What are your thoughts on Mastodon? 🐘🤔

Kevin

Code Monkey 🐒
I'm curious to see what your thoughts are on Mastodon. I'm not going to explain in what reference "Mastodon" applies because the responses to the vagueness of the topic will actually give me insight on our community members. :)
 
Not quite my cup of tea.

I don't find a whole lot of heavy metal that I enjoy but I respect people who do... I think I just haven't found my niche yet in the genre.
 
Anything that encourages or allows far-anything is anathema to me.

Von Clausewitz said in "On War" in the 1870s that "Truth is the first casualty of war." IMO he was right on the money ...

Much of today's news/opinion etc is based on provably false premises, and/or "facts". Ditto, some areas of science.

Do we, as a planet, really need yet another platform dedicated to the spread of horse hockey, as Colonel Potter would say?
 
Don't for a second entertain the idea of getting one as a pet. You would never be able to eat a meal without finding gobs of hair in your food. You would need contractor trash sacks to clean up the poops in the park when you take it for a walk. If you leave it alone for a night in your house it will destroy your walls and doors with it's tusks due to separation anxiety.
 
✅ Mammut spp. are cool by me, not that I've much familiarity with the genus.
✅ Regardless of how one feels about it, social media's clearly going to be a thing. As has already been pointed out, the corporate walled garden version of it has some substantial limitations. Those limitations pushing people towards an open source, non-monolithic, no so profit driven alternative with a stronger history of trying to curb toxic content may or may not turn into a meaningful experiment. If it does, I hope it goes better than previous ones.
❔ Haven't listened to much of their stuff. I should probably check out Emperor of Sand or Hushed and Grim sometime, though some of their earlier work has slightly more favorable reviews on Encyclopaeda Metallum.
 
Okay, I figured it out. Hahah. I have been so far away from Twitter that is never heard about it, I purged myself from Twitter a number of years ago. Interestingly, it wasn't far-right but far-left people who clogged my feeds with vitriol, it was the rise of cancel culture and virtue signaling at the time and Twitter was awash with it. Maybe it still is. Haven't checked for years and years.

I'm not sure how this makes anything better. I know Mastodon is eager to ride out whatever press they can get in the wake of Musk's purchase, but I never saw how that transaction was going to make Twitter any more OR less of a hellhole. It's the day to day behaviors of Twitter members that drove me off the platform, not some theorized tolerance or intolerance of particular figures or messages. I doubt a new platform is going to breed decency in discourse, and that's what I'm looking for in the internet. I know it's a tall order. One may even say that's not what the internet is for, primarily. But I don't care, I want to use the web for what I want it for and I want it to be easy to avoid what I don't want. I want to live most of my life pretty far away from cyberspace, anyway. It's hard to do, but it's my goal.
 
Mastodon is exciting technology but the kind of people who are adopting it the eagerest are the sort I may not want to mingle with, so I've left it unstudied.

Distributed social media is not a new invention. 20-30 years ago there were blogrings and link rings and more people (proportionally) could have hosted their own HTTP server to serve their blogs.
 
I think NZ has the third largest uptake as people leave the birbsite. I believe the Irish & Welsh instances are going gang-busters too.

I think for small groups looking for a sense of community, ad-free, without trolls or hate-mongers or the surveillance capitalism, its pretty sweet!
I had an account on SDF for a few years but only used it periodically. Joined a small NZ instance in April and really enjoyed the mellow, friendly & low-key vibe. Very similar to a local BBS in the early dial-up era.

It'll be interesting to see if existing community norms persist and if any of the big Tech outfits run up their own instances, fork the code, attract a user-base and then break inter-op and lock in their audience while simultaneously killing off the smaller local instances. Fingers x-ed that doesn't happen.
 
Just joined the Aus instance/server, 3 days ago. Has grown so fast they have stopped people joining. Can join only if invited by a current user. Hopefully a temp measure as they add capacity. Very subdued compared to the bird. By the way it's not a Facebook replacement, MeWe is more for that. As far as usability still trying to get my head around how it all works but so far haven't made a fool of myself!
 
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