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A short note regarding Mastodon. I know everyone and their cousin has already weighed in with their opinion on the recent matters of Mastodon and Twitter and all this Musquerade, so why not add my own perspective to the pile?
I've been a Twitter user for a year or two I think, several years ago. Then I got fed up and removed it. Of course, I've been interested in Mastodon, so I registered an account this March just so I had one, wanted to look what it's like.
Now recently with this huge influx of new users, I wanted to take another peek and try and figure out whether Mastodon is something I'd like to be doing frequently.
I guess I should conclude that it's not, but bear with me, it's not because I think that Mastodon is bad.
I just think that Mastodon isn't for everyone, or rather, microblogging in general isn't for everyone.
You know, Twitter undoubtedly has a lot of problems, and different people see different problems with it too, but we could generalize them, perhaps, into two broad categories:
Obviously, Mastodon could, by design, solve the (abundant) problems of the first category, and could only scratch the surface of the second category at best, because - obviously - Mastodon is a microblogging service, thus susceptible to the inherent shortcomings of this particular form of communication.
My own Mastodon account (which some of the tildezens/geminauts might've probably accidentally seen) is nothing serious. Actually, I've purposefully filled is with the silly and absurd things that my mind generates on industrial levels.
This is because it isn't my goal to attract followers or write massively favorited post, I just wanted to learn what Mastodon _feels_ like, regardless of what I write.
Turns out, the feel isn't much different from Twitter. Different, and better, of course, but not much.
I applaud the Fediverse for being what it is - a FOSS alternatives to the gigantic corporate wall gardens. This can only be good.
But Mastodon is just... Too much? Too fast? And it's only going to get bigger and faster as it gets more popular. And it's not Mastodon's problem, it's a problem of the microblogging medium as such, and nothing can be done about it.
There's a lot of people who want to have a say, and it ends up in your feeds (way better organized than in Twitter), and this implies a kind of reaction system (a way better one than in Twitter), and this system influences what and how you write (though much less than in Twitter), and whatever you write gets lost in history without making any considerable impact.
However better Mastodon is compared to Twitter, I just can't feel at home, and I assume I can't be the only one. Maybe some people just can't (or don't want to) wrap their heads around a constant stream of posts. Maybe for some it would become too much of a distraction (or - a temptation to check it out one more time, and one more again, and again). And maybe some, in the end, just don't see the point behind it all.
Whenever I think of writing something serious in (any) microblogging service, I can't help but wonder - why? For what purpose, what difference will it make? A small bite of unoriginal (because almost nothing is original anymore anyway) thought that will pass through the filters in the brains of people who can see my feed, only to be replaced by something new after a minute.
There is immediacy, there is urge to write, there is (be brave enough to admit it, okay?) urge to see feedback, and there's not much actual value. And whatever value there _is_, wouldn't it be even more valuable if it was delivered via another, more suitable medium?
Ok, I'm basically just grumbling at this point.
I guess I just want to say - to everyone - that there may be this prevalent feeling that you have to be on Mastodon because well that's the buzzword of today. But do you really have to? It's FOSS, but it's still social media. So it has all the benefits of FOSS, but also the problems inherent to social media. If you feel like it's not for you, just listen to this feeling and feel free to stay aside.
But if you still feel that you want to participate in a microblogging community, by all means make sure you pick Fediverse/Mastodon over Twitter.
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Keith Aprilnight (aprilnightk@tilde.team)