Comparing :Twitter: to :Mastodon:
Pretty much everything I valued at #Twitter has moved to some extent to #Mastodon. So why do I still visit?
I've come to realize that the main factor is simply scale. The content quality on the pachyderm 🐘 is an order of magnitude better, but also pretty thin when looking at any sufficiently narrow subject.
And, in the other direction, your audience reach is more engaged, but much smaller. (That's actually a feature, not a bug, for me.)
I do NOT feel in touch with the world when on the #Fediverse, compared to the #birdsite 🐦 . News eventually arrives, but hardly instant.
So a long way to get to asking:
Are most of the shortcomings of #distributed #socialmedia just about scale? Can we grow into a more satisfying experience.
Or perhaps, there by dragons?
Comparing :Twitter: to :Mastodon:
@TheLastofHisName @EubieDrew
Same here. If people want to continue to feed Musk fascism, so be it. It's votes that count not social media rhetoric.
Thinking back, most of the time twitter really wasn't all that fun. This place is much calmer, more diverse and I don't miss being threatened daily because I wasn't a MAGA or a Bernie Bro.
@EubieDrew pro tip: I've started using tools like netnewswire to get updates from twitter accounts without visiting the website
netnewswire is limited to the Appleverse
@EubieDrew I'm sure there are other feed readers for other operating systems! I think there's even some web-based ones!
Checking out feedly right now.
re: Comparing :Twitter: to :Mastodon:
If you just want news without interaction, there's a lot of bots available.
The news.twtr.plus instance is basically one large bot that pulls news posts from verified Twitter accounts. I believe they might even pull from RSS feeds as well.
There are some gaming related bots like @gamingnews & @ignbot.
Hope this helps!
Comparing :Twitter: to :Mastodon:
@EubieDrew I think the difference between Mastodon & birdsite type places *is* just scale.
The more content & users might give you more of what you think you want to see but I am not sure that is necessarily a good thing.
There may be lots of information on bigger sites, but it is distilled and that distillation has been created by previous personal activity on the sites.
That’s why I prefer it here. It makes me go looking for stuff, rather than having endless streams of often misleading content or 50 versions of the same content.
Take the explosion in Jersey. It was useful to see one report from BBC or Sky but after that the pages of comment & opinion were pointless. Every one has shared the same video clip over and over again. So I go there scroll through a couple of reliable sites, which have it all on their own websites & apps. Birdsite is easy but I can get it all elsewhere. I am really happy not to see the 99% of drivel & hate.
I’ve noticed more pointless commentary appearing here, which is OK, but I wish it was hidden behind a content warning filter.
I’m really pleased to be able to spend my time reading & seeing much more varied content here, which is why I spend most of my time here now.
I no longer get any sort of buzz from getting hundreds of likes on a comment about an MP’s anti Meghan tweet while his elderly constituents slowly drift into a hypothermic coma. I make my point, get a couple of hundred likes but he won’t read the replies or change his behaviour, so what was the point?
For my mental wellbeing I’ll continue to spend most of my time here!
Comparing :Twitter: to :Mastodon:
@EubieDrew I think #Twitter is going to have to have some serious systemic failures (prolonged outages) for there to be another large influx. Most of the larger networks probably won't come here if they can't advertise or have some say in how their content is prioritized. It's different here, and I don't want a Twitter clone.