Twitter and Mastodon

If you're online enough to know about this blog, you've certainly noticed the whole Twitter kerfuffle. I liked Twitter and it often gave me interesting articles or laugh-out-loud jokes. But if it goes, it goes; it's not the end of the world, and I don't expect it to be the last social network we'll see crash and burn.

And watching it burn is definitely fun. We've created a chatroom with a few friends where we enthusiastically post any and all related things - screenshots of Musk fanboys, serious analyses, jokes and memes, anything.

If you've been here longer, you might have noticed I'm a fan of owning your own piece of the web, so it's probably not a surprise that I'd test-driven a few of the decentralized networks quite some time ago. I have even tried spinning up an instance of Mastodon (which worked) and Hubzilla (which didn't). I've also created an account on mastodon.social back in 2018 where I averaged one post every two years. 😁

Big thanks to #SpaceKaren for this great incentive to revisit it. Since many people moved as well, the fediverse is a lot livelier these days.

Which brings me to the point of this post: I've been using both Twitter and Mastodon. You'll Be Surprised What Happened Next!

I admit it surprised me how much I now prefer Mastodon. I didn't expect to like it much, to be honest. Four years ago it just looked like Twitter's poor cousin with fewer people. But the overall vibe and style suit me very well. Some features of Twitter seem to be missing at first. But then I found out those were intentional design decisions driven by the desire to build the network differently. And I quickly realized that yes, I prefer an app that will just say "... and that's it, there's nothing else new in your feed" instead of one built to hook my attention and never let go.

I'm still learning to fully utilize all the various options provided by the local and federated feeds. But I've quickly found out those can fully replace the fortuitous/random discovery I thought I'd be losing when leaving Twitter; and even better, since I have to explicitly navigate to one of those feeds, spending time browsing them now is a deliberate decision, not something that just happens because of the algorithm.

I do still keep Twitter on my phone as well. I've always had it hidden away behind multiple taps, so I don't develop a habit of just opening it every time I grab my phone; but as the weeks pass, I find I only go there when I want to see what's new in the Twitter drama. And I'm uninstalling the app the moment any of Musk's ideas - such as mandatory location sharing - pops up.

Okay, so that's it for the actual post. Now some random Twitter-related crap. 😁

Here is an interesting thread about the concept of a "trust thermocline" in relation to social networks; here is the same thread, but unrolled, if you prefer it that way.

And apropos of nothing, just of pure nostalgia: one of my favorite tweets that made me laugh out loud once in a grocery store line.