Twitter Alternatives: The Great Migration
Posted: Wed Dec 21, 2022 11:07 am
Falsehoods Unchallenged Only Fester and Grow
http://thefogbow.com/forum/
At the weekend, Musk briefly banned all links to the rival service and suspended users who tweeted out their Mastodon usernames, but has now admitted the apparent move to prevent Twitter users migrating was an error. “That one was a mistake,” Musk said on a Twitter livestream with a former intern on Tuesday night, adding: “Fucking post Mastodon all goddamn day long, I don’t care. From an evolutionary standpoint, how’d that work out for the mastodons?”
Mozilla, the developer of the popular Firefox browser, seems to disagree with that take, joining the rush to create a presence on the platfrom. On Tuesday it announced it would begin to run a Mastodon “instance”, one of the decentralised servers upon which the social network rests.
“Our intention is to contribute to the healthy and sustainable growth of a federated social space that doesn’t just operate but thrives on its own terms, independent of profit- and control-motivated tech firms,” said Steve Teixeira, chief product officer at Mozilla, which is owned by an non-profit foundation.
“We’re living through the consequences of 20 years of centralised, corporate-controlled social media, with a small oligopoly of large tech firms tightening their grip on the public square,” he added. “In private hands, our choice is limited, toxicity is rewarded, rage is called engagement, public trust is corroded, and basic human decency is often an afterthought. Getting from the internet we have to the internet we want will be a heavy lift.”
Mastodon founder says investors lining up since Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover
Eugen Rochko has ‘offers of hundreds of thousands of dollars’ from Silicon Valley private equity firms
Dan Milmo Global technology editor
Wed 28 Dec 2022 16.47 GMT
The founder of Mastodon has said he has rejected approaches from more than five US-based investors, as the Twitter rival grows in popularity after Elon Musk’s chaotic debut as a social media owner.
Eugen Rochko, who launched the open-source social network in 2016, told the Financial Times he had received the offers from Silicon Valley private equity firms to put “hundreds of thousands of dollars” into the product.
The popularity of Mastodon has surged since the $44bn acquisition of Twitter by Musk in October. Rochko said last week that Mastodon had jumped from 300,000 monthly active users to 2.5 million after the Twitter deal, which has seen Musk reinstate banned accounts such as Donald Trump’s and temporarily suspend journalists at publications including the New York Times and Washington Post.
Rochko, a German software developer, told the FT his platform’s status as a non-profit organisation was “untouchable” and its independence was part of its appeal to users. Mastodon has more than 9,200 patrons on Patreon, the online membership service, who are contributing more than £28,000 a month to the platform between them.
“Mastodon will not turn into everything you hate about Twitter,” he said. “The fact that it can be sold to a controversial billionaire, the fact that it can be shut down, go bankrupt and so on. It’s the difference in paradigms [between the platforms].”
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... r-takeover
Post.news feels like the unfortunate result of a drunken night between Twitter and Facebook.
https://mastodon.social/@scottjshapiro/ ... 2540267348
Some Tricks To Making Mastodon Way More Useful
(Mis)Uses of Technology
from the a-non-beginners-guide dept
Thu, Dec 29th 2022 10:53am -
Mike Masnick
It’s been interesting to watch over the last few months as tons of people have migrated from Twitter to Mastodon (or similar compatible ActivityPub-based social media platforms). I’ve noticed, however, that some people keep running into the same issues and challenges as they discover that Mastodon is different than what they’re used to with Twitter. There are a few tips and tricks I’ve been sharing with various people that seemed pretty broadly applicable, so I figured it was worth doing a post laying them out.
A couple of quick things to note: these are unlikely to be universal. It’s just a few of the things that I’ve found that take the Mastodon experience to a new, better, more useful level. In other words, yes, this is highly subjective. Also, some of the tools I’m discussing are relatively new, often developed by users who saw the need and decided to build something (again, this is something that’s nice about the open platform that enables anyone to see something that they feel can be improved… and improve it). This also means that it’s highly likely that there will be even more of these kinds of tools and add-ons from others in the near future, and they may surpass most of the suggestions here. This isn’t meant to be a comprehensive list.
Separately, there are a million “how to get started with Mastodon” posts and articles out there. If you’re brand new to Mastodon, I highly recommend checking those out first to get the basics down. This post is more about taking your Mastodoning to a new level. Perhaps the most comprehensive guide is found at Fedi.tips. A few other good beginner posts are Adam Field’s post on Medium, Dell Cameron’s guide at Gizmodo, Tamilore Oladipo’s guide at Buffer, Amanda Silberling’s guide at TechCrunch, and, finally, Noelle’s wonderful GuideToMastodon.com, which kicks off with the same advice I’ve given tons of people: DON’T PANIC. You’ll figure it out. Lots of people have and so will you.
All of those should give you a pretty good basis for understanding Mastodon, and (in particular) some of its differences from Twitter, which seem to be the things that trip people up the most.
https://www.techdirt.com/2022/12/29/som ... re-useful/
Mastodon instance dedicated to professionnal and independant medias/non-profit organisation
Back to the future: how Mastodon is restoring the lost art of online conversation
The new social network and its interconnected ‘fediverse’ is a welcome alternative to blustering rival Twitter and Elon Musk
John Naughton
Sat 21 Jan 2023 16.00 GMT
When Twitter first appeared in July 2006, I was enchanted by it. At one point, some geek created an app that logged tweets and geolocated them in real time on a map of the world, so you could watch little dots popping up all over the globe. (I even made a short video recording of my screen and set it to music, but didn’t put it online because I didn’t own the music rights, and now I can’t find it. Sigh – such is digital life.)
What I loved about Twitter at the beginning was that it enabled you to plug into the thought streams of people you liked or admired. Like all good things, though, that came to an end when the platform embarked on the algorithmic curation of users’ feeds to increase “engagement” (and, it hoped, profits). And from then on, it became increasingly tiresome, though I kept my account. But when it became clear that Elon Musk was going to buy the platform – and wreak havoc – I decided to explore possible alternatives.
Like many other people, my gaze alighted on Mastodon as a possible refuge from the Musk-induced madness. After all, it offered its users the same kind of microblogging facilities. But there the similarities ended. Twitter is a single site. Mastodon, in contrast, is a protocol – “a system of rules for spinning up your own social network that can also interact with any other following the same code”. So whereas Twitter is a universe, Mastodon is what has come to be called a “fediverse” – that is, a decentralised network made up of a large number of semi-independent nodes, or as one observer put it: “A distributed network of Twitter-like services.”
That sounds intimidating, but in reality, it’s relatively straightforward. Joining Twitter involves just signing up on twitter.com; but to become a Mastodon user, you have to sign up to one of those semi-independent nodes. They’re basically just servers run by individuals or groups, and Mastodon helpfully provides a list of ones that you might consider joining. Once in, your identity is linked to the server on which you have an account. So if you’ve chosen the username “vici” on the server arsenalfc.social, then your username will be @vici@arsenalfc.social. And you can follow any other Mastodon user, no matter what server they happen to be on.
more https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... nversation
Mastodon isn't really that hard. You can pretty much pick any serve as your "local" server. From there, you can read your "home" feed, which is everyone you follow, your "local" feed, which is everyone on your particular server (also called an "instance") and the "federated" or "global" feed which is everyone from all feeds combined.Slim Cognito wrote: ↑Sun Jan 22, 2023 10:17 am I went with Post instead of Mastadon. I feel like I'm stuck in Beta while the rest of the world is going VHS.
(Post is just so easy. I don't yet have time to figure out Mastadon, but I'll get there...eventually...probably.)
Foggy wrote: ↑Tue Jan 24, 2023 12:00 pm Yeah, apparently I can only search for people on my own instance (mastdn.party), and you simply can not do a Mastodon-wide search.
And without following anyone, your home page just sits there.
And Federated is a firehose, it streams past so fast in so many languages it's unusable.
And I am the leader of the Grumpy People usergroup for some odd reason.
But I'm not grumping about that, just everything else.
Yeah you can - I've found a number of people that way. You can search by @name, if you know it, or If you don't have their @name, you can enter their name or what you think they may be using as a handle, and it'll search for anyone with that as a name or partial name on all servers.
Local is the one I use most - it gives me everything on my instance/server and enough boosts from those yousers tomfind other interesting people to follow,And without following anyone, your home page just sits there.
Can't argue with that one!And Federated is a firehose, it streams past so fast in so many languages it's unusable.
Yep, and it works beautifully - I've used it before. It's a fairly simple process with good instructions and took less than t min to be et up on my new instance.
What to know about Bluesky, as Dril and AOC join the new Twitter alternative
A new option for people interested in leaving Twitter has big names and minimal features.
By Kelsey Ables and Heather Kelly
Updated April 28, 2023 at 1:09 p.m. EDT|Published April 28, 2023 at 4:07 a.m. EDT
Prominent Twitter users Dril, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Chrissy Teigen have found somewhere new to share their musings online. They’re joining Bluesky, the latest social media platform touted as a possible alternative to Elon Musk’s struggling site.
Musk took over Twitter in October, and in the months since, it has been riddled with glitches and changes, frustrating people who say the site now has a different feel. Many apps have tried to fill the gap — Mastodon being the most successful so far — but Bluesky seems to be the first to come close to striking Twitter’s offbeat tone. As more Twitter users flocked to Bluesky on Thursday, one account likened them to a group of people who “miraculously survived a plane crash together.”
Bluesky, in fact, could be Twitter’s doppelganger, its posts sound a lot like tweets, and at least for the time being, many people seem to be using it mostly to poke fun at the social media giant.
Here’s what to know about the latest buzzy social network.
WHAT TO KNOW
What is Bluesky?
Is Bluesky owned by Twitter?
Who is on Bluesky?
How can I join Bluesky?
How is it different from Twitter?
Are there other Twitter alternatives?
Follow the link for details of What To Know
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technolo ... -dril-aoc/
That is truth and why I am hanging back until all this crazy figures out what it is doing before fudging around.MN-Skeptic wrote: ↑Thu Jul 06, 2023 12:04 am https://twitter.com/DougJBalloon/status ... 4356714496
New York Times Pitchbot
@DougJBalloon
In the future, every Twitter alternative will be popular for 15 minutes.