It’s easy to forget while watching the trainwreck that a lot of people use it to connect with others in positive ways.
Yeah, I moved to Mastadon for my primary social media site and dropped my other socials to people I want to continue to engage with, but it’s really fragmented. Mastadon is intimidating to a lot of non-technical people, and a lot of people find the culture there different. A lot of my POC mutuals, for example, are finding it less hospitable and usable than I, a white tech nerd, do. If they don’t make it over, I’ll lose perspective on their experiences that I think is really important.
Thanks. I’m sure once the dust has settled things will feel better, but I don’t think I’ll find the same sense of community I did on the bird app.
There are tools for finding people from Twitter on Mastodon, but there’s still a lot of fragmentation. A lot of people aren’t interested in learning a new platform, or don’t like how it works, or just prefer to stick with other platforms they’re already using. I had just broken 1900 followers on Twitter, I’m at 81 on Mastodon. That’s a lot of voices I can’t engage with anymore.
I don’t mean to make light of the collapse of Twitter, there are a lot of people who will be hurt by its loss. 1000’s of employees have lost jobs, some users will be impacted financially and many more will suffer the loss of community. I hope your community is able to stay together should Twitter end.
I just simply find Elon’s public humiliation absolutely hilarious and deserved, that I have to focus on the one positive from an otherwise terrible situation.
Yeah that’s fair. I’m just feeling super depressed that my online home for talking to my trans friends and shitposting is in its death throes.
And yeah, it’s great to see Elon finally showing his ass for all but the biggest bootlickers to see. I thought he was a visionary once, but over the years it’s becoming clearer and clearer that he’s just a mediocre white guy born into wealth who lucked out and got rich, and definitely doesn’t deserve the reputation he, until recently, had.
After seeing Andy Serkis’ excellent performance in Andor I think that, as good as he is at the motion capture work, maybe it’s time to let his career blossom without forcing him to play inhuman monster characters.
This is why I’m more a fan of protocols over platforms. Sites like twitter and such will always die. There will, for every service out there, be an end date. Especially if that service uses closed secret methodologies and functions. Protocols, however, open protocols… those stick around. Email, IRC, RSS, HTML, ActivityPub (what runs Mastodon) , are things that aren’t owned. They can’t be taken away at this point.
Also something to think about re: Mastodon that I think a lot of people are having trouble with understanding… Mastodon is a protocol (basically). You don’t need to pick the RIGHT mastodon server to start out with. Migrating from one to another AND KEEPING YOUR CONTACTS is baked into the system. Many of the services will even track the changes and update your followers/follows (though, don’t assume they will). It’s made to be interoperable.
So seek out services that don’t hold you hostage, or your friends hostage, like Twitter has done, and then you’ll never have to worry about losing your community again.
Twitter was built on a protocol, too. SMS. It reached critical mass because it took a thing many people were already carrying and let them use it to update/get messages from a website. It never required knowledge of how much more complex Twitter became as it was made more human readable. Which allowed a much wider variety of people to get their stories out. That privacy team attorney on the company’s Slack warned about the impact upon dissidents. But, it’s not just disadvantaged and possibly non-technical people who came to use it. There are so many members of academic fields who found an audience, or learned how to have that career or exposed harassment from the entrenched.
Oh believe me I am, but I’ve been on Twitter since 2009 and until extremely recently it looked like it’d be there for quite some time. I will never try and build a platform on a closed site like this again.
I like Mastodon, and I understand how it works reasonably well, but the current fediverse doesn’t work for many of the people I am mutuals with, particularly those who use Twitter to survive (e.g. artists, sex-workers) who need the visibility and reach of a centralized platform that’s missing from decentralized services. I posted my Mastodon account some time ago and I’m at 70 followers vs 1900 on Twitter. If you’re a bigger account like some of the artist or SWer accounts I mentioned, that’s not going to put bread on your table. Sure they can rebuild a following, but if you lose your house that’s just gonna make it harder to claw back up to where they were before an entitled man-baby decided to nuke it.
The other side is marginalized communities that were not originally on Mastodon. The fediverse does have its own culture and customs, and I’ve seen a fair amount of criticism about the newcomers not respecting the culture in place. Which is fair, it was built by the people there now. But some of that is at odds with the culture of these groups coming from twitter, and while they can build their own culture over time, whether within the fediverse itself or on their own instances (which takes resources many don’t have) the reaction has caused many to feel unwelcome.
That’s one thing where the Twitter algorithm worked, it tended to group similar accounts within their own algorithmic bubble. I very rarely saw Black Twitter tweets in my bubble, and before coming out and actively seeking it out, I very seldom saw Trans Twitter tweets. On Mastodon you see it all, increasing the potential for cultural conflict and as a result a lot of people try it out and don’t feel welcome, so they write it off and never return. That might be able to be fixed in time, but that doesn’t help those looking for a new home now.
The death of a platform is a complicated thing, and there’s never a drop-in replacement for what was lost.
