Bebo, Friendster, Myspace, and a dozen geographic community sites used to fill the space where Orkut (RIP), Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram now fill.
Time after time, I keep running into the same people even decades in. At interest sites, in comment sections, even at random forums (yeah, i’m surprised those exist, still).
Like minded or like interested people will meet again.
I’ll miss the days of making Le Epic Putdown/Dunk reply and it going viral, but i think the diaspora will be much healthier for the world in general. Conflict reinforces belief.
I signed up for a Mushroom invite so I can try it when they finally launch. I did the same thing with Masto 5 years back and never used it until last week. I’m actually really digging it, though there is a learning curve. I guess that’s how any of us feel when trying a new social media platform though.
I do miss the “Drinking from the firehose” vibe from twitter though. I know there are tons of neat folks on Mastodon, but I’m struggling to find them at the moment. If anyone wants to say hi, I’m https://mastodon.social/@docpop
I suspect that this largely falls under ‘parasocial interaction is a hell of a drug’. If it were strictly about product it would certainly make more sense to just pay them and not bother them; but among the people you’d classify as ‘fans’ it stops being strictly about product pretty easily; which has its distinct downsides but also means that at least creating the appearance of engagement can yield downright disconcerting levels of enthusiasm.
I would ask why the analogy of email isn’t more readily useful; then I remember that that probably is the most recent example of a federated protocol that saw nontrivial adoption vs. the various arrangements where the vendor, protocol, and often even list of clients that won’t get you banned are treated as an inseparable whole and I feel desperately old.
Yah, as soon as I heard “what server should I join” is a required question, I knew I was never getting a Mastadon account. I’ve retired from all social media and it’ll take quite a bit to get me back at this point. The barrier to entry needs to be a lot lower than deciphering peer-to-peer server networks to figure out where communities I would like are.
I totally understand that barriere. Simon W describes Mastodon as “just blogs” and I think that analogy works pretty well. You want to start a WordPress blog? First thing you have to do is find a hosting provider. It’s the same for Masto.
enjoy watchung the federated feed of 1 million new herd members tooting at once. federated view on .online and .social is only available during low server activity, so you may need to be on a smaller instance to get the federated view all day.
I think it’s the end of the second attempt to turn the Internet into cable TV. We’re already seeing many streaming services, social media sites, and many other one-size-fits-most platforms become irrelevant or just fail. Even cloud computing and storage is taking a hit from them as companies realize that some resources should be locally maintained/managed rather than being held for ransom by providers and geopolitical upheavals. It won’t be like the 'Net of the 90s but I suspect it’ll be a less centralized, less able to monetize kind of Internet.
I think they’re on the money. The way I’m beginning to use Mastodon is to look for new content which is often hosted on a blog somewhere else. It’s honestly a better way of doing things imo.
