On the train, staring at my phone, as you do.
If you’re leaving Twitter because Elon Musk is a terrible boss, or because he fired half the team, either moderators or accessibility engineers, I don’t really know the details, then my recommendation is to join the fediverse. Personally, I have three accounts on three instances, and they don’t all use the same software but they all interoperate.
@kensanata is my general account: pictures, programming, shower thoughts, that kind of thing.
@kensanata is my table top role-playing account.
@alex is my table top role-playing account, but in German.
Another option for role-playing games would be creating an account on dice.camp.
Mastodon is easy to understand than some of the other options. I was confused by Diaspora, for example.
Mastodon is also federated, which means that each instance has their own moderators. That influences your local timeline and allows us all to coexist with asshats on other servers. 😆
Anyway, I joined in 2017 after Google+ and I haven’t regretted it.
Check your local and federated timelines, click on stuff you like and read the conversations. Follow people that seem interested, and the people they are talking with. – 2017-04-08 Mastodon
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I recently posted some Mastodon explanations for all the Twitter newcomers. Why not post them here, too. Off we go!
How to find people on Mastodon to start filling your timeline:
https://communitywiki.org/trunk/
The Fediverse is Mastodon, Pleroma, Friendica, Hubzilla, Pixelfed, Peertube, and all their friends, federating. ���
But what do we call all the silos, the ad-based family of Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and friends? It’s the Adverse! A universe founded on ad serving. And a reminder that they offer plenty of adversity. All the adverse silos stand alone, like rocks, like islands, like Alcatraz. 👎
And what about Orkut, Google Wave, Google+ and other networks that have come and gone. This is the Necroverse.
Sometimes networks that seem alive today slide into the necroverse. Let’s hope we keep our network alive. Here’s to many happy years in the fediverse! 😁🥳
See also: The many branches of the Fediverse.
The many branches of the Fediverse
Every now and then I get the urge to unfollow inactive accounts, and to shed inactive followers. I don’t know why, exactly. Something about data parsimony, or reducing the number count, or maybe reducing the CO₂ emissions of my tooting (methane levels stay the same, I fear…).
Anyway: Follows and followers → Account activity: dormant, for both followers and following: Unfollow selected users or Remove selected followers
Watch out, you probably don’t want to remove all followers of the selected domains. Oops!
The details might also depend on your exact server software. This is on my instance which runs Glitchsoc, not Mastodon itself.
How to look at the followings and followers of accounts on other instances: when I click on your avatar it takes me to your profile on *my* instance. Here, only the subset of your posts, your followings and your followers my instances knows about are shown. If I then click on “View full profile”, it takes me to your profile on *your* instance. There, your posts, your followings and your followers are correct. I can click on the list and click through to the profiles of your followings on your server. To follow them, it’s probably best for me to copy their account names into the search of *my* instance. It’ll fetch a copy and allow me to follow them.
You might be wondering about the weirdness of this. But think of the alternatives. We could all go back to centralised server for all of us. Nope, tried that, didn’t work for me. What I definitely don’t want is all the accounts of all the people copied to my instance. There are just too many people I don’t like and I don’t think I want a copy of all the accounts. So much data that isn’t used. I also don’t want my instance to search all the instances all the time. So much traffic, so much much CO₂. So, it is what it is.
The user interface could be better, though. In Mastodon 3 it was worse, though. Instead of clicking “View full profile” you had to click on the avatar *again*. That was super weird.
Then again, consider this: fediverse discoverability is still better than for email. 😆
Watch out, though: choosing people to follow is like picking books to listen to or newspapers to read. At the end of the day total strangers are sending their shit straight into your brains. Be careful about that. Life is short and then you die. Imagine you’re lying on your death bed and you dying words are: I just wish I had read somebody else! It’s a difficult problem and I don’t have an answer.
Perhaps the simplest first step is to not sign up to long lists of people in one swoop. Look at those profiles, one by one, and be deliberate in your choice.
The next step (even harder) is to consider what you are posting and boosting. Is the world a better place for it? It is very hard. Making the world a better place is hard.
I’m trying to not get derailed, I’m trying to hold that thought … uh … What the hell am I spouting straight into your brain? Sorry! Yikes.
In the last few days I saw a post with a long list of suggested content warnings. I remember being nonplussed when I got here about some of the things. Violence, politics I didn’t care about, sure, I got it. But food or eye contact? I didn’t understand, I knew so little.
I use content warnings as a courtesy, but for myself, I use the setting “always expand posts with content warnings”. This turns content warnings into subject headers that help me decide whether to skip or read, and since they’re expanded, I can read without having to aim for that eye to poke. But that’s also because I find text easy to skip. Images … not so much.
Which is why use the setting “always hide media” and disable “show colourful gradients for hidden media”.
I’m a bit sad that this results in a big white rectangle saying “media hidden”. I’d love for that whitespace to be much smaller. Oh well, it’s not so bad. At least it now acts as a huge button that I can click to load the image, if I want them.
What I’d like even more, though, would be for the stupid placeholder to contain the alt text for me to read! Right now I have to click the “media hidden” rectangle to load the images, and then hover the mouse pointer to read the alt text. How annoying. Also makes it hard to select and copy the alt text.
On Mastodon, you can have identity verification tied to other websites. If you trust that they guy you want owns alexschroeder.ch, then you can visit my profile and see that the Contact link is marked as verified: it’s a two way link.
This of course only moves the post: people can “impersonate” as alexschroeder.net, alexschroeder.org, alex-schroeder.ch, and so on. Simple phishing attacks are still possible!
The approach works is cool for well-known domains. If you work for an organisation which has a profile page for you and you can set a link to your Mastodon profile with the correct attribute (slightly tricky), you can similarly get “verified” as being the person on that organisation’s profile page of yours by two way linking.
The beauty is that this organisation doesn’t have to run a Mastodon instance in order to do that. It’s just links that get checked.
There are currently no Mastodon groups built in, but there are a few ways to get groups going. The simplest one is a bot that boosts every message where you mention it. The famous ones I know are @rf for Russian speakers and @hob for bread baking and other oven related activities. These work across the entire fediverse with the only drawback being that you will see your own message boosted. Some of these bots are smarter than others, not boosting replies, for example.
Another drawback is that you need to host your own bot. If you want to give it a try, here’s a repository: Fedi Groups.
The next level up are ad-hoc groups as created by a.gup.pe. If you mention an account on there, it immediately creates it and boosts your message.
These boosts use special features of the ActivityPub protocol so that other servers know not to show you your own messages. So, two benefits over self-hosted bots: no hosting required, no seeing of your own messages, again. One drawback is that there is absolutely no moderation possible. These groups are all ephemeral bots without real owners. That said, the one I like the best is called @plants.
Anyway, more info here: Guppe.
Finally, we could think of more complex solutions. Both groups.qoto.org and federa.site were such efforts by they give me a 404 error. These promised to allow the creation and moderation of groups.
@stevegenoud tells me that they could not get any traction with federa. The code is still here: federa.
One final point: why not hashtags? Hashtags like “mosstodon” for moss and “florespondence” for flowers are super popular. Often they are great!
The problem is that federation only delivers messages to people you mention and to people following you. That is, if A and B are not following each other, and they are on different instances, A can post a message using the hashtag “tea” and B won’t necessarily see it. Somebody else on B’s instance must be following A for the tea message to show up in B’s instance. Once it’s there, search will find it and the tagged post will show up for B.
Usually this is great. You don’t want all instances to have copies of all the other instances. But sometimes, and specially when you’re on a smaller instance, or a one person instance (!) this is important to remember.
Actually, it’s a simplification: @pmj tells me that once at least one person on a server follows somebody on another server, more than just those person’s posts can get fetched. I always thought this required a relay, but perhaps this is a feature to facilitate discovery. If you know more about this, let me know.
@tamitha posted the following:
A reply is cool. If you want to interact with people, this is important. Write something and avoid the temptation to just mark something as a favourite.
I recommend clicking on a toot you’re going to reply to and checking the existing answers. You don’t want to repeat something other people have already said.
If you want to make extra sure, click on the timestamp of a toot and you’ll visit it on the author’s instance (instead of the copy on your own instance) and that can show you even more replies, otherwise you’ll only get the copies of replies that ended up on your instance – important for smaller instances.
When replying, I try to avoid making a joke based on what the other person wrote unless I know the other person will appreciate it. Just like in real life, if I try to have an interesting conversation and you’re a joker, I’ll probably go and find something to read instead.
In short, shitpost in shitpost threads, but don’t reply with shitposts to regular posts.
When replying, assume that there is nuance and depth to the original post, even if you can’t see it. If you’re wrong, no harm done. If instead you assume the other person is a fool, your reply is probably a waste of energy if you are right, and if you’re wrong, you’ve made the world a worse place: you are the reply guy we have warned about all this time.
Don’t be insulting, condescending, eviscerating, demeaning and all that. Even if you’re on my side of an issue, I prefer not to see it.
#Social Media #Twitter #Mastodon
(Please contact me if you want to remove your comment.)
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I just left Twitter, after 11 years, because Elon Musk is a bloody idiot. I came here looking for the post I *knew* you had to have written about new digital destinations 🙂
– Enzo 2022-11-10 14:16 UTC
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You know me too well… 😀
– Alex 2022-11-10 14:58 UTC
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I think an interesting local timeline makes sense when you’re new. That’s why you might consider joining tabletop.social or dice.camp; or rollenspiel.social.
Once you are following a lot of people, however, there’s no need. Just visit this thread and you’ll get a lot of the dice.camp people, for example: https://dice.camp/@epidiah/109308874786391046
https://dice.camp/@epidiah/109308874786391046
Another alternative is to visit the admin's list of followers and soon enough the question will be: how many people can you reasonably follow? 😆
– Alex 2022-11-10 15:41 UTC
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@SymbolicCity recently suggested some hashtags:
I love how that gets rid of abbreviations like TTRPG. So much better!
– Alex 2022-11-14 13:08 UTC
