Eubie Drew (QOTO 🦣) @EubieDrew@qoto.org

I've been using Mastodon since Saturday, and I'm going out on a limb here: Mastodon (or the Mastodon model) is the future of social media.

It has the potential of curing the worst evils of social media and evolving into a genuine (and workable) public sphere.

I'm working on fleshing out these ideas.

Some people think Mastodon is too weird to become popular:

I joined Twitter in 2008. We had to put a "d" in front of a tweet to convert it to a direct message and every other day you had some embarrassing private moments exposed because someone forgot about the “d”. Hashtags were just a community hack, introduced by Chris Messina to somehow tag content. Search? Hah, you wish! Tweets via SMS were supposed to be a thing. Oh, and the daily meet and greet with the failwhale. Totally not weird.

🌓🌎🌞 <-- lunar eclipse

🌎🌓🌞 <-- solar eclipse

🌎🌞🌗 <-- apocalypse

Everyone's like Mastodon versus Twitter but it's not either-or, and I'm finding value in having both. For example, there is a vibrant community on Twitter dedicated to complaining about Mastodon, and a vibrant community on Mastodon dedicated to complaining on Twitter.

@briannawu I half wonder if it’s even that. It increasingly strikes me that he just wants to set fire to Twitter, as some kind of ‘own the libs’ victory in his own mind. What’s the worst that could happen for him, personally? He’ll still be a multi-billionaire regardless.

Friends, I've finally figured out how the CW thing works & now I feel like a total idiot. To save you my embarrassment: click the CW in the text box as you compose & it opens up a headline text box & when your post comes out that's what folks see & they can click through for more.

Thank you!
We use: drosophila.social

Building an aggregator for #ScienceMastodon. Let's you view multiple servers at once. Creating a list of all the science servers I know of. Please let me know of any others!

genomic.social
ecoevo.social
mstdn.science
fediscience.org
scicomm.xyz
scholar.social?

Any others?

It’s also easy to account spoof: I’m @PeteStrzok, but that doesn’t prevent someone from creating (on existing or new severs they make) @petestrzok@mastadan.social, @petestrzok@mstdn.social, etc.

Make sure you verify the account you’re following is in fact the person you think it is. An old article (would welcome an updated version):
https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2017/04/mastodon-risks/amp

None of this is meant to disparage Mastodon - just noting things to keep in mind.

I keep seeing people say Mastodon is nothing like Twitter. And they’re right.

Mastodon is an echo of the old internet, it’s decentralised, chaotic. What you get depends on your sysadmin. You can’t search, everything has to be shared to you by a human. Networks split apart and rejoin. What you see is your unique connection to it.

Is this good? Maybe. But for me that’s the internet I grew up with. No algorithms, no targeted adverts, just human interaction, and it was glorious.

After 70 years of relative stability, democracy is weakening all around the world. Strongmen and dictators are ascendant, and legislatures are weakening.

The real problem is we are in a global information war. It goes on every minute of every day.

And we are LOSING THAT WAR.

Mastodon will update to 4.0 soon! Here are the most exciting new features (in addition to fixes & changes):

- ability to follow hashtags
- ability to filter by language
- ability to translate posts
- ability to post HEIC files (i.e. your iPhone’s native photo format)
- define user roles (big deal for admins)
- define sign-up process on your Instance (admins again)

See all changes here: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/releases/tag/v4.0.0rc1

Thanks, @Gargron and @Mastodon Team. #Mastodon4

I’m quite impressed by (a) how helpful existing users of Mastodon have been for all of us noobs trying to learn a new system, and (b) by the deep and widely-held sense of a Fediverse culture (the fact that there’s a “we” that uses content warnings more liberally, alt text more frequently, etc) - it’s complete with a sense of place, ethics, identity. It’s fascinating, and makes me glad to have had the good fortune to stumble into it.

“I want news organizations to not only set up their own servers but also to start adding share-on-Mastodon buttons to story pages. That will send a message to Elon et al, endorsing an alternative.” — @jeffjarvis https://buzzmachine.com/2022/11/05/hope-for-a-post-musk-net/