An Intro to Mastodon From a Relative Newcomer!
“…With Twitter under new management that leaves me very pessimistic about its future as a viable communications site, I’ve been taking a look at some other options again. Two of these are Mastodon and Counter Social, both of which have a posting and following structure similar to Twitter (and are kinda related, but I’ll get to that).
I actually joined both a few years back, sometime around 2017, when Twitter was already making some dubious and infuriating decisions in how it runs things. I haven’t spent much time on either, until recently, but having the accounts set up made it easy for me to jump back in.
There’s a lot of concern and confusion about the sites, particularly about Mastodon, and its at-first-glance strange home server system. Now that I’ve gotten a bit oriented, I thought I’d write a post trying to explain things as I understand them, from the perspective of a relative newcomer myself. I actually enjoy both, so hopefully I can help others to get a bit comfortable, too! I will update and correct this post if I learn that I’ve gotten anything wrong.
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(see details at link below)
“…The more I think about it, the more I really enjoy the federated model of Mastodon. There is no profit motive, so bad actors are removed quickly and unflinchingly. Twitter has always been focused on growth, so you get the impression that they reacted to every complaint they got something along the lines of “okay, this is racist, but is it ‘RACIST racist?’” I understand that there was at least one attempt to add a nazi server to the federation; the result was that all the other servers immediately cut off all connection with them! They were free to be nazis all by themselves. This can happen to any server that becomes a bad actor, providing pressure for individual servers to maintain standards.”