Good Morning Friends! It is time once again for my semi-annual explainer post about the Fediverse or as some call it Mastodon. In truth, I am not going to do a full explainer because I did one back in April and I am not sure I can do a better job than I did then. If you are like most of us and have littered the fediverse with many past versions of yourself as you tried out many instances, then this post might be of interest about migrating between sites. As I said in the post from April, I originally joined the fediverse during the Wheedon Exodus of 2018, but it seems like every six months or so there is another mass influx of folks discovering/re-discovering the platform. Of note… while I jokingly refer to it as the Wheedon Exodus, I mostly got hip to the notion of “mastodon” due to all of the Loading Ready Run cast moving to various sundry instances. It does make me wonder if anyone is out there tracking the migratory patterns of Twitter users.
So You Decided to Leave Twitter
Yeah, I guess I am going to write about this today, but given that I already linked you better articles that I have already written I am not sure where to go with this one. I think first it is important that you understand that the Fediverse as I refer to it, or Mastodon as the media seems to refer to it… is not a single website controlled by a single entity. There is no one corporation responsible for running everything, but instead a network for smaller “instances” that are “federated” so that they can share messages with each other and facilitate cross-instance communication. What this means in practice is that the Fediverse is not a monolith with a single culture, but instead a bunch of different smaller communities that each have their own cultures. Probably a better analogy would be for you to imagine that users on the World of Warcraft Forum, Something Awful Forum, GameFaqs, and Reddit could somehow seamlessly communicate with each other.
Firstly I feel like I want to get this out of the way. This is not a post attempting to recruit you to the Fediverse. I am happy to welcome you with open arms to this alternate dimension, but it isn’t the sort of thing where you unplug from Twitter and plug into the Fediverse and life continues on like normal. Using these instances is its own thing with its own series of differences that go far deeper than the tweet vs toot thing. Image a server instance as a small computer club that meets in the back room of your library, that deals with all sorts of logistical problems inherent with growing membership and outgrowing its meeting room space. Instances in general are run by a very small group of administrators that are struggling to pay the bills and are happy to have you… but also know that each influx is going to wreak havoc on their data usage.
Finding a Home
I’ve bounced around quite a bit during my time in the fediverse, but this is sort of a thing that happens to most people. They join an instance and it doesn’t end up feeling right for one reason or another. My own journey looks a little bit like this:
Mastodon.cloud – My very first instance and I had no clue what any of it meant at that point, or that I wasn’t signing up for one single monolithic site. It was perfectly cromulent.
Elekk.xyz – Once I learned different instances and did different things, I obviously tried to gravitate toward the gaming-related one. It was a pretty nice place with a bunch of interesting users that I still follow to this day.
Nineties.Cafe – My friend Liore wanted to start up an instance so I signed on this nonsense to help administrate it. This meant leaving Elekk behind, but since you can so easily migrate between instances it was no big deal.
MMORPG.Social – As Ninteties.Cafe had run through its cycle of excitement, and a friend of mine Gazimoff decided he wanted to try and tackle creating MMORPG-centric social media. I moved houses once again and helped administrate, but the costs eventually became egregious and it was shuttered.
Elekk.xyz – So I migrated back to Elekk and mostly went to sleep for a while, going dormant for a year or so. When I woke up and started caring about the fediverse again, the instance was a very changed place. It seems that there was a bit of a “netsplit” to borrow an old term, and Elekk was pretty proactively blocking a bunch of instances making it very hard to communicate with friends spread throughout the fediverse.
Mstdn.social – This led me to try and find a more neutral ground instance. One that was not quite so block-happy but also was not doing anything egregious that would lead to it being actively blocked. So I migrated over to this lovely instance run by a nice person who goes by Stux.
I fully expect that most of you are going to go through a sequence of events similar to the ones that I did. At this point, I would maybe shoo people away from rolling on Mastodon.social, because while it is the largest instance and considered the “flagship” it is also largely lawless. Nothing has been done about abusive members for long enough that the community took it upon itself and caused the problems that ultimately led me to leave Elekk. Basically, if you choose to use that one, just know that there is going to be a wide swath of people who won’t be able to see you.
Maybe Support If You Stick Around
Like I said before each instance is usually run by a very small team that is racking up expenses in order to keep the lights on. Knowing this I have always tried to chip something into wherever I am calling home. When I was on Elekk I contributed to their Patreon, and when I moved to Mstdn.social I started contributing to the one Stux has set up. Like it isn’t a large amount of money but I end up chipping in $5 a month as a way of attempting to help the operation. It doesn’t give me any benefits other than knowing that I am at least helping to keep the lights on a little bit. Most of these instances are not profitable and are deeply cutting into the personal finances of those who are running them.
Each time there is a mass migration wave, more folks end up sticking around. Something you should go into this knowing is that the vast majority of “I’m leaving Twitter” folks will be back within the week. However, what has evolved over time is an alternate reality that skews way more liberal and queer and as a result super open and accepting about some things and hypercritical of other things. I feel like if you want to come to the Fediverse, you are going to need to accept it for what it is and not try and turn it into Twitter 2.0. The folks are really lovely but also a heck of a lot quieter. There is less general noise on the network, but also much less interaction.
Riding the Bomb Down
I’ve personally found a place in my life for both Twitter and the Fediverse/Mastodon. I have no plans to do anything drastic like delete my Twitter account. If folks legitimately migrate this time then I will likely spend less and less time there. I feel it is also very important for folks to realize the level of stress these mass migration waves place upon the existing denizens of these instances. Like they are all open and welcoming but have been through this shit so many times before. I know alone this is my fourth or fifth mass migration, and I know they existed prior to the Wheedon Exodus that brought me to these shores. On some level, the “townies” often duck out for a few weeks until the onslaught has died down a bit and then poke their heads out again to see who actually stuck around.
Please note while this post is not an attempt to recruit you, it is also not an attempt to dissuade you. Whether or not you take this adventure is entirely up to you. I am more than happy to field direct questions from anyone considering it. Like I said before I’ve written about this several times in the past and some of my words might fill in gaps in your knowledge. So I will leave you with a list of links.
Moving Your Home Fediverse Instance – a follow-up post where I talk about the process of migrating your follows and redirecting people to your new home instance. This is helpful if you have a string of other attempts to move off Twitter.
Adventures in the Fediverse – might be fun to read to see how my tone has shifted over the years since this original post back in August of 2018. I was way more excited about this being the future of all social media, whereas now I am pretty resigned to knowing it will only take hold with a handful of people.
Keep Up Alternate Contacts
I will close this out with the last piece of general advice, one that I have learned the hard way over the years. If you care about someone enough to not want to lose contact with them… trade multiple forms of contact. There are numerous folks that I have lost over the years through various gaming venues, and I occasionally wonder how they are doing. I know email is old school, but it and phone numbers tend to be the lowest common denominator for staying in contact. I’ve had the same email address for almost twenty years, and at this point moving to another would be painful. Discord is another more modern messaging platform that is worth trading information on, but remember it is also a closed platform owned by a single company and could at someday be the thing you are fleeing.
For me, you will always have this blog. I am going on my fourteenth year and I figure much like Slim Pickens I am going to be riding this bomb to the ground. This will always have some cogent way of contacting me available to you.
The post Flipping Birdsite the Bird appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! Over the last several days I have fielded a large number of questions about Mastodon and the Fediverse at large. There is one aspect that I hinted about in my guide post, but did not really cover in detail and that is how to move instances. I bring this up in part because yesterday I moved instances. It is something that I have done a number of times over the years for various reasons. For fun here is a quick rundown:
Mastodon.cloud – I started here because I had no clue how anything worked and was joining during another wave of mass exodus from Twitter in 2018.
Elekk.xyz – I was not there long and then moved to Elekk because in the directory it reported to be a gaming focused instance. While gaming discussion does happen I was kinda surprised by how not true that statement was.
Nineties.Cafe – My friend Liore decided to start up an instance and happily moved over, and ended up helping with the administration and moderation a bit. We had some fun times here.
MMORPG.Social – After awhile Nineties.Cafe died down and my friend Gazimoff wanted to try and create an MMORPG focused social network, and as such I moved houses once again and helped a bit with administration and moderation.
Elekk.xyz – When things got too hard for Gaz to keep it running, I migrated back to Elekk and mostly went into read only mode for awhile, occasionally favoriting and posting daily blog posts but not a ton of direct interaction.
Mstdn.social – Then yesterday I moved once again to a larger instance run by a lovely Dutch fellow that goes by Stux, and is more general purpose.
To most people this is going to seem like madness, but in truth instance migration is built into the fabric of the Fediverse and a rather normal custom. Why did I decide to pick up my box and move it to another home? Well the reality is in the time I had been semi-afk on Elekk, it became a much more locked down environment than I realized and as a result I had been severed from a number of people on Mastodon.social and Mastodon.online, who through no fault of their own decided to pick the big flagship instances that some instance operators are blocking. Elekk is still a lovely place and if you are there currently there is zero reason to ever leave, that is unless you ALSO have friends in places that you could not communicate with.
Most instances that you would be migrating to or from are going to be running Mastodon as the backend software. Pleuroma is also extremely popular, but I have no experience with those instances and as a result I am uncertain how this process works there. However if you see an interface that looks something like this when you go into user preferences, you are on a Mastodon based instance. Under Account > Account Settings there is a functionality that allows you to move from one instance to another. There are two ways to do this, but the first is automated where you plug in the information for the instance you are moving to, and go through a series of dialogs to indicate which bits of data you want transferred. The instance you are leaving will then go dormant and show that you have moved to a new instance (will show this shortly).
If for whatever reason there is a difference in software versions, a misconfiguration… or something purposefully blocking this functionality there is another method. Essentially you can go into the Data Export section of the Mastodon user preferences screen and dump individual CSV files for each of the pieces of data you might want to migrate. Then on your new instance you can go into the Import screen of the same area and pull in the individual CSV files. Something you need to know about this process is you can migrate the people you follow, but you cannot migrate your followers. This moving process happens often enough that when someone gets a notification that you have followed them on a new account, most of the time they click follow out of habit. The Fediverse in general is way less focused on clout and making follower numbers go up. I personally like this manual process because it allows me to edit the CSV which is just a text file, and remove any accounts that I might not want to carry over to the next instance for any reason.
When someone goes to your old profile, they are going to see something like this indicating that the account has gone dormant and moved. Notice how my header image and avatar are greyed out, and in the side there is a note indicating that I have moved to @Belghast@Mstdn.Social. What is nice about this process is that if anyone happens to stumble upon any of your older “toots” out in the ether, there will be a breadcrumb trail that can lead them back to your active account. Among all of those accounts I talked about earlier, the only instances that are still alive are Mastodon.cloud and Elekk.xyz, and as a result I logged into both of them yesterday and set up my redirections.
Hopefully through this little sequence you can see that the process of moving instances is nowhere near as tedious as it might sound at first. As always if you have any questions about the process please feel free to drop me a line below, or if you are yourself dabbling in the Fediverse feel free to reach out to me @Belghast@Mstdn.Social. There are certain customs and traditions in the Fediverse that might see a bit odd at first, but over the last four years I have gotten accustomed to them. I am always willing to help new folks as they start down this journey.
The post Moving Your Home Fediverse Instance appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good morning friends. It was not my original intent to make this post but after having several people ask me to do one I am bending to public sentiment, or at least as public as this blog audience and my social sphere is. I’ve been on Mastodon or as it is more correctly known The Fediverse, since the great Wheaton Exodus of 2018. Most people left… I stayed around at least partially active and have some words to say about the matter. These are by no means authoritative words, because like many things the Fediverse is what you make of it. However I am still going to fill a post with words nonetheless.
So You Want to Leave Twitter?
Every so often an event happens to make people extremely nervous about the future of their social media platforms. We’ve gone through this many times over the course of the years with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, and even further back when you start counting instant messaging platforms and IRC networks. So what happened to cause this current disturbance int he force? Basically an asshole bought Twitter, and has spouted off some random bullshit as he is wont to do about his grand plans for it. What is going to happen as a result is anyone’s guess. Elon could be playing 5D chess right now and trying to rattle the cage to get the stock price to go down… so he can pay less to buy the company. He could also be completely serious because he has had more than one run in with a Twitter user… like this situation where a bot was tracking his plane.
I wanted to start this post with a bit of editorializing, to get it out of the way. Twitter can be an awful experience for anyone who is being harassed or is in any way marginalized and abused because of it. Twitter can also be a magical place where you can connect to people of similar interests from around the world. Coming up this Friday, it will mark my thirteenth year on the platform and I have seen so many things over those years and it has both positively and negatively impacted my mental health. There is no replacement for Twitter… I know I have looked many times. There are OTHER networks that exist out there, but if you go into them attempting to remove twitter and replace it with something else… you are going to end up sorely disappointed. Again I know… I have looked… and while I enjoy the various places I have found in the process there is no direct Twitter Killer just like there is no WoW Killer (other than sometimes itself).
The fediverse (a portmanteau of “federation” and “universe”) is an ensemble of federated (i.e. interconnected) servers that are used for web publishing (i.e. social networking, microblogging, blogging, or websites) and file hosting, but which, while independently hosted, can communicate with each other. On different servers (instances), users can create so-called identities. These identities are able to communicate over the boundaries of the instances because the software running on the servers supports one or more communication protocols which follow an open standard.[1] As an identity on the fediverse, users are able to post text and other media, or to follow posts by other identities.[2] In some cases, users can even show or share data (video, audio, text, and other files) publicly or to a selected group of identities and allow other identities to edit other users’ data (such as a calendar or an address book).Wikipedia
Twitter is a single open platform and everyone on it can see everyone else on it and all of the content contained within… with a few caveats for things like blocks and mutes. The Fediverse instead is a group of individual platforms running on the same protocol and agreeing to “federate” data between them in order to facilitate communication across multiple platforms at the same time. There are many different software platforms running on this shared protocol but the most popular of these is called Mastodon. This is in part why everyone mistakes the name of the broader platform for Mastodon, when in actuality it is just a subset of the greater Fediverse running on ActivityPub. There is some nuance here but really for sake of understanding that is about all you really need to know.
Usernames and Instance Names
In The Fediverse you are your username combined with your Instance name. So for example I currently reside on the Elekk.xyz instance of the Fediverse which is largely gaming focused. I am Belghast on that instance and in order to reach me you would use my username and the instance name like this:
@belghast@elekk.xyz
Essentially you are telling once instance who has authority over your account. When you follow someone from another server, there is some verification that takes place to make sure that both accounts are valid before setting up the syndication of content between them. Once followed, that user will effectively act like they are on your instance with you and you will see content from them similar to following someone on twitter.
The Feeds
The default web interface for Mastodon/Fediverse looks an awful lot like Tweetdeck, so for me it is extremely familiar and comfortable. However at a high level the Fediverse itself functions a little different than twitter. Everyone has Four feeds that they can access without any additional configuration. Lets talk about these and give a quick overview of how each functions.
Home – This is essentially a feed of everyone you are following on your account. Unlike twitter you will often times see partial conversations as the @ behavior is a little odd at times.
Notifications – This is a feed of mentions, favorites, and boots… which is the equivalent of a retweet. There are no quote retweets in the Fediverse, so those simply don’t exist.
Local – This is a feed of everything that is being talked about currently on your local instance and is ultimately what gives a given server a “community” feel.
Fediverse – This is everything being talked about on the Fediverse as a whole or at least the servers that your instance is currently Federating content for.
Apart from that you can create columns for Hashtags and create user lists similar to twitter and configure your interface to include these. There are also mobile apps but I will get into those later.
Post Audience
Let’s talk about a little quirk that is a bit different from Twitter. Each post you make has the ability to change the audience that it is currently targeting. In twitter when you send someone a direct message, it shows up in a completely different interface. When you send someone a Direct message in the Fediverse, there is a visual indication that it is private but it shows up in your feed. The only difference between the two is that the “audience” is set to one or more users. You get to this interface by clicking the Globe icon and you have a handful of options by default. I am going to run through these but please note that various servers have various other options because these can be configured by the server admin.
Public – This shows as available to anyone who is federating content with your server and is watching the local feed of the server.
Unlisted – If someone is following you directly they will see the content or if someone clicks on your profile, but otherwise it will not show up in public timelines.
Followers-only – This will only show up if someone follows you, and will not show in public feeds or on your timeline if someone clicks through and is not following you.
Direct – This is flagged to only show up as the users included in the message.
This message was going around yesterday and causing some great concern. The truth is that nothing you say online or on your phone should ever been considered private full stop. There is some nuance here, but everything that you say on ANY platform… is readable by someone. When I used to run forums all the time, it would have been trivial for me to get in and read private messages sent between users. I didn’t do that because it would be a violation of privacy. Having administered a Fediverse server, the truth is there is no EASY back end interface to allow admins to read your messages. They would have to get into the table structure and mung around with the data to find them… but just like your corporate email administrators can read your messages… it is a possibility. Someone at twitter can also read your messages as well… you never had any privacy there either.
That might not be the assurance that you want, but it is the truth. So let’s move on to another “quirk” of the network when some things start to break down.
Remember the Joy of Netsplits?
The largest “Instance” is called Mastodon.social and there is a similarly sized overflow instance called Mastodon.online. The first is run by a man named Gargon, who lists himself as the CEO and Lead Developer for the Mastodon project. He is both revered and reviled depending upon which segment of the broader Fediverse you are talking to, and mostly based on my long distance view of his actions… does whatever the hell he wants without taking into account the suggestions of other server admins. Mastodon.social is both the most twitter-like of instances, but also largely lawless and un-moderated. It could just be the sheer scale of the server, but little has been done to take action on known bad actors on both .social and .online.
So instead various segments of the community and server admins have taken action for them. This means that sometime between I went absent in December 2021 and now… the instance I am on has actively stopped federation with those two servers. That is one of the unique “features” of the Fediverse is that each community can determine who they will and will not accept posts from. The end result however is that you can have users on two different server instances that cannot communicate with each other… effectively breaking the “miracle” of open federation. I culled through my friends list yesterday removing everyone that I could no longer reach and it was not an enjoyable thing. Apparently votes were taken among the community I am on, but I was not paying attention at the time and as such did not get to vote.
Moving Instances
One of the interesting features of the Fediverse is that essentially took into account that it is unlikely that you are going to stay on the same instance forever. If decisions like blocking an instance end up harshing your enjoyment of the platform, you can effectively pick up “your house” and move it. There are semi-automated and manual ways that you can export all of the people you are following, blocking, and muting and import them into a brand new account on a different instance. This does not move the people who are following you, but when you move you will ultimately ping everyone when you “follow” them from the import, and given that this is a fairly common practice most people just take it as a normal practice on the network.
During the course of my stay on the Fediverse I started on Mastodon.Online, then decided that the community was not my jam and moved to Elekk.xyz. When my good friend Liore decided to roll her own instance I moved again to Nineties.Cafe while it was active, and then again when my friend Gazimoff started MMORPG.social moved over there. In both of those cases I helped with the moderation and administration a bit, or at least enough to understand what a pain in the ass it is. Finally when both of those instances ended… I came back to Elekk.xyz and reactivated my account there. One of the default features of The Fediverse is the ability to go into user preferences and indicate you have moved and the account that you are moving to.
Remember the Term Netiquette?
Since every server that you interface with is effectively its own small island on the larger collective federated platform, they are each going to have their own “community norms”. For example Elekk.xyz the gaming instance that I hang my hat on tends to be very queer and very liberal. There are going to be instances that are very much the opposite of that… in fact the new “Trump” social network is running on the exact same open platform as is Parler that darling of the rightwingers. This is in part why finding a community that fits you is so important. However one of the things you are going to see a lot more on the Fediverse than on Twitter is “Content Warnings” because they actually do something. The above screenshot is an example of the interface when I have clicked the CW icon, giving me a line to write what my warning entails and then the normal dialog for composing a message.
What is shown to other users is something that looks like the above image. You get a line indicating what the warning is and then a Show More button allowing you to unroll the image. You can go into the back end interface and determine if you want this default behavior to happen or not, but honestly I find it terribly useful. If you want to “toot” about game spoilers then you absolutely can, just indicate that your content warning is a game spoiler and what game it is for and talk away. Anyone who responds to the original message is going to will also be wrapped within the content warning keeping the thread hidden from anyone who does not want to look upon it.
Similarly you can mark images as sensitive and they will not by shown by default unless the user clicks on them. The negative side of this is that users will self police their instances and give you a piece of their mind if you are posting something potentially triggering that does not happen within a content warning or sensitive flag. Another thing that the fediverse is extremely big on is accessibility, and as such there are users who will give you a good deal of grief if you make it your practice to regularly post images without descriptions. To get to this interface click the Edit button after uploading an image, and it will bring up the dialog shown above allowing you to give a description of the image for the visually impaired. It also has a functionality where it attempts to auto-describe it with AI… but that does not seem to work on any of the video game screenshots I have tried it on.
Read the Room
If I had one piece of advice to give potential folks migrating over to the Fediverse, is to lurk for a bit and read the room. Scroll through the local feed to see what sorts of interactions are happening on the server. Each Instance Server in the Fediverse honestly has more akin with an old school forum than it does Twitter. When I used to join forums all the time for different groups of friends, or even more modernly new discords… I would attempt to pattern my own behavior after the behavior of what I was seeing in the community. That is not to say that I would behave significantly differently than I normally do, I would just attempt to adopt the customs of a given server/forum/discord.
The Fediverse/Mastodon is not the new Twitter and honestly anyone saying that is being disingenuous. I’ve been here roughly four years and what I found instead was an interesting and wildly different community to the one I had on twitter. It can scratch a bit of the same itch, but if you go into this experience looking for a one to one replacement, then I feel like you are going to be sorely disappointed. I posted a long “explainer” thread yesterday not in an attempt to get people to convert, but to explain the network at a high level. Your are more than welcome to join me there however. If you are interested in Elekk.xyz I can send you an invite, because it is an invite only community. However that said I myself do not play on burning down Twitter any time soon. I’ve simply existed in both places for a long while… as I also exist on Instagram and to a very limited degree Facebook.
The post The Fediverse: A Wildly Incomplete Primer appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
