So I found myself on the morning of the day after Christmas signing up for Mastodon. Today's column will be about my experience. I give my username at the bottom so you can follow me there if you want. Don't worry, I have no interest in leaving Hive. I am fully committed here. But it's always interesting trying out new services.
If you haven't heard, Mastodon is the new thing. It's been around for several years as I understand it, but it took Elon's takeover of Twitter to push people to actually start to use it en masse. And use it they have. The service has grown quite a bit in just a few short weeks.
That should tell you what it is in broad strokes: it's a Twitter clone. One that's decentralized and with no corporate control. It's a bit like email. There are many servers and one can sign up for any of them, kind of like one can sign up for any email provider (gmail, hotmail, proton, etc). These servers can all see each other and give you the illusion that it's all one big place. You can follow people on any server and they all go together in your timeline. The only unique feature to individual servers is you can see posts from everyone on the server you are on. This is labeled "local" in the view options. The regular combined timeline of everyone you follow is the default view and is when you get when you click the "home" view.
It is more like early Twitter than modern twitter. There are no ads, nor any algorithms that recommend people or give more weight to some tweets than others. Tweet... we can't call messages on Mastodon that anymore, can we? What sound did mastodon's make? We probably don't know. Well... elephants are the same family, right? Or a closely related one, anyway. We sometimes refer to an elephant's call as a "trumpet". So I propose we call Mastodon messages "trumpets". You heard it here first, folks!
I was an early uses of Twitter. Not so early that I could get a two or three letter username, but early enough that I remember when it was still more like a group SMS. The retweet format still hadn't been formalized or offically supported so people had many different styles. At the time all that was offically supported was tweeting and replying to tweets. Celebrities had yet to sign-up; a few writers may have embraced it early (I think Stephen King and Neil Gaiman were early users) but most had not. Ads weren't there yet; there weren't even any analytics so we had no idea how many people "liked" a tweet or retweeted it or saw it or any of that nonsense. Twitter mobs were unheard of and there were no "influencers". Corporate control was nonexistent and as a result there was seemingly an unlimited number of apps, all with different ideas of how to arrange and display the tweets. Many of the modern Twitter features (like retweets) actually originated in these independent apps. The "Wild West" metaphor for internet things is often overused, but it did have something of that feel. It was more wild, but also a more friendly service. At present Mastodon has a lot of the same feel, which is nice.
I stumbled my way to the famichiki.jp server. This is a server run by foreigners in Japan, so it seemed like a good fit for me. I signed up and started trying to figure it out.
I don't know if I will stick with the service. Ever since discovering Hive's first form five years ago (nearly six years ago, but I wasn't able to make an account for awhile) and Discord where all Hive folks talked, I haven't used any of these messaging services very much. I did use noise.cash for awhile and I enjoyed it, but it got confusing juggling all these things so my usage of it dropped away. At any rate, at present I am enjoying Mastodon. We'll see how long that lasts.
The decentralized thing is interesting, and already seems to be under some challenge. It seems that some big company in Japan has already bought up several of the more popular Mastodon servers. It's not hard to see why a server would sell out. People run them freely, more as a hobby than anything, so if a corporation comes and throws money at them, well, that's hard to refuse. We all hate what corporations are doing to society, but principles are hard to keep when a handful of money is shoved in your face.
I've read that corporations now control enough of the emails servers to make independent servers almost impossible to run. There have been several articles about it, from people who ran their own email servers for decades but can no longer manage it. For example, it seems like gmail automatically bounces or filters to spam email from most independent servers and they make it almost impossible for these servers to appeal their blacklisting. This same thing could presumably happen to Mastodon eventually. At least for the moment, however, that seems far off. New servers are popping up daily right now. I wouldn't know how to run one, but it must not be difficult.
Having said that, I don't really know much about it. If you do, please feel free to correct me in the comments.
If you are curious to sign-up, I might offer the following tips.
- Write an introduction as one of your first trumpets. Use the #introduction tag. Many people are pinning their introduction so that it's the first trumpet on their profile.
- Use tags a lot. The search function only sees tags, so use them.
- Boost (the Mastodon word for retweet) and favorite things often. There are no algorithms at work, so boosting is one of the only way people see new things. And favorites remain a great way to gain the attention of people and network.
- Use the "lists" feature. Put "friends" into one list, "news" into another, and so on. Just like on Hive, if you aren't around when people post things you miss them. Especially if you follow a lot of folks, it's easy to not see things that were posted some hours before you look. Lists help combat this problem.
- Use Debirdify to see the usernames of any of your Twitter friend who have signed up for Mastodon and posted about it on Twitter. This will also show you what server they are using. Again, you can see their posts regardless of what server they use, but if you haven't signed up it might be interesting to see your server options.
- ??? I'm still new myself, so I'm just winging it. If you know of any other tips or unspoken rules, let me know about them in the comments below.
If you are there and want to give me a follow, I am dbooster on the famichiki.jp server, so that makes my username @dbooster@famichiki.jp (I think). Feel free to give me a follow, and send me a trumpet letting me know you are a Hive user so I know to follow you back.
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David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. |
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