitter and went ballistic over it.

From the point of view of a Mastodon user though, if I was suspended without doing anything wrong, I would start by contacting my administrator to find out what's happened and hopefully correct the mistake.

It just didn't seem to occur to her that a moderation mistake can actually be corrected, in a quick and transparent way. Her Twitter experience led her to think moderation decisions are arbitrary, mysterious and unlikely to be corrected. But I think when the new Twitter people on Mastodon encounter one of the inevitable, occasional moderation problems, their instinctive reaction is to go nuclear about it, when much of the time they could just ask for it to be reversed.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 5:08 AM on November 23, 2022 [6 favorites]

Oh I am fucking amazed the whole thing is surviving the obvious scaling problems as well as it is, and I think it’s a real indication of long term durability. The problems still suck.
posted by Artw at 6:10 AM on November 23, 2022 [2 favorites]

One of my main criteria in searching for a Mastodon instance to join was that it be relatively large. That indicates that it's been around for a while, which indicates that it's run by someone who understands both the tech issues and the moderation issues.

I'm not sure the one thing follows from the other. Federated networking in general, and Mastodon specifically, has two different scaling problems. One scaling problem is technical: there are well known tips for performance tuning, but new administrators are often figuring out the issues as they go, and experienced administrators can still be surprised (e.g. issues I'm seeing people mention with performance on flagship instances like mastodon.social, or this after-action report from Fosstodon).

The other, perhaps more critical, scaling issue is moderation, as pointed out numerous times in this very thread. If you have something in the range of 50 users (as suggested by Darius Kazemi in the runyourown.social guide) then moderation tasks can be handled by one person, or with a consensus that's somewhat easy to reach with that small a user base. But as restless_nomad (who should know) pointed out in this thread, moderation scales geometrically. Somewhere beyond 50-or-so users (the maximum limit for a solo moderator is possibly related to Dunbar's Number) moderation needs start to scale in ugly ways.

When you are talking about thousands of users on a single instance, that requires multiple moderators. It's hard to find people to do that work, it's hard to train them (cf. the notable failures this week that came from new/inexperienced moderators fresh out of training [or perhaps not trained well enough at all as in the journa.host fiasco]), and if you have multiple moderators you may run into situations where Alice would moderate something but Bob would leave it alone. And what happens when Alice and Bob burn out?

Considering the Mastodon fediverse is a tiny fraction of the size of Twitter, there seems to be a much better ratio of moderators to users on it.

But who's paying them? Who'll replace them when they burn out? How much work is needlessly duplicated as hundreds of new, probably volunteer, moderators encounter the same (predictable) problems over and over? I like the idea of smaller instances but if your small instance means that one admin/moderator can burn out and just shut the whole thing down, that seems just as unsustainable as a huge instance with tens of thousands of users.

And again, the lack of a commonly-agreed set of best practices makes a lot of the setup and administration more work than it needs to be.
posted by fedward at 8:17 AM on November 23, 2022 [3 favorites]

Climate Twitter and Mastodon
posted by spamandkimchi at 10:50 AM on November 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

I probably should have taken the time during setting up my feed, to weed out things I just find distressing--and I may still do that with filters--but clearly copying over the billion things I was following and being stressed out about on Twitter, is just stressing me out on Mastodon, EXCEPT that I have discovered the #SheepOfMastodon tag, and maybe I'll just unfollow everything but that. Is it too late to make a career change and become a shepherd?
posted by mittens at 1:12 PM on November 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

One of my main criteria in searching for a Mastodon instance to join was that it be relatively large.

I don't think larger is always better. The difficulty with scaling is that both the technical infrastructure costs and moderation issues increase exponentially with size.

Obviously a small instance will have a small local audience, but you will be more visible to those people than on a huge instance. After trying out a few, I think there is a sweet spot, not too large and not too small.
posted by Lanark at 3:03 PM on November 23, 2022

Also a nice feature in Mastodon is the ability to login to multiple instances at the same time, on the same browser, you never get logged out.
posted by Lanark at 3:05 PM on November 23, 2022

Federated networking in general, and Mastodon specifically, has two different scaling problems.

Well I would say there's another one: legal. Your 50 friends you personally know, or at least know through your network/neighborhood are cool are probably not going to sue you for some stupid shit. In 10^4, 5, or 6 numbers of users, that probability increases substantially.
posted by ctmf at 3:07 PM on November 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

Moderation discussions you do not expect to see. [CW:Garfield, lewd Garfield?]
posted by Artw at 4:53 PM on November 23, 2022

There are two scales Fediverse moderation has to work at, yeah? Within and between instances.
posted by clew at 9:43 PM on November 23, 2022

Cooler.mom for mothers, dads.cool is the equivalent for fathers.

The Mefites server is invite only: you need to put an email address in your Metafilter profile and ask in this Metatalk thread for an account.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 2:37 AM on November 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

I landed at photog.social and it's a very nice little place full of mostly european artists.
posted by octothorpe at 9:03 AM on November 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

I heard a journalist on the radio this morning giving a brief summary of their experience of Mastodon. They missed "trending," and they missed the speed at which news could be broadcast. Those two things, they felt, were what made people want to be on Twitter, and that's why Mastodon didn't work for them.

I guess Mastodon replaces "build a bespoke community for yourself" Twitter, but it doesn't replace "breaking news" Twitter. As for "tell the world your opinions" Twitter and "yell at people you don't know" Twitter, I guess we'll wait and see.
posted by clawsoon at 9:49 AM on November 24, 2022 [2 favorites]

I like Jen Sorensen’s History of Twitter in 4 panels cartoon.

I think that Mastodon can be quite good at delivering breaking news within the niches you follow - but it takes quite a lot of wrangling to make it work really well. The lack of algorithm is great for making an environment that surprises and encourages interaction - but that does not mean I would not like to be able to select and tweak an algorithm that does other things - like boost popular topics or locally breaking news.
posted by rongorongo at 2:18 AM on November 25, 2022

They missed "trending," and they missed the speed at which news could be broadcast

I see that as a feature of Mastodon and not a bug but YMMV.
posted by octothorpe at 6:11 AM on November 25, 2022 [5 favorites]

They missed "trending," and they missed the speed at which news could be broadcast.

I never looked at "trending", but I guess I did use the concept in the sense that, as much as I do not want my chronologic feed taken away, I do check 'home' when I've been away for a while.

I don't get the second complaint. What made news broadcast faster on Twitter? You can still 'boost' things to your own followers, and that still would tend to create an exponential avalanche effect until everyone on the planet has seen it, no?
posted by ctmf at 6:27 AM on November 25, 2022 [1 favorite]

Alarming shit going on in the world just doesn’t spread as fast on mastodon - no algorithm, antiviral design, very few primary news sources on there in the first place, cultural leaning against spreading alarming shit. Couple that with limited discoverability (intentionally) and you can’t just dig into whatever the big thin of the moment is.

Some of this might change, some of it seems pretty hardwired in.
posted by Artw at 7:01 AM on November 25, 2022 [3 favorites]

...you can’t just dig into whatever the big thin(g) of the moment is.

I would argue that is a benefit, and a big one. Very little good comes from instantaneous hot takes on Twitter.
posted by COD at 1:17 PM on November 25, 2022 [3 favorites]

I would argue that is a benefit, and a big one. Very little good comes from instantaneous hot takes on Twitter.

Very little good comes from gambling, too, but if you can build the best casino in town you'll get a lot of customers.
posted by clawsoon at 4:20 AM on November 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

I believe there’s a relevant saying here about the distinctions between data, information, knowledge, and wisdom.
posted by eviemath at 6:19 AM on November 26, 2022

> I believe there’s a relevant saying here about the distinctions between data, information, knowledge, and wisdom.

What is it?
posted by The corpse in the library at 11:35 AM on November 26, 2022

I’ve seen it in various forms, but here’s a relatively clear infographic version.
posted by eviemath at 11:56 AM on November 26, 2022 [3 favorites]

An awful lot of Twitter “breaking news” appears to be in the “data” category.
posted by eviemath at 11:57 AM on November 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

"Today #infosec Twitter is like a vacated campsite: a few glowing embers and only a lingering smell of smoke."

"This is a funny thread, but there’s a serious element at its heart: major firms don’t seem to be able to deploy encryption without using Signal Protocol, and specifically, without signing a proprietary license with Moxie/OWS/Signal."
posted by jeffburdges at 6:02 PM on November 27, 2022

I've stayed off twitter since being ill in August, and shall stay off, but nothing Musk related, just busy elsewhere.

Twitter is/was the cultural/intellectually "valuable" social media site precisely because you could choose to follow wise-ish people.

I've no idea how twitter gained so many scientists and cultural figures. Are they happier reading and writing titles than average people? Also, elimination? Facebook being family and friend focused makes it hostile to work. And LinkedIn being focuses upon the sleezy bullshit side of work, like hiring, makes it hostile to legitimacy or serious work.

As for format, I've no idea if 140 or 280 characters goes too far, but we write abstracts, first paragraphs, and introductions, and have copy editors precisely because brevity often adds value too. I'd also expect/hope non-stateful big edit box sites never being too successful, due to long comments being lost to back buttons.

As for noise, we need moderation for public discourse, but one easily ignored arguments in Twitter, thanks to their bizarre interface, which relaxed their moderation requirements. Although not perfect, moderation felt relatively fair on Twitter, like afaik they justify decisions from published rules. Afaik people won't quickly/ever forgive really problematic removals by mods, so maybe "legalism" avoided mods chasing off people with more important things to be doing.
posted by jeffburdges at 6:30 PM on November 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

A guide to potential liability pitfalls for people running a Mastodon instance
posted by Artw at 8:58 AM on November 28, 2022 [1 favorite]

you can’t just dig into whatever the big thin of the moment is.

Somebody quoting this comment above added a "g" in parentheses to the end of "thin"... e.g., "big thin(g)".

But I actually like the phrase "big thin" to describe the kind of daily or hourly molehills that Twitter makes into mountains.

They usually seem very big in the moment, but in the grand scheme of things, and taking the long view, most of them turn out to be very thin.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 4:03 PM on November 28, 2022

Eh. Dunno. Anyone on Twitter with decent attention could have told you Jan 6th was going to happen, people relying on more conventional sources seemed utterly blindsided. So it did have some utility sometimes.
posted by Artw at 9:14 AM on November 30, 2022

I do not get news from Twitter, and I could have told you Jan. 6 was going to happen. And it’s come out at least over the last year that a lot fewer people who were in positions of responsibility for preventing stuff like the Jan. 6 attack were actually blindsided by it than initially claimed to be. I’m sure Twitter was helpful for informing many people because it was a commonly used medium, but from what people have posted or referenced over the years here on Metafilter as breaking Twitter news, I don’t think there was anything special to its precise format beyond the fact of its widespread use. That is, “lots of people got their news from Twitter” seems perhaps like a case of “maps of distribution of X that are actually just population maps”.
posted by eviemath at 12:01 PM on November 30, 2022 [3 favorites]

I Was Wrong About Mastodon - from someone who thinks the moderation WILL scale.
posted by Artw at 3:08 PM on November 30, 2022 [1 favorite]

- from someone who thinks the moderation WILL scale.
This article reads like someone who Rushed with his Reckons^TM without first reading the manual. His initial views were based on a gross lack of understanding of how Mastodon and ActivityPub actually worked. Which is fine in itself but his rush to sound like an expert in an area he clearly didn't understand is so typical of tech commentators. He has now read the manual and wants us to believe, lo and behold, he has deep insights into Mastodon. Nope, not buying it.
posted by vac2003 at 5:51 PM on November 30, 2022 [3 favorites]

Does feel like they have yet to get to the chapter on INSTANCE DRAMA.
posted by Artw at 6:05 PM on November 30, 2022 [2 favorites]

Only a matter of time for the subreddit for masto drama a la fandom wank to emerge.
posted by cendawanita at 6:19 PM on November 30, 2022 [1 favorite]

the chapter on INSTANCE DRAMA

yeah like, when I said on the other thread that I figure you can probably bypass this by hosting yourself on a non-fannish, stable instance run by someone who doesn't give a shit about your current fandom of choice...

....I say that in the full, serene knowledge that the way people will actually do things is, in fandom, going to bring us back to the days of BNFs hosting little fannish communities and playing little fiefdoms by controlling resource access via instance hosting, rather than archival or forum hosting. The main difference I see from forums is actually the ability to comment on any forum you want with the same account, which is tied to one home "forum" base that you can pick up and move whenever you want while actually retaining most of the rest of your setup. Amazing.

I loved forums, so I am very happy and sort of hoping all my social media will let me do that wherever I go. But boy howdy, I am not at all going to pretend that forum owner drama / moderation drama (because I remember the power struggles over fora where the actual day to day owner was completely MIA and mod staff was volunteer based with very little fondness) aren't a core part of that model.
posted by sciatrix at 7:07 PM on November 30, 2022

(yeah, having read the article I am genuinely wondering if the author has been active on any other model of social media up to and including Reddit. Or for that matter in any volunteer-moderated social space larger than, say, a hundred users. Glancing at his bio, which is, ah, dramatic, I suspect his social Internet history has largely been restricted to very small groups... and in any case, he's considering moderation costs here purely as a technical problem rather than a social one. I don't think he is very familiar with the ins and outs of moderating purely volunteer communities, because I suspect he is most likely to be familiar with hacker communities that infamously don't... really moderate or manage communities qua communities at all.)
posted by sciatrix at 7:14 PM on November 30, 2022 [3 favorites]

Anyone on Twitter with decent attention could have told you Jan 6th was going to happen

The problem is that people on Twitter will tell you all sorts of things are going to happen that never happen.

Even a broken clock is right a couple times a day.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 9:14 PM on November 30, 2022

« Older Was stitched up by a postie, that's not glamorous | Need a Peptoc? Encouragement from kindergarteners Newer »

This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments

MetaFilter

Mastodon is having its moment in the sun
November 8, 2022 6:12 AM Subscribe

Tags

Share

Mastodon is having its moment in the sun November 8, 2022 6:12 AM Subscribe

Tags

Share

Mastodon is having its moment in the sun
November 8, 2022 6:12 AM Subscribe