Can Mastodon Be A Twitter Alternative?
This article <https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2022/11/7/can-mastodon-be-a-twitter-alternative> says: With Twitter in disarray since the world’s richest person took control of it last week, Mastodon, a decentralised, open alternative from privacy-obsessed Germany, has seen a flood of new users. Nevertheless, this “flood” is a mere trickle compared to the torrent of users that is Twitter -- a million or so active monthly users on the one, versus over 200 times that on the other. The decentralization of Mastodon means that no single entity can take control of it. But it also makes it harder for users to find their way around. [Mastodon creator] Rochko, whose Mastodon foundation runs on a shoestring crowdfunded budget topped up with a modest grant from the European Commission, has found a particularly receptive audience among privacy-conscious European regulators. Germany’s data protection commissioner is waging a campaign to get government bodies to close their Facebook pages, since, he says, there is no way of hosting a page there that conforms to European privacy laws. Authorities should move to the federal government’s own Mastodon instance, he says. The European Commission also maintains a server for European Union bodies to toot from. Yeah ... “toot” ...
On Tue, 8 Nov 2022 10:28:34 +1300, I wrote:
Yeah ... “toot” ...
It appears that quaint little term is being retired <https://gizmodo.com/mastodon-toot-retired-twitter-tweet-equivalent-1849786221>, in favour of the blander “publish”. That was apparently the Mastodon creator’s original choice anyway.
If anyone wants to get on a mastodon instance, we just got a big hardware upgrade secured for mastodon.sdf.org (not rolled out yet; we're fine with 70k on our instance so far anyway with basically no optimisations (though it no longer shares resources with toobnix.org)) Federated networks! The migration to mastodon is a glimpse of the internet healing itself. sdf is a tilde about art and anti-commercialisation of the internet, so if you hate art and love seeing advertisements everywhere, proprietary subscription web services and being scraped for data it might not be for you ./back-to-invisibility On 11/18/22, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo(a)geek-central.gen.nz> wrote:
On Tue, 8 Nov 2022 10:28:34 +1300, I wrote:
Yeah ... “toot” ...
It appears that quaint little term is being retired <https://gizmodo.com/mastodon-toot-retired-twitter-tweet-equivalent-1849786221>, in favour of the blander “publish”. That was apparently the Mastodon creator’s original choice anyway. _______________________________________________ wlug mailing list -- wlug(a)list.waikato.ac.nz | To unsubscribe send an email to wlug-leave(a)list.waikato.ac.nz Unsubscribe: https://list.waikato.ac.nz/postorius/lists/wlug.list.waikato.ac.nz
On 18/11/2022 12.46, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
On Tue, 8 Nov 2022 10:28:34 +1300, I wrote:
Yeah ... “toot” ...
It appears that quaint little term is being retired <https://gizmodo.com/mastodon-toot-retired-twitter-tweet-equivalent-1849786221>, in favour of the blander “publish”. That was apparently the Mastodon creator’s original choice anyway.
"Bland" is probably the fate of things that become generalised and 'standardised'. The applicable 'standard' (it's not really termed such) is even called "The ActivityPub protocol". Objects may have three datetime descriptors: "published", "updated", and "deleted". The first kind-of gives the game away. In its original form the protocol was called "ActivityPump". Be thankful we are not pumping posts! Toot-ing never conjured-up images of a mastodon/mammoth in my mind - nothing to do with bad/dangerous driving, for example. Vaguely struck me as sounding jealous of "tweeting". Aren't elephants described as trumpeting? In recent days, mastodon.nzoss.nz (the New Zealand Open Source Society) has been reporting growth by leaps-and-bounds. I don't think it is necessary to be a financial member of the society before asking for an account. Make own approach, or will be happy to enquire on your behalf, upon request (off-list). -- Regards =dn
In for a penny... My own writing is on the gopher. Mastodon is my first experience of any network like that (like a social media; federation used to be normal before modern times, consider XMPP which Google just offlined their former Hangouts hosted service of, the internet itself..). So I can reasonably speak to the mastodon side of this. In the three weeks since Paypal guy bought the bird, we gained about seventy thousand new users on our long-standing mastodon instance. I ballpark about 1/1000 people became a typical(ly strange) sdf user, though the former bird users still introduce themselves with a reasonable understanding that they're not buying the bird on mastodon. I judge this by the sudden influx of new names at our usual events on SDF, such as our improvisational synth battles. I believe we are the fifth largest current Mastodon node at 70k people. You can do the math on that since the paypal purchase. I guess user density is something like exponentially distributed (you can find NZ instances with the common 300 users). People seeem to be using the federation, unless they are on a non-federating instance, though some people sign up their username on a number of socially nearby instances. There are people who appear to have been popular on the bird site who are desparately trying to wave their erstwhile open source tech news users back to Paypal guy's eight dollar monthly subscription deal. Long time mastodon users reminisce about the good old days. My understanding is that Paypal guy and bird site company are acting weird and often described as imploding at the moment, though I understand that paypal guy is very rich so he might not care about lawsuits for his buy-a-checkmark being manipulated to manipulatively tank companies. Emptying, closing an office inexplicably, and so forth. On 11/18/22, DL Neil <NZLUG(a)etelligence.info> wrote:
On 18/11/2022 12.46, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
On Tue, 8 Nov 2022 10:28:34 +1300, I wrote:
Yeah ... “toot” ...
It appears that quaint little term is being retired <https://gizmodo.com/mastodon-toot-retired-twitter-tweet-equivalent-1849786221>, in favour of the blander “publish”. That was apparently the Mastodon creator’s original choice anyway.
"Bland" is probably the fate of things that become generalised and 'standardised'.
The applicable 'standard' (it's not really termed such) is even called "The ActivityPub protocol".
Objects may have three datetime descriptors: "published", "updated", and "deleted". The first kind-of gives the game away.
In its original form the protocol was called "ActivityPump". Be thankful we are not pumping posts! Toot-ing never conjured-up images of a mastodon/mammoth in my mind - nothing to do with bad/dangerous driving, for example. Vaguely struck me as sounding jealous of "tweeting". Aren't elephants described as trumpeting?
In recent days, mastodon.nzoss.nz (the New Zealand Open Source Society) has been reporting growth by leaps-and-bounds. I don't think it is necessary to be a financial member of the society before asking for an account. Make own approach, or will be happy to enquire on your behalf, upon request (off-list).
-- Regards =dn
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On Fri, 18 Nov 2022 17:19:14 +1300, Jake Waas wrote:
My understanding is that Paypal guy and bird site company are acting weird and often described as imploding at the moment ...
Just heard on the news that 88% of staff have left the company in the last month. Seems like large numbers, confronted with his “go hard or go home” ultimatum, have chosen to go home.
Mastodon is my first experience of any network like that (like a social media; federation used to be normal before modern times ...
I remember USENET ...
I remember USENET ... There is the looming spectre of discussions of community moderation norms. As someone who knows all of our moderators, they are all nice people. If you cleave to that guy's book about arguments about moderation decisions of USENET, his thesis was that communities are a run-time side effect of your software and there isn't a generalisable right answer about moderation. In our case, SDF is fortunate to have a deep and mature (in the sense that an '87 BBS was mature) community with our own culture, weekly aNONradio shows, public access unix...
https://mastodon.sdf.org/@sdf/109361697463911281 a mastodon toot with the new hw adding to mastodon.sdf.org
participants (3)
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DL Neil -
Jake Waas -
Lawrence D'Oliveiro