Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/04/05/mastodon-like-twitter-witho.html
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<cynical>
Mastodon - like Twitter, without users
FTFY.
</cynical>
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Did Twitter start with users?
I think that people need to seriously get over being locked into exploitive communication tools that they don’t even agree with the TOS of. When people complain about online “monopolies” but are only willing to move to “the next big thing” it is already too late. It’s “big” because it was funded by venture capital to exploit its user base.
It’s almost as if people were thinking “I wish I had the power and convenience of exploitation and market dominance - except run by people who will be fair for a change!” Since nothing has ever worked that way before, I don’t expect it to start now.
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I give most of the new stuff a whirl- so I’ve been on G+, ello!, etc etc etc. Most go away pretty quietly, some last for long enough for me to miss them when they’re gone.
I’ll give this one a try, too.
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yeah, it did.
It started life as a private service and when launched to the public it already had a large user base from it’s previous incarnation. Twitter is the product of evolution not some “me too” app.
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I just signed up. I’ll give it a shot.
cameronh1403 is my non de plume out there.
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like Twitter, without Nazis
You should know better than to give the internet a challenge or excuse.
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I still log into G+ on occasion…even when Google isn’t asking me to.
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“without Nazis” – for now, or that you know of. i know it’s super trendy to hate on Twitter for any number of reasons, but i’ve enough time invested in it to stick around and let them try to fix it. i’m not going to bother jumping to the next new hotness anymore unless it is a proven thing that Twitter can’t/won’t fix their problems, or is dead.
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Can I be real for a minute? I really liked how G+ works(ed).
The circles analogy was way closer to the way I deal with people in real life, and it allowed me to go off on rants about a given area of interest without bombarding the rest of my followers with stuff they didn’t want to see. It was the right granularity of control for me.
It also has(d) a really nice looking interface, I thought.
Very few other people seemed to like it very much.
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I know. That’s why I self-deprecatingly used the “cynical” tags.
I know I’m being overly cynical by implying that it will fail to displace Twitter in the same way that Google+ failed to displace Facebook, and that that attitude is exactly the reason why it doesn’t have enough users to displace Twitter.
Cynically, I’m still probably right.
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It needed critical mass. I made a half-hearted effort to get my FB friends onto it, but I don’t think any came over.
A few of us from work jumped on it since we were all IT geeks. But no one in that circle has posted in years.
Sad really. As you said, great interface, but too much for some people.
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Check back in a year and then let’s see if this thing is a flash in the pan or not.
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I’m actually still a daily user. I really prefer the interface and the circle meatfor works well, even as they try to bury it in new updates.
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All I know is I finally have an @myfirstnamehere account somewhere. Not that I think it matters, since this is a weird decentralized, federated communication system. You can use mastodon.cloud sure (which is slow as hell right now), but there’s https://social.targaryen.house and many others.
See here for a list: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/blob/master/docs/Using-Mastodon/List-of-Mastodon-instances.md
Actually, this is terrible. There’s all these instances right, federating with one another (maybe, the operator can be selective). So now you have a communications platform that exists in shards, and the platform you use might not federate with the platform your friend uses. Your user isn’t portable, so now you have to go create another user on a different instance that your friends can see. But hey, now that instance shuts down 'cause it was some random person running it. All your history is lost, all your social connections are lost, time to register somewhere else. Meanwhile, @frauenfelder on mastodon.cx isn’t @frauenfelder on mastodon.cloud. And I know he’s not, cause I’m @frauenfelder on mastodon.cx
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And yet no one I know uses it which pretty much makes it useless to me.
I want to like it, but the mass-scale sharding is a pretty serious anti-feature for a social network. That was why diaspora was worthless. This is madness:
https://instances.mastodon.xyz
Also, with instances like 4chan.cmer.fr connected to 27 instances, I’m guessing there are Nazis
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