Current Events > Mastodon, decentralized social media. Have you used it/Do you use it?

(+) Yeah! (+)

I just finished reading a long form article on Vanity Fair about Tim Berners-Lee (often credited for making the first web browser and open sourcing the internet) and it made me admittedly a bit nostalgic.

Tim and Vint made the system so that there could be many players that didnt have an advantage over each other. Berners-Lee, too, remembers the quixotism of the era. The spirit there was very decentralized. The individual was incredibly empowered. It was all based on there being no central authority that you had to go to to ask permission, he said. That feeling of individual control, that empowerment, is something weve lost.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/07/the-man-who-created-the-world-wide-web-has-some-regrets

It's a great article that goes over his work on Solid, a decentralized platform for the internet. If you have the time I'd recommend reading it.

Anyways, the article mentions Mastodon instances, bringing up something I had passed over many times without giving it much thought. So I'm curious if any of you have participated in a Mastodon instance or if you have used it regularly? Are there drawbacks to Mastodon as a social media platform apart from having a lower adoption rate than say, Facebook or Twitter? From what I'm finding it seems better for people that have a niche interest (Musicians, Developers, Etc) and want a social media platform that revolves around that in regard to instances. Thoughts?
---

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCjobAeMBos" data-time="
---

Burgess posted...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCjobAeMBos" data-time="

Beautiful.
---

I've heard some cool stuff about it but also some not as cool stuff

I don't see myself ever really making much use of it honestly unless discord suddenly gets extremely bad all of a sudden (which is entirely possible)
---

kirbymuncher posted...

I've heard some cool stuff about it but also some not as cool stuff

I don't see myself ever really making much use of it honestly unless discord suddenly gets extremely bad all of a sudden (which is entirely possible)

Thanks for the input. I'm going to mess around with it for a week and see if I tire of it.

The discord team definitely assembled a great app that I use frequently, but it's not so great in how they treat their users.
---

Pteradactl

whoa is this gonna be like OG twitter
---

wowowowow follow me on mastodon

https://mastodon.social/@easycore
---

Crack the Skye is a masterpiece.
---

dam i can make my own twooter with mastodon
---

BreezyExcursion posted...

dam i can make my own twooter with mastodon

Yeah, it's kind of interesting how they built it to basically connect to other instances pretty much seamlessly. I've encountered a bunch of stuff from other instances already. Mostly anime avatars though.

https://mastodon.social/@komb
---

TendoDRM posted...

Crack the Skye is a masterpiece.

From what i read the dev named it after the band

it was out of frustration about changes twitter made, so it's supposed to emulate twitter but keep the chronological timeline.
---

i got my friend to make an account and they joined some instance called counter.social, tooted "hi" and immediately got like 5 messages of "welcome to the community"
---

risky click



these federation timelines can be disturbing

maybe other instances are small enough to get a community vibe to them and notice when new people join
---

yeah it seems it might be worth digging around for a good one to join.
---

wow i got my second follow

on my way to twooter fame
---

can someone please explain this meme

https://mastodon.social/@CLeituga/100753506368054874
---

this looks interesting, tag for when i get home
---

nearing the end of day 2 of the mastodon experiment.

gained 2 more followers, though i'm not tooting a whole lot. to be fair i've never been that great at personal social media.

i've noticed a lot of anarchists a few socialists, mostly left wing types and people that are here for their respective causes. the platform does kind of line up with people critical of centralized power that might be looking to communicate that in how they engage with social media.

also noticed a lot of developers on here, actually i would say there might be more devs using this than anything else.

anime avatars and obscure anime references seem to be a dime a dozen.

what i haven't seen is a lot of hate speech. i'm pretty sure the largest instance is managed in a way to bar hate speech and blatant racism as instance owners make their own respective rules for their instance of mastodon. that doesn't bother me in the least. that said every instance has its own set of rules much like an individual discord server would, if you ignore discord's global rule set.
---

it's interesting in contrast to some other alternative social media sites.

like i always thought gab.ai was a great idea but it really just became a congregation of pepe avatars who were banned from twitter so it wasn't actually ever a useful platform for me.
---

Yeah after reading the wiki about grab.ai it sounds like an echo chamber of alt righters. I'm looking at the logo and starting to wonder if it was always like that maybe?

There's also another FOSS software being developed called Riot to compete with discord, built on matrix-react-sdk iirc. You basically can host it yourself or use it at riot.im but it's pretty much not nearly as good as discord yet. I am just keeping an eye on it to see how it progresses.

Are there any other social media ideas that popped up recently that have got some adoption? I can't even recall anything outside of this and maybe another site way back in 2014, which I forget the name of. I had no idea grab.ai was even a thing.
---

this is the future of social media


---

shit posting may be the best approach. picked up 4 more followers. Im going to pepper in more serious updates though.

From what Ive read the biggest problem right now is not losing followers when switching between instances but I guess theyre working on automating the process without making it too intensive on resources.
---