Getting Started with Mastodon

TidBITS Talk
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I wrote a post about Twitter alternatives. Right now, it’s mostly about getting started with Mastodon.

https://www.lisaspangenberg.com/2022/11/03/alternatives-to-twitter/

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A nice thought, but hosting a public Mastodon instance brings with it a host of content moderation issues, even if access were restricted to the highly intelligent, erudite, and unusually attractive members of the TidBITS community. I suspect Adam has all the moderation duties he’d ever want just taking care of TidBITS Talk.

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There is already a TidBITS-associated microblog site. No need to create another.

https://slackbits.herokuapp.com/

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I thought it is

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The thing that stopped me was there seems to be no way of starting a Mastodon account for all the forums at once. If it’s possible (and it should be possible) it’s not clear at all from the App and the sign-in process that this is so.

Also in terms of the forums themselves, all I found was a short list of very specific and “small” topics of no real interest to me.

Whatever else Mastodon is, it’s no Twitter alternative, and it’s not very well explained or user friendly considering the massive opportunity of the moment they are facing.

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That’s what I thought, but in June, @ace shared the URL I posted:

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As far as SlackBITS goes, I think you need to sign up on the https://slackbits.herokuapp.com/ link to start, but then you go to the https://slackbits.slack.com/ link to access SlackBITS.

Things are changing at Heroku this month, and I’ve been unable to manage that signup page for ages, but I haven’t gotten around to figuring out how to do a new public signup page.

I might set up a Mastodon account for TidBITS, but I really don’t want to get into running a server.

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Is anyone using @Tribel instead of Twitter? It seems a little easier to use and you don’t have to pick a server to log into.

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They aren’t forums. Those are lists of specific Mastodon servers or instances. Think of it like email; you have gmail, he has an iCloud account, she has a private domain mail account, but you can all send and receive email from and to each other.

You join a particular Mastodon server; maybe it’s connected to a locale or subject you are interested in, or maybe it was open or you received an invite. Once you have an account, you can follow anyone else (they may need to approve you), though you will need to copy and paste the full address of someone not on the same server as you (Their profile makes this simple with a button to copy their address).

It’s not Twitter, but it is similar; more like early Twitter.

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I’m checking it out.

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Just bear in mind that “they” are a loose association of mostly volunteer server operators, users, and developers. Things in the fediverse aren’t likely to ever be focused and monolithic – which is both its strength and its weakness.

Any account (almost) on (almost) any server will be able to follow/interact with accounts on (almost) any other server, but subject to the whims of the particular server operators.

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I just saw this today:

In many (certainly not all) respects, the Mastadon “fediverse” network reminds me of the Usenet messaging system whose “newsgroups” were one of the most popular ways to discuss everything prior to the rise of social media.

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So far, nothing’s changed on twitter that affects me particularly. I don’t have a check mark and don’t want one, so the sub fee isn’t a worry. Mainly the only effect to this point is the hyperventilating by people I follow on what might happen. I realize it’s different for everyone, but I don’t see a need to switch to anything else at the moment.

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Thanks to a nudge from @cwilcox, I found that Slack now has time-limited public invite links. So this will get you into SlackBITS if you’re not already there.

https://slackbits.slack.com/admin/shared_invites

SlackBITS doesn’t get anywhere near the traffic of TidBITS Talk, but it’s good for live events.

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You can use this invite link to mastodon.social and will automatically follow me. I’ve been there for a while but don’t post much. Sign up - Mastodon

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Is it possible and is there any advantage to signing up on multiple instances?

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Maybe.

If there is a group/topic hosted on one server that isn’t shared with yours, then you would have to either convince your server’s admin to start sharing the group (assuming its host server allows it) or log in to a server that has the group.

I can’t think of another reason why you might need to have accounts on multiple servers.

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Considering joining the Twitter migration? Check out these platform alternatives.

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If you have two identities, i.e. you as you personally, and you as an employee who needs to use Mastodon. But generally speaking, you can Follow and be Followed by users on other servers/Instances.

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That’s not really the point, for me. I’ve never posted on Twitter, and I was on it only to follow certain obscure sources that aren’t easy to access otherwise. Odds are that these would not have been too disrupted (assuming they stayed on Twitter, which is a different question).

But I have quit Twitter. Yes, I’ve lost access to those sources. I can live with that. I quit Twitter because:

  1. I don’t want to encourage a facility that prioritizes free speech over factual accuracy (frankly, if there is anything we should have learned in the last six years, it’s that facts matter more than free speech!),
  2. I don’t want to use a facility that encourages trolling, and
  3. (most important of all) I don’t want Elon Musk monetizing me.

So I’m off Twitter.

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