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.
First off this morning you are getting a picture of Dolly and Dot for no apparent reason other than the fact that they are adorable and they should be your best friends too. Secondly this is going to largely be a Mastodon/Fediverse related topic, so your mileage may vary. Last week I started off the week with a post about my adventures in the “Federiverse” at that time. After some digging around I apparently used the wrong term, which was confusing given that both got used in equal parts as far as I could see. It turns out Fediverse as a concept dates back to at least 2008, whereas the Federiverse thing doesn’t have its own Wiki page and only really links to hashtags on mastodon… so I have edited my vocabulary to adopt the correct term.
Now I went through this little dance with the naming of the thing, largely because this is a sequence of events you are ultimately going to get used to if you truly blend into the culture on Mastodon and all of the other services using the ActivityPub protocol. Like me you will likely be coming from a background built upon using Twitter or “Birdsite” as a lot of the denizens of the fediverse refer to it as, and that came with a bunch of cultural norms. Mastodon and related services also have a lot of cultural norms and it can be sorta confusing getting adjusted to them. For the most part however folks seem to be genuinely nice about helping new users along the journey.
In gaming there have been several times where I was asked to join a guild or a clan with their own well established doctrine of “normal” behaviors. In many cases the choice was either to adapt to how things worked in that structure or to ultimately branch out and do your own thing. When I go into one of those situations I try and be hyper conscious about my actions and how they might impact others. Similarly I try very hard to not take anything for granted, and ultimately ask for permission rather than assume that I have it. This is also a complimentary mindset for joining Mastodon and making sure that you largely fit in with the flow of things. This morning I am going to talk about a few things that it took me a bit to sort out.
Gaming vs Gameing
One of the things that you are going to encounter as a gamer on Mastodon is that they regularly use an incorrect spelling of the word gaming. It took me a bit to sort this out, because for awhile I thought maybe this was a US English vs UK English sort of thing and maybe some people actually DO legitimately spell it with that E. Eventually I did what I have often done to learn things on the network… I asked the Fediverse and in response it spit back more than a few comments. Ultimately what it comes down to is “Gameing” is sort of their reaction to the “hardcoreification” of the “gamer” identity. There are folks that felt like that identity was co-opted by the super serious and elitist, leaving little ground for the more casual players who just want to enjoy gaming to its fullest without getting caught up in too much epeen braggery.
As a result they started using the misspelled and nonsensical “Gameing” to represent the more pure aspects of the joy that is discovering new and interesting things through video games. Understanding this now you will see me also adopting that hashtag at times when advertising my posts since I am not really the most serious person in nature. I lead off this post with a picture of Dolly and Dot afterall, so I am not exactly hard edge. This honestly dates back to a discussion that has sprung up numerous times in the blogosphere about how to identify a gamer, and if there is such a thing as “casual core”. Instead we can just skip past all of this and use the #gameing bit to indicate which side of that gulf we happen to reside on.
Caption Your Images
One of the things about Mastodon and the Fediverse in general is that they seem to really care about accessibility. What I mean by that is that your content is accessible by both sighted users and the visually impaired that may be using a screen reader app to check their social media. You will hear people talking about making sure to caption your images, but it took me a long while to actually sort out how that works. I thought by simply including text along with my image I was doing that. However once you have uploaded your image you can click on it with your mouse, or finger on a mobile client… and it brings up a box allowing you to had an explicit caption of what the image represents. It is a good habit to get into, but folks are understanding when you simply rush to post something and forget.
Delete and Redraft
Now say you post an image… and you want to fix the fact that you forgot to add a caption. Mastodon has this wonderful feature that is called Delete and Redraft… that is sorta like editing but not quite. Essentially it does what it says… it deletes your original toot and pulls the contents of it back into the editor so you can fix that typo or add that caption. This will of course nuke any interaction that has been done with a toot, but you are going to find that Mastodon is a network of people that don’t place quite as much emphasis on how many “favorites” or “likes” something got.
Using CW/Content Warning Tags
Another thing you are going to see a lot of is the wide and varied uses of the CW tag, or the collapsible [show more] [show less] blocks on posts. I am honestly still sorting out how I want to best use these, because there are a lot of different ways that they get used in the community. Firstly they should always be used if you are going to post NSFW content and when you click the CW button in your client it brings up a box that allows you to describe what sort of content is being posted. Additionally the community prefers that you use these in any situation where your post might trigger someone. For example I used them when I posted a picture of cookies yesterday, just in case someone out there with an eating disorder might be negatively influenced by that posting. I denoted in the description line “food, cookies” as a sort of short hand so people can understand why the tag is happening.
The other usage you will see an awful lot that I also have attempted to adopt myself, is using them to shorten long posts. For example the above image is of my Actively Playing pin on my profile. Without expanding it you just see the text “Actively Playing 2018-08-25” but then if you expand it shows all of the games mentioned and their equivalent hashtags. The interesting thing about CW is that if someone were to search for #MonsterHunter for example… they would eventually find my pinned toot even though the hashtag itself exists behind the block. The only negative of a CW is that it also always hides the visibility of the image. Basically this is the sort of thing you need to play with yourself to determine if you want to use it or not. However you are going to be urged gently (most of the time) to adopt some sort of regular usage of them by the community.
Pronouns
I have to admit here, I have never really put my pronouns in a social media profile not because I am oblivious to the need of such things… but more along the lines that I didn’t really mind whatever pronouns someone opted to using for me. If you want to call me She, it isn’t really going to bother me nor is referring to me as the more neutral Them. However in the middle of a conversation I had someone explain that seeing pronouns in your profile just makes them more comfortable, especially in situations where someone is trying really hard not to make any assumptions about anyone. Again this goes back to trying to ease into the water of a pool that is already full to the brim with people… and if it makes others more comfortable I will absolutely adopt that stance going forward. Similarly I suggest you move in that direction as well, and as such I am also going back and shimming the “he/him” bit into my older social media profiles as I come across them just to help ease the comfort levels of others.
Interact Freely
The other thing of interest about the Fediverse is that no one seems to consider it creepy if you just start commenting on random posts. That is absolutely a thing that happens due to the federated nature of the timeline… people who have no connection to you will find your posts and occasionally comment and no one takes offense to this. You are having a very public conversation and it is accepted that you are basically shouting into an open room, in part because Mastodon gives you the option to post privately or only to your followers along with the more public options. If you can see a post… it means it is perfectly fine for you to chime in on it. It is also perfectly normal to follow random people or boost their toots. This is one of the more refreshing things about the Fediverse in general is that there are not as many weird hangups about interactions. You are expected to branch out and meet new people through interactions, and generally speaking people seem to be way more open as a whole because the various content controls that Mastodon Instance owners have… tends to make it a much safer place for open discourse.
It has been an interesting experiment getting involved with this network. It feels more natural I guess the more I use it, and you too will go through a bit of an adjustment period. Granted I still very much use Twitter and I am not really looking for Mastodon to be a replacement. It is however a vastly different experience and as such I sort of treat it as its own thing. I’ve only scratched the surface of things I could say about my experiences but I figure at this point it is a long enough blog post. I would be curious to hear all of the little idiosyncrasies that you have found in getting adjusted.
One of the things that you probably already know about me by reading my blog… is that Twitter is my social media home. It is where with the release of this blog I carved out a place for myself online and then filled my feed full of other awesome gamers and bloggers. It was for years my happy place, where I came to get new ideas or interact with others about my own. Then something happened along the way that started to darken the environment. More politics started filtering their way into these discussions and with the introduction of the Gators, there was a massive chilling effect on this community I so loved. So it is a world that I still feel very connected to, and is still the primary source of communication I have for a lot of my friends… but the day to day interactions just don’t feel as good as they once did.
Hey, I made a Mastodon account. Come follow me there. So far it’s like early twitter, but gayer, so better in every single way??https://t.co/NMLEUjL7cH
The above tweet was sort of a catalyst for an interesting journey I have been on this weekend. Initially my thought was “why the hell does the metal band have a social network?”. It seems like I have been behind the times and another network sprung up without me knowing about it. Mastodon is essentially the latest not-twitter to show up on the block, but in truth by latest I mean it has been out in the wild since October of 2016 in one form or another. Twitter is the most readily available comparison but in truth it is doing a lot more than that, some of which honestly is a bit of a detriment to easily on-boarding new users.
Mastodon is a distributed and federated social network that is by nature decentralized, and while there is in fact a Flagship site called Mastodon.social, there are a ton of smaller communities that have downloaded the open source software and are running their own instances. The largest of these is the primarily non-English speaking Pawoo.net with around 400,000 users, and the smallest ones somewhere in the sub-100 user range. No one person controls the network as essentially all of the instances out there have control over the code base of their own server… pending they don’t tweak the general network protocol settings.
So you are probably thinking to yourself, what use is a social network if it is a bunch of disconnected islands? This is where the Federated part comes in allowing users on different island states to talk to each other freely as though they were on the same network. That means I can take my @Belghast@Elekk.xyz account and talk freely to @Tamrielo@Tabletop.social or @x1101@social.nasqueron.org. The naming following an email like scheme with @Username and then @Instance following it if they are not also on your local instance.
The user interface has a very “I swear I am using TweetDeck” feel to it, but it is just subtly different enough to trip you up a little bit. However it was extremely easy for me to shift over to using it comfortably because a lot of the things I was used to doing were also here. Instead of a Tweet you have a Toot since Mastodons… and instead of a Retweet folks call it a Boost, which in some ways is a more pleasant way of thinking about it given you are trying to share someone else’s content with the world. Significantly different is the fact that you can change the visibility of a given “toot” so that it shows as public, unlisted, follower-only or is instead a direct message to a specific user or users mentioned.
There is also the Content Warning tag that allows users to hide anything that might be sensitive behind one of the Show More walls that you are seeing in the screenshot above. Each community uses this a little differently, and a lot of people will simply use it as a way of truncating a long post so that it doesn’t clog the feeds of others with a wall of text or something that is image heavy. For example this weekend when I syndicated my podcast, I was able to give a little longer of an intro to it given the 500 character limit instead of 140/280 and hid most of that behind a CW tag for making life easier on the folks reading their timelines. The only thing that seems to be missing is the ability to add a comment along with a boost similar to the quoted retweet functionality that I use so often.
One of the other interesting things about the Federiverse as a lot of people call it… is that you can effectively start on one server and uproot and move to another. For example I started out on Mastodon.cloud because I simply did not understand at first how this network worked. It was a more general interest instance and quite honestly was still very awesome with a very nice admin. However the longer I used it, the more I realized that maybe I wanted to be on an instance that was more drift compatible to my own interests. I had a lot of great interactions with folks from Elekk.xyz and that lead me to investigate it closer… and when I saw the above image I knew that it was probably the right place for me.
One of the things that separates Mastodon from Twitter is that you have the ability to read essentially every public toot that comes across the server. You have a local timeline that shows you everything happening on your own instance, and a federated timeline showing you everything happening on all of the servers your local is connected with. It is probably best to think of this in MMO terms as your Local Timeline is your Guild Chat and your Federated Timeline is Trade or General.
The other thing that it feels like to me is an old dial-up BBS. During Fido.net era when they were loosely connected through a hub and spoke relay network, a user on one BBS to communicate with a user on any other connected BBS. However it sometimes took four or five days for the round trip depending on when you sent the message and when the person on the other end received and replied to it. In the Federiverse each of these instances is like your local BBS where you get to know everyone, with the ability to reach out and make friendships with anyone else in the larger connected community.
I feel like I have spent an awful lot of time talking about the hows and not much about the whys this morning… but unfortunately the WHY I am enjoying myself is going to have to come another day. Essentially the short version is… it feels like a throwback to a simpler time in the internet when we all were much more open to talking freely with each other. Thusfar everyone I have encountered has been charming and helpful in me getting settled into their neighborhood. There are a handful of us from the blogging space that have made a home for ourselves on Elekk.xyz, but there are so many other instances that I highly suggest you start out on JoinMastodon.org and see some of the other instances. I am finding out it is weirdly customary to have multiple accounts on multiple instances. Tam for example has one on TableTop.Social, Elekk.xyz and some Game Dev related one that I don’t know the address for.
Does this mean I am leaving twitter? Probably not, but I do find Mastodon to be a much more engaging network than the current state twitter is in. If you too sorta miss the days when the internet and social engagement was simpler, or have a hankering for an even older time of BBSes and IRC Servers… then maybe it might too feel comfortable. It is more than likely always going to remain a niche thing, but I think in the grand scheme of things that is its strength. We talked about this at length on the podcast, but maybe having a bunch of fragmented islands leads to a better community than having one mega server as it were. I know we have commented as such in various MMO communities, so why would that same theory not apply to the broader social media?
