Since Elon Musk’s (forced) acquisition of Twitter, people have been looking around for alternatives. The site hasn’t really changed yet–moderation activity remains the same, for example–but obviously there are changes coming. I don’t think we’re likely to see an experience much different from ~2018 Twitter, but regardless, it’s just sensible to wonder what else is out there. The new place to hang out that everybody seems to be converging on is called Mastodon. It’s definitely the most Twittery of the ‘alt’ social networks, but a lot of people are having trouble getting started there, so I thought I’d write up a little primer. (I last wrote about Mastodon following Trump’s Twitter ban.)
So, what is Mastodon, and how do you join and use it? For the first question, let’s just say that it’s a Twitter clone. You post character-limited ‘toots’, you can ‘boost’ them into your own timeline, favorite them, reply to them, and so on. You follow people; you read their posts in a reverse-chronological feed. If this is all you’re interested in, well, good news! You don’t have to worry about any of the confusing parts of Mastodon, at all. Feel free to scroll down to “how to sign up”.
But it’s the confusing bits that make Mastodon especially interesting to me. Said confusion comes from the fundamental difference between Mastodon and Twitter: Mastodon is a federated social network made up of thousands of separate, interoperable instances. Basically, anybody can create an instance, and then they all talk to each other, creating several layers of user experience. Imagine Reddit, with its thousands of Subreddits, each with its own rules and moderators–except there is no central organization tying them all together. The instances all voluntarily communicate to create a network-of-networks known as the Fediverse. By default, you can follow and interact with anybody on any instance. (If any of this seems confusing, it’s because it was created by Software People… bear with me.)
You can have as many accounts as you want on different instances, but for simplicity’s sake let’s say you have one. You will have access to three feeds: home, local, and federated. Your home feed is like the Twitter chronological feed: you see toots by people you follow, and toots they boost. The local feed is toots by everybody on your instance (and toots they boost). The federated feed is annoying to describe, but you could do worse than quoting the official user guide: “The Federated Timeline shows all public posts from all users ‘known’ to your instance. This means the user is either on the same instance as you, or somebody on your instance follows that user.” The converse is of course also true: if somebody on another instance follows you, all your toots will show up in the federated timeline for all of that instance’s users.
Maybe an example will help. Imagine that there is a Balloon-Juice instance and a Breitbart instance. By default these would all be part of the Fediverse, their toots visible on federated timelines, and so on. Your home feed would be people you follow. Your local feed would be all Balloon-Juice users. Your federated feed would be your home feed, plus toots by anybody followed by any Balloon-Juice user (including you). So if somebody here follows somebody at Breitbart, maybe to keep tabs on them, they’d show up in the federated feed for every Balloon-Juice user. Now imagine that we decide we don’t want anything to do with the Breitbart instance. We could remove them from all Balloon-Juice users’ federated feeds and/or block their users from reading any of ours. Since Mastodon is a protocol, not a platform per se, the owner of an instance has a huge amount of power to tailor the user experience.
(For example, you could block all Iranians and Russians from signing up, as counter.social, one of the biggest Mastodon instances, did. In retaliation they found themselves mostly removed from the Fediverse. Another contentious Mastodon instance you may have heard of is Gab, which is largely unmoderated and therefore where the Nazis hang out. Your credentials from Gab won’t get you very far elsewhere.)
If you’ve made it this far, you might be curious how to sign up.
The first step is to pick a home instance. (Don’t spend too long worrying about picking the wrong one–you can always move your account.) Unless you’re interested in a specific topic, for instance writing or the Bay Area, I’d probably recommend mastodon.online for now. A lot of instances have had to go invite-only due to heavy signups this last week, but that one is still open, and remember, there’s little worry about picking wrong–your account will let you interact with most instances and users regardless. You should Google around for one that works for you.
Once you’ve created an account, it’s customary to post a personal #introduction. From there, I’d recommend searching for hashtags that interest you and big accounts you know from Twitter, a lot of whom have opened Mastodon accounts in the last week, or have been there for a while. Explore your local feed and the federated feed. Make friends, post things. It’s kind of like early Twitter, where finding people to follow was super annoying. It’s also kind of like early Twitter in that the servers don’t always cope with a heavy load… but it could be worse.
You can find me at @[email protected] (an instance that has unfortunately had to go invite-only).
Open thread, also too.
Baud
Oh, I was hoping you’d weigh in. Now to read your post.
Baud
Balloon Juice should have its own instance!
NotMax
IIRC Mastodon operates strictly chronologically, so no threaded commentary. Yay for that (if so).
Baud
I wonder if some company will create a massive instance that becomes dominant.
Major Major Major Major
@NotMax: no there are replies.
Librarian
What you’re calling “instances” Mastodon calls “servers.”
Yutsano
I have been warned off Mastodon. Apparently they have a huge malware/Trojan problem with no central “authority” to fix that. So yeah, unfortunately not taking that plunge.
RaflW
@Baud: That would be great. And, I’m thinking it’s a lot of work?
I ended up signing up with the c.im instance (a general user one, ‘mostly in English’ they said, with servers in Germany (?)) but after finding it slow yesterday, and pretty normal earlier today, it seems to be down now.
Which, given the very rapid growth of mastodon + non-profit/volunteer admins , instability is to be expected I think.
eta: I set up an account more to have a place to go/be if Muskker goes down for stretches around Nov 8th and after. I think Tim Wise has a great thread on why to stay on the ‘hellsite’.
NotMax
FYI.
Twitter alternatives for the Musk-averse.
@Major Major Major Major
I lounge corrected.
Expletive Deleted
I joined during the previous mass exodus and while I know I’m not using to its fullest capabilities, it is still enjoyable just by following folks and not overthinking it.
Another Scott
The gurus who set it up seem to have learned a few things from USENET and all the stuff before.
Why can’t I quote someone’s toot, like a quote-tweet?:
Sounds like a good solution.
I’ve got an account on Counter.Social and am on a waitlist for mstdn.social I’m not thinking that I’ll be doing anything with either of them any time soon, but just in case…
Cheers,
Scott.
PaulWartenberg
I went to CounterSocial. Mastodon is not user-friendly.
Starfish
@NotMax: There are replies, but the replies are not elevated, so you won’t see the same thread over and over because someone replied to it. You can seek it out and read the replies if you want to, but you won’t be bothered by a week’s worth of racists replying to your comment to David Simon.
Starfish
@Librarian: No. Mastodon calls them instances. The servers that served several instances, including the one I am on, went down for a little while today.
Ken
“It’s really quite simple and intuitive. Of course you have to use it for a year or two first.” — Terry Pratchett, in one of the Discworld books.
(I think I posted this about a week ago, but it is perennially relevant to any talk of user interfaces.)
Starfish
@PaulWartenberg: Counter.social is particularly cluttered.
I have three different Mastodon accounts, and the recent one seems to be the most promising because so many people are migrating together this time.
Instances.social can help people choose an instance. A lot of the instances are bogged down right now because so many people created accounts.
Instances are running their own flavors of mastodon, so some are using the one put out by the group who created mastodon. Some are running other versions.
For example, the instance I am on has the ability to set a theme with a light mode. Some of the other ones don’t have that ability.
lowtechcyclist
I’m on the Mathstodon instance. There was theoretically a wait list, but I got an email within minutes inviting me to join.
On Mastodon, they apparently refer to Twitter as the ‘birdsite.’ So now I’ve got “make a little birdsite in your soul” going through my head. Much more pleasant and flattering than anything associated with Elon Musk ought to be, but it’s hard to get rid of an earworm.
MazeDancer
@RaflW: Started with them, yesterday. Switched, I hope, it was a little confusing, today, to “online”.
brendancalling
Over the past couple of years I’ve become indifferent to, and frankly quite hostile toward, most social media. I still have a FB account, but I only use it to post gigs. I got booted from Twitter and decided against appealing—it took forever to get reinstated when they booted me off erroneously, and after the second time I realized all Twitter does is make me angry. I’m angry enough as it is, I don’t need more anger. So while Mastodon sounds interesting, I’m going to pass.
Major Major Major Major
@PaulWartenberg: counter social is mastodon!
zhena gogolia
God, “toot” is worse than “tweet.”
All I can think of is “Beans, beans, musical fruit . . .”
Major Major Major Major
@zhena gogolia: yeah I feel like an idiot whenever I type it.
raven
@zhena gogolia: I think of Bolivian marching powder.
zhena gogolia
@raven: That too!
TheOtherHank
Another reason to have an exit plan is that Elon fired a large fraction of the people that keep the lights on. In the nerd world (speaking as a nerd) there are multiple groups of somewhat overlapping computer types who do things (this is an incomplete list and very hand-wavy):
Elon fired a large fraction of the SREs. So when an incident occurs, the people with the expertise to diagnose and solve the problem are going to be very thin on the ground.
It might not matter if moderation/verification/Nazis/etc are a problem if twitter is offline more often than not.
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
On the Twitter alternative I’m creating, they’re called “tuts.”
So when someone says something stupid, people can reply “tut, tut, tut.”
Starfish
@TheOtherHank: Their entire accessibility team
Redshift
On my first attempt to try it out, I found Mastodon really difficult to understand, and there’s too much you have to learn to “do it right.” However, after a bit, I figured out that it’s a lot simpler if I want to use it like I use Twitter, only reading people I follow and not caring about all the content that’s “out there.” You can follow people who aren’t on the same instance as you, and if you’re just reading people you follow, the whole federation concept is not something you really need to think about.
Starfish
@zhena gogolia: counter.social does call them “posts” and not “toots”
I am just bothered so much by the things that look like tickers on it.
Splitting Image
@zhena gogolia:
A tutor who tooted a flute
Once tutored two tooters to toot.
Said the two to the tutor,
“Is it harder to toot,
Or to tutor two tooters to toot?”
– from a 1950s-era Archie comic that my dad bought when he was a kid.
Suzanne
If anyone wants to follow me, I’m @[email protected]
I used Twitter maybe once a year, but I do like to share photos.
zhena gogolia
@Baud: Or they could be “tsks.”
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
Like.
lowtechcyclist
@TheOtherHank:
Apparently Elon realized he needs a bunch of the people he fired to come back to finish implenting some of the new changes they were working on before the transfer of ownership (which Elon is acting like are *his* swell new ideas).
I hope they realize they have him over a barrel, and demand exorbitant compensation for very short-term contracts. (“Sure I’ll come back, Elon. How does $12K per week sound to you?”) Shake that mofo down, but good.
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
And the guy in charge could be King Tut.
MattF
I looked for a server for users interested in science— there doesn’t seem to be one. I’m guessing that ‘servers’ don’t really line up with ‘interests’. Not much structure?
Baud
@lowtechcyclist:
Oh, that’s nice.
MomSense
When the election is over I think I’m just going to stop using Twitter and hang out here with all of you. I can only take so much doom scrolling.
Starfish
@lowtechcyclist: They really can’t because they are still on payroll. If they refuse to come back, he can fire them for cause.
Baud
@MomSense:
Twitter’s loss is our gain!
JPL
@Suzanne: Cool now I’m following three people. I found Molly Jong-fest and Joyce Vance already. You’re among good company.
Phoenix_Rising
I’ve been on Usenet, blogger, DailyKos, this blog, Facebook & Twitter.
Facebook reduced the friction required to post your stupid opinions below the sweet spot for a low ratio of stupid to less-stupid comments. Mastadon appears to be above that sweet spot by a little more than WP or blogspot. I’m not clear it will last.
I’m attenuating my use of Twitter after Tuesday, will have time to come back here, and I can’t wait to see what options emerge.
Redshift
@MattF:
One of these might suit you:
Ugh, Twitter’s “embed tweet” seems to have lost the names of those servers and substituted links. They are:
🔹http://mstdn.science
🔹http://fediscience.org
🔹http://scicomm.xyz
🔹http://scholar.social
Starfish
@MattF: There are several. Let me figure this out for you.
fediscience.org is one.
mstdn.science is another.
JPL
@MomSense: Yesterday was deactivation day for me. Even though twitter stalled implementing their new blue check system, just the idea of no one moderating the platform was enough to convince me to leave.
Phoenix_Rising
@MomSense: Same–I’ve had to use social media to work in politics since early 2019, and I get to take a break from Twitter! Once the last GOTV is pushed, pulled and dragged on Tuesday! I can’t wait. (Also it’s possible I will finally finish my frigging graduate degree.)
Martin
@MattF: Like usenet it’s a bit of a mixed bag of interest structure, geographic structure, etc.
You might want to check out fediscience.org, scholar.social, and scicomm.xyz.
Understand there will probably be a meaningful distinction between ‘interest in science’ and ‘for scientists’, much as there’s a distinction between ‘I like planes’ and ‘I want to discuss contract policy for pilots’.
Suzanne
@JPL: I haven’t deactivated my Twitter yet, but I will probably just not look at it for months. Certainly not going to pay $8.
Whereaway
@Another Scott: I’d be interested on your thoughts on counter.social. I’ve had it bookmarked for months but haven’t signed up.
But then again, I never created a twitter account, haven’t signed into Facebook in a year or so (and am starting to delete the account).
I’m not a huge fan of social media …
glc
Very interesting post.
I did not get a confirmation email from mastodon.online.
Two tries – the second with a “Keep” email filter in place at my end.
Either gmail is treating the whole thing as spam pre-delivery (which they’ve been known to do) or the server is doing something odd. I am getting the confirmation *screen* that the email has been sent. It may wander in later on perhaps.
I think of myself as “not on social media” but I’m here, occasionally on Discord, and some other places as well, and the structure of mastodon looks promising so I’d be interested to make its acquaintance, particularly if some accounts that I’ve been interested in turn up over there.
Fortunately (from my perspective) my computer as configured has never been willing to connect to Facebook or Instagram, even on the rare occasions that I”ve wanted it to.
Layer8Problem
@Starfish: That’ll learn ’em. “Yeah, how’s the layoff going. Uumm, I’m gonna need you to come in tomorrow to work on the CanNeverFailOrWeDie system, that would be great.”
“F–k you.”
“Well then you’re fired.”
“Ok, cool, g’bye!”
“Waaiittt a min- (dial tone)”
Baud
@glc:
We’re more anti-social media.
Gary K
@Librarian: Actually Mastodon does call them instances. An instance is hosted on a server.
Starfish
@Layer8Problem: It’s extremely messed up. Both the groups that were laid off AND the groups that were not laid off were upset by what happened. I think NYT said the people working at twitter were sharing this.
trollhattan
@Baud: The rare medium that’s well done.
SpaceUnit
We need our own messaging app. Ballooner. In time it could become an almost top 10,000 social media platform.
Major Major Major Major
@MattF: I believe the ‘official’ server list only includes things that have 1) asked to be listed and 2) signed onto a particular moderation framework. So you might have to do some googling.
Another Scott
@Whereaway: I’m in the same boat. Never had a FB or Twitter account. I had a Google+ account for a while, but never posted anything there.
Counter.Social, as said above, seems to be Mastodon. The guy that runs it seems to be Ok now but has some bad history (as SGB pointed out). He seems to have decent technical chops, but I don’t know how he plans to keep ahead of the DDoS attacks, etc.
I’ve just logged in for the 2nd time. The interface is sparse – black background, 6 columns of small text, a MSNBC ticker in a line across the top. The second column, “Community Firehose”, is the most active for me, so it’s not a slot machine of activity and flashing gizmos.
I have no clue what the “community” is like or how it compares. I have only skimmed some of the FAQs on it and Mastodon. Not having used Twitter, the terms are a bit like a foreign language. I haven’t wanted to spend the time to figure out how to use it, how to find people worth reading, how to mute/block/ignore/send – to – the – bottom – of – a – volcano people that annoy or enrage me. ;-) Figuring out how to do that strikes me as being important before I actually write anything. (I still remember some guy on G+ getting thermonuclearly angry at me for some reply I made to his comment – understanding the culture is important!)
My $0.02, FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
Major Major Major Major
@glc: masto servers are under very heavy load right now so the emails are probably delayed.
Starfish
Ooh. I just found climatejustice.social
Yutsano
…
I’m going back to ICQ.
Gary K
@lowtechcyclist: I likewise joined Mathstodon. Thus far it has a far different vibe than the bird site: I already have more followers than after 6 months on the BS, and I’ve posted as much in a couple of days as in 6 months. It feels cozy to be surrounded by other nerds, and with only a few thousand members in the instance, the rate at which posts accumulate feels leisurely. I’m @[email protected], if you care to make contact.
Martin
@Starfish: That’s the one I’m looking at as well.
Kirk Spencer
The thing that makes me hesitate about counter.social is one of its touted strengths. By default certain nations are blocked due to being troll and bot factories.
So what about the protestors from there? I mean, we’ve got a lot of things about the current Iranian insurgency that came out via social media – and this would block them too. The pre-emptive nature makes it easy for the moderators of the site but I feel that this is yet another demonstration of Mencken’s rule: [T]here is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong. [1]
[1] Lots of variations of this quote exist, but at least this one I can cite: 1920, Prejudices: Second Series by H. L. Mencken (Henry Louis Mencken), Chapter 4: The Divine Afflatus, Start Page 155, Borzoi: Alfred A. Knopf, New York.
Layer8Problem
@glc:
, @Major Major Major Major:
I just set up an account on mastodon.social about a half-hour ago and have been checking my (non-Gmail) email. Nothing so far, so I’m guessing either they’re very laid-back responding or they’re slagged with Twitter refugees far outpacing the great Freenode to Libera Chat IRC exodus of last year. There were dozens of us!
Raven
@Layer8Problem: me too
Martin
I’ll be honest if there was a BJ instance, that’d be a no-brainer to sign up under. But I don’t like to make suggestions that just make work for others. One thing that I worry about with Mastodon is how various instances are funded. I’ve been on the construction side of a shit-ton of user beneficial services and the tech was *always* the easy part. The funding was *always* the hard part, and often prevented them from existing at all. BJ now at least has a stable funding mechanism.
A Man for All Seaonings (formerly Geeno)
@SpaceUnit:
We can have green balloons instead of blue checks. Mybe the cute name for posts could be “pops”
Starfish
@Kirk Spencer: I joined counter.social to keep tabs.
My name is very Iranian, and it is going to take a while to rebuild all the Iranian journalists, all the Iranian policy specialists, etc. Someone else who is also Iranian on the instance I am on (that is not counter.social) followed me (probably because my name is Iranian), so I took that as a positive sign.
Alison Rose
I haven’t used Twitter in over four years, so I don’t really care about finding an alternative. But even if I did, I could not possibly bring myself to use a site where I’m posting “toots”.
Just no.
Baud
@Alison Rose:
How about tits?
Another Scott
@Kirk Spencer: Yeah, he has a FAQ about that. Maybe he lets users in those countries in via VPNs or something, but he doesn’t explicitly say so.
Dunno.
Cheers,
Scott.
Starfish
@Layer8Problem: They have been growing faster than Twitter this weekend. The instance I am on had maybe 100 users a couple of days ago. It has 800 users now. The person who set up the instance set up a Patreon to fund server costs. Then he brought on three other people to help moderate.
Suzanne
@Martin: Agreed, I’d love to sign up under a Balloon Juice “instance”. I don’t know how much work it is to create one, though.
SpaceUnit
@A Man for All Seaonings (formerly Geeno):
Awesome. John Cole could be the next
MuskZuckerbergThielGru. Which I guess would make us his minions.Another Scott
Cheers,
Scott.
MomSense
@Baud:
😘
@Phoenix_Rising:
Go get it!! Grab that degree with both hands!
Spanky
@Baud: Tats. Or tatters.
J R in WV
@Major Major Major Major:
Hey Major~Major!
Are you still in Manhattan, or have you relocated to Denver CO? We have visited Denver some, have friends in Pueblo. preparing to relocate to Kansas where their daughter lives, Olathe, I think.
I think I would way prefer Colorado to Kansas, but with an offspring to live near, maybe that would make the difference. Anyway, take care, wherever you are today!
Ken
I assume they’ll also have the equivalent of whatever the hell was going on in usenet’s talk.aviation.politics.area51.abortion.
ETtheLibrarian
Anyone know anything about Tribel?
Another Scott
(via nycsouthpaw)
Cheers,
Scott.
nonrev321
I just joined Mastodon 2 days ago for a spot to land if twitter goes off the deep end.
But after reading this I don’t think I’ll pursue Mastodon. What really put me off is the users ability to so completely customize/tailor their experience. This ability to create a bubble is something we suffer from now. It just leads to further isolation and some level of dependence.
Maybe tolerating whatever $h!tHouse twitter becomes will be acceptable. Maybe no social media at all is best really. I never thought I’d think this but ….. are we really ready for this as a society?
Another Scott
@Ken: rofl.
Cheers,
Scott.
PaulWartenberg
@Major Major Major Major:
wait what
J R in WV
@Starfish:
Starfish is Iranian? When we were in NYC last, pre-covid, all the Iranians we met told us they were Persian — would that work for you guys?
Was Persia for many centuries prior to Iran, after all… They were all really nice folks, too!
Baud
Elon Musk aside, it is wild to think that people were so dependent on Twitter without a fallback.
Another Scott
@ETtheLibrarian:
Quora.com:
Sounds an awful lot like “volunteer to be the product for our advertisers!!” to me.
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
TaMara
This is like my third “explainer” for mastodon. None (sorry M4) has enticed me even to attempt to sign up. It sounds gawd-awful and both times I’ve clicked over, it looks gawd-awful. Is all black in this year? Three columns of “toots” (W the actual F?) It reminds me of the nineties on the web. That may change, but I’m in no rush to jump onto more social media.
After the election, I’m muting all the political follows (and if you enjoy retweeting a hundred people an hour, you’re getting muted, too). And then I’ll just watch twitter sink like the titanic, full of bots and trolls making racist comments until the end.
That should reduce my social media by 2/3rds by default. FB is for family. I don’t really understand IG – I don’t need to see minute-by-minute photos of strangers’ days, no matter how cute their critters are, and Tik-Toc, while entertaining, isn’t worth wasting my time on. Twitter, at least, gave me links to useful information, even if I had to wade through the slime to get it.
Maybe I’ll actually get some decent writing done – unless the country implodes on Tuesday, then I’m finding a nice cave somewhere and hangout with my fur and feathered gang.
Now get off my lawn….
WaterGirl
@Martin: @Suzanne: And then the blog dies out because so many people are spending their time on the BJ twitter replacement instead of on the blog?
Gravenstone
@Yutsano: i almost remember my ICQ number… almost.
WaterGirl
@Starfish: Fast growth is the most dangerous time for an organization. Lots of things have to scale up quickly and things get out of hand.
Baud
@TaMara:
That’s what we’ll call getting banned on the BJ instance.
WaterGirl
I suspect Musk will tire of the bad publicity, and the bleeding, and he will sell it for a song, maybe back to the original owner?
Major Major Major Major
@Suzanne: setting one up is pretty turnkey but managing it would be work. I’d be willing to try though running a BJ instance, though, if people were truly interested. @watergirl I don’t think hosting costs would be too crazy… tens of dollars a month…
Baud
@Major Major Major Major:
We’d complain a lot. Ask WaterGirl.
different-church-lady
This makes my head hurt…
Suzanne
@WaterGirl: I mean, Twitter already exists and we’re all still here. I think social media and blog comments are inherently paced differently, and most of us appreciate the deeper dives.
But it’s all good. I’m not a big Twitter person anyway, and I don’t anticipate that changing with Mastodon. I use Twitter to follow, not so much to interact.
Major Major Major Major
@J R in WV: we’re moving in January! Probably not into the house we signed a purchase agreement for, though, what with the looming housing crash and the doubled interest rates.
@Baud: WG’s mistake is listening 😏 jkjk
Omnes Omnibus
I am waiting until the carnage abates and some system rises to the top to do anything.
NotMax
@brendancalling
Have never been to Twitter and actively avoid clicking on any link, from anywhere, which leads there.
Have never been to Facebook and actively avoid clicking on any link, from anywhere, which leads there.
Have no intention of sullying that record when it comes to visiting any so-called social media site.
Starfish
@J R in WV: We were an empire and have never forgotten it. 😂
Alison Rose
@Baud: well I am queer
Martin
@ETtheLibrarian: I’ve been looking at tribel as well. Will probably make accounts in both places. Tribel seems very Twitter-like, but also very determined to be Democratic Party Twitter.
My main concern about all of these is their ability to scale and maintain things like moderation. At least with mastodon that too is decentralized so you can at least fund it through a patreon and have some ability to make it sustainable at scale within an instance. Struggling to see how counter.social and tribel pull that off right now. A lot of the onerous things about Twitter were the cost of doing business to get ops/moderation at scale. That’s simply a problem that will shift to others now.
Leto
@different-church-lady:
This is why your head hurts. It wasn’t designed for a normal user experience. If you have to post multiple dissertations on just how to minimally use the product…
Central Planning
@lowtechcyclist: $12k is too low. If they put in 40 hour, that’s $300/hour. We’ve heard Elon wants them to put in 80 hour weeks, so now you’re down to $150. That’s chump change in the bay area.
Martin
@WaterGirl: Well, that’s not a great way to look at it. If people would rather be on mastodon than the blog, then the blog is already at risk. At least this way you guys are maintaining the community rather than someone else.
But mastodon’s protocol would allow it to be more tightly integrated into the blog. Actually implementing that is a different question. But in that way it could potentially help the blog by not having users split their attention quite as much.
Just a thought. I mean, this is the community I want to be with. I suspect that’s true of a lot of us.
pacem appellant
I moved to Mastodon a while ago. Twitter was toxic even before EM came along to kill it as part of his weird billionaire kink. You can find me at @[email protected]
Major Major Major Major
@Central Planning: I’d probably be willing to come back for a 50% raise and hefty no-clawback hiring bonus (if I were in that situation)
Martin
Got one of my predictions wrong.
I had predicted they wouldn’t figure this shit out until sometime mid-morning on Monday. They realized they were fucked a whole day earlier – on Sunday no less.
Also to the recognition they fired some people they hadn’t planned to. My deep insight into the quality of HR software and operations continues to serve me well.
Ivan X
I mean, Elon’s a huge turd, but I also don’t care enough to leave.
Ken
No problem, just things up so that anything posted to the new balloon.juice.nearlytop10000 Mastodon server is also posted to balloon-juice.com, say as a comment on the most recent post. It would be like having John’s twitter feed off to the side, except with more potential for crashing the balloon-juice server with a self-inflicted accidental DOS attack.
Starfish
@Leto: It’s actually gotten better and is nicer than it was before UNLESS you are looking at counter.social as your example. The instance that I am on has theming, so you can put the thing in light mode.
It is hard at first because it is different; but because so many people are coming in, there are a zillion intro tutorials.
pacem appellant
@Alison Rose: On my instance, they aren’t toots, they’re just posts. Eugen, the head developer of Mastodon, posted an apology for “toot” a while back. English is not his native language, and he accepted a big chunk of early developer money by an English speaker with a wicked sense of humor in exchange for the right to come up with an alternate to post or tweet.
He added option to skin an instance with whatever verb you want, with “Post” as the new default (which my instance, blessedly, now uses)
Ivan X
@Martin: I kind of hope they stay fucked or that the laid off people insist on coming back with 30% higher salaries.
pacem appellant
@Martin: How many of them actually come back remains to be seen. My guess is, not as many as EM needs.
Starfish
@Alison Rose: There are a number of LGBTQ instances. There is also sfba.social for a particular region of the country.
Major Major Major Major
@Starfish: I think people forget how much of a pain in the ass twitter was at first.
Martin
@Major Major Major Major: I’ve firmly shifted from any practical considerations around Twitter to seeing it as a needed tale of hubris of putting too much faith in our billionaire betters and the value of treating workers well that I’m now cheering for maximum dysfunction and destruction. I wouldn’t see any particular value in deferring the inevitable job move to Google by buying Twitter an additional week of life.
pacem appellant
@Starfish: If I hadn’t recently moved instances, I might be tempted to move to sfba.social. It’s a lot more active right now with cool peeps.
Starfish
@Major Major Major Major: Yes. I think we are both more pre-disposed to being early adopters, so we are more willing to check things out.
Central Planning
@Major Major Major Major: Sure, but probably not for 80 hours/week.
Major Major Major Major
@Martin: tech interviews are annoying, I’d take a pile of money being dumped in my lap without having to whiteboard. I can always quit.
They wouldn’t offer me 50% plus a bonus though, and two months severance sounds nice.
TaMara
@Major Major Major Major: This might be why I didn’t join until well into the teens – I’d have to double check, but it feels like I didn’t have an account until about 2016. I’m a late adopter, LO
ETA: Yikes, it was actually 2012 – but I think the only interaction I had was my recipes were posting there. I don’t think I started arguing with strangers until much later.
Martin
@Major Major Major Major:
I mean, Musk is already in for $44B. That’s almost $12M sunk cost for every employee he’s laying off. The least he can do is provide affordable housing. I mean, he’s the one with the most to lose here, not the employees.
Starfish
@TaMara: Yes. And that happened because choices Twitter made. Boosting “Likes” as well as “Retweets.” Valuing “engagement.” That all put us in conflict with people who we should have never seen in the first place.
Avoiding those folks is not necessarily creating “a bubble.” It is just having a chat with your friends instead of caring what stupid crap some celebrity said today.
Big Mango
@[email protected]
looking for fellow juicers,,,,
Starfish
There is this great discussion of content moderation by one of the former CEOs of reddit.
Another Scott
@Martin: At the rate things are going with EM, they’ll be vacating their suite on Market Street by the end of the week.
Cheers,
Scott.
Another Scott
@Starfish: Man, he likes to hear himself talk, doesn’t he?
:-/
He may have a good point buried in there, and, yeah, behavior matters – duh, but I bailed about halfway through.
Sorry. Thanks for the pointer.
Cheers,
Scott.
Kristine
@Martin: Idk if you saw this thread on Twitter–warning about Tribel: https://twitter.com/travisakers/status/1584359435765710849
Ryan
Toots are what we used to call farts when I was a kid.
Ryan
@Martin: +$1 B a year in debt service.
Starfish
@Another Scott: If I bailed every time some dude was going on and on, I don’t think I would be able to survive my career as a woman in tech.
Another Scott
@Starfish: Haha.
Touché.
:-)
Cheers,
Scott.
Martin
@Kristine: Yeah, that tracks. Tribels operations don’t seem to track with what’s realistically possible.
I look at stuff like this and it comes at me like a magic trick. I can’t see how you got from A to Z and I’m not going to just shrug and accept it, I’m going to keep staring at it until I can figure it out. And if I can’t, I stay away. Most of the failures in tech are pretty obvious cases of magical business practices/economics that most people just glide through and then are surprised when the whole enterprise falls apart or they get taken advantage of.
Mastodon is the one ‘platform’ that makes sense to me. It still has significant challenge with scaling and moderation, but at least I can see those problems and mechanisms. They aren’t hidden behind an opaque business model. I’m looking at Musk’s so-called ‘plans’ and none of that shit is going to work, so how is is *really* going to work, and how badly will that be harmful to me personally?
That said, counter.social is a mastodon construct and gives me the same ‘avoid it’ feeling. So even in the mastodon space, it’s all about implementation. Not an easy space to navigate.
jnfr
@[email protected] but I’m on Twitter until the bitter end.
surfk9
Martin: Back in the early eighties Time Warner bought Atari. One of the Warners called an employee meeting at Atari and told the software engineers that they were a bunch of fucking towel designers and that they should get over themselves. There was a mass exodus shortly thereafter and a lot of those folks ended up at a startup named Nintendo
Tony G
@Martin: “After Twitter Inc laid off roughly half its staff on Friday following Elon Musk’s $44 billion acquisition, the company is now reaching out to dozens of employees who lost their jobs and asking them to return, Bloomberg News reported on Sunday.” Unbelievable. This is like a slapstick parody of bad management, in a timeline of days rather than years. When I worked as a “contractor” at an IBM software support center in upstate New York, something like that had happened, but at a more leisurely pace. IBM had given the boot to a number of experienced software people “to cut down on costs” — but then after about a year it occurred to management that they needed these people, and asked them to come back (at less pay and no benefits). Some did come back, because employment opportunities were scarce up there. In other cases they grabbed people like me, who had I.T. experience but no IBM background. Without exception my co-workers violently hated IBM, and they were not shy in expressing that. So this is progress — Elon has managed to cause in a few days the damage that it took IBM about a year to do. Progress!
Ken
I have to think that at least some investors are looking at this, and at Tesla’s P/E ratio and recent history, and calling their brokers.
Another Scott
https://twitter.com/dick_nixon
Kinda sad that dick_nixon has been cowed by Elmo into putting a “parody” disclaimer in his header.
dprk_news is still disclaimer-free.
Cheers,
Scott.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Another Scott:
What’s Musk doing that they would feel compelled to do that?
Major Major Major Major
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): all parody accounts must have ‘parody’ in the name now.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Major Major Major Major:
Seriously? Why? What’s the point? And why didn’t Twitter require this when they were a public company?
Major Major Major Major
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): they required it to be either be obvious or in the description, but didn’t bother enforcing it unless somebody complained. Musk is just mad that people are impersonating him.
NotMax
@Major Major Major Major
Can’t simply give them the coveted mark of a blue rubber chicken?
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Major Major Major Major:
Everything seems to come back to that man’s fragile ego, doesn’t it?
Anthony
I’m @[email protected] if anyone’s looking for more connections. Nerd stuff, occasional cat pics.
jamey
Mastadon is why Democrats fail in microcosm.
Requires too much explanation, too great a level of initiative, and doesn’t empower those who can’t afford spare time enough to engage in depth. I can “afford” to do it, but the user-unfriendly experience and other factors create too high a hurdle for many to clear.
Twitter, for all its vices and drawbacks, was easy and intuitive. Double-fuck Musk for screwing it up,
glc
P.S.: It took a very long time but the confirmation emails from Mastodon came through (sent and resent).
One gets the “email sent” confirmation screen immediately and apparently it means the request has been handed off to some other server.
Mousebumples
Idk if anyone is checking this thread late, but I’m at https://qoto.org/@Mousebumples
Not moving over fully until after tomorrow, at the earliest. And I may end up moving “instances.” But this works for now. I’m intrigued by the differences but don’t have time to dig deeper right now.