Technology

My issue with mastodon is it’s strayed so much from its vision. I use misskey but there is not a ton of clients for it at the moment.

How it started:

"Oh, non-profit tech company! How noble! I trust that!"

How it's going:

I have no interest in these hollow PR dance moves until CEOs are publishing compelling outlines of how they have instituted complex legal frameworks that mean they can't reverse (or others can't reverse) these cynical moves to temporarily sway public sentiment during a building phase without say... Being legally compelled to immediately forfeit all historical stock earned and donate any historical salary and bonus compensation to the Red Cross or children's cancer research. They won't though, at best, this is an option, subject to change at will.

Remember that Zuckerberg initially allowed those tampons in the men's rooms and got a little praise, because some men do have periods and require tampons. They were in little wicker baskets, with the lids propped open on full display as you walked into any of their global offices. Zuckerberg then quietly told them internally to start closing the lids in the basket by default, still there, but closed, and then to place them on a lower shelf out of the way and ultimately, you now see the headlines that he ordered them fully removed performatively.

Declarative statements matter from people with proven, consistent integrity - that trait is inconsistent with anyone who can successfully rise to the level of modern CEO.

Micro-blogging didn't click for me, it's just so much less exciting than the forum format of Reddit / Lemmy :)

I heard of Mastodon a couple of years ago. I was still on Twitter and Facebook. I am not really tech savvy, so I didn't bother to go over to Mastodon. It was until just recent, I thought I would give it a try.

Long story short, I am on Mastodon, and I decided to ditch both Twitter and Facebook. Because, I like the layout and the format much better than the two. I even joined Friendica (open source platform like Facebook). So, as I started getting used to these open source social media platforms. They are much better and I would support Mastodon with some donations from time to time.

I mean, why pay $8 to Elon Musk, when you can do pretty much the same things on Mastodon? I wasn't going to throw in my 8 bucks just to get a stupid tweetdeck. Mastodon has its own deck, and it's totally free!

I am still investigating other various social media (open source) sites. I may even join Pixelfeed (alternative to Instagram).

I know you have to make money....but for a guy like Elon Musk, who owns Tesla, Space X, and a few others...why does he really need to charge people money to use his platform? I mean, I know he can do whatever he wants...but he has the money to keep the site going...without charging people 8 bucks to get "Premium" service.

The only thing Mastodon doesn't have that X (Formerly Twitter) has, is the fact that you can watch (or upload) live streaming.

Maybe, in the future Mastodon will do that?

I'm amazed, he actually stopped corruption before it started

I'm not sure what the practicals of doing something like this will be, but it speaks a lot to who Eugen Rochko is.

He might also be an obtuse dick. I've gotten that vibe too. Still, good for him.

Even having ceded control, they will go down in history as a legend. More positively viewed then the likes of... other social media founders.

Why is there this very loud chorus of people touting bluesky as alternative to twitter instead of the far superior Mastodon?

Bluesky you are basically swapping a tyrant against a benevolent dictator, that dictator can become corrupted or sell bluesky to Musk Elon later on.... That is not a solution that is more like procrastination.

Copy-pasting a comment from Aurich (Ars Staffer):

I set up the Ars Mastodon instance, and speaking as a relatively educated and technically savvy person I found it extremely confusing. And the more I learned later the more I don't feel remotely bad about being confused, it's honestly pretty messy.

I put Ars on the main instance, and I think it was the right call. We're not going to maintain our own, at least at this time, and trusting a random instance that's very difficult to vet is kinda sketchy.

We ran a guest editorial a while back that I think really clearly outlines the various issues:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/06/op-ed-why-the-great-twittermigration-didnt-quite-pan-out/

But you know, it's really okay. It doesn't have to be big, or popular or mainstream. As long as it survives and people like it? That's good enough.

I think going into an era of balkanization of social isn't the worst thing.

One of my complaints with Mastodon and similars is that you can't search only for posts of a specific instance, or temporarily mute a single instance from your feed. There's also some sort of "invisible wall" for Pleroma users (niche of a niche), as their public posts simply don't show up in public Mastodon searches, though I don't know whether that's a problem with Mastodon or Pleroma.