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Twitter alternatives

Puppycow

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Puppycow
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I know that there's a thread about CounterSocial, but I don't want to limit the discussion to just one.

Apparently there's also something called Mastodon that is a sort of alternative to Twitter:

Boosted by Twitter drama, Mastodon reaches 1 million active monthly users

Germany-based Mastodon has experienced rapid growth since Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, with nearly half a million users joining the network since October 27. While a fraction of the size of Twitter’s 238 million daily active users, Mastodon’s user base remains on a steep upward trajectory, growing from 60-80 new user registrations per hour prior to October 27 to thousands of registrations per hour today.

Twitter’s controversial new ownership — and recent product changes — have supercharged Mastodon’s expansion. Some users say that they were inspired to switch to Mastodon over to concerns about how Twitter’s functionality may change under Musk’s control, while others joined as a form of protest against Twitter’s new paid verification scheme and Musk’s heavy-handed approach to moderating certain forms of satire.
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Could Mastodon Really Become a Social Media Mammoth?
Launched in 2017 following rumors that right-wing tech titan Peter Thiel wanted to purchase Twitter, Mastodon was crafted as a not-for-profit alternative with all the best parts of the bird app (fun and informative microblogging, smooth user feeds, room for personal customization) and none of the worst (a bizarre content algorithm, user data collection, weak moderation, loads of far-right trolls). Instead of a C-suite and centralized farm of servers, control of the open-source Mastodon is granted to myriad volunteers who run specialized servers that can host participants and interact with other servers. The platform also explicitly bans hate speech and neo-Nazis. Otherwise, server moderators have pretty broad leeway over how they’d like their communities to function. But Mastodon has never boasted more than a few hundred thousand dedicated users.
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Until now that is. Now its user base seems to be growing pretty fast.
I guess it's sort of a non-profit volunteer thing. A bit like Wikipedia.

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

Jack Dorsey (Founder of Twitter) is apparently in the process of founding one too, called BlueSky. It's not out yet though.
 
Mastodon seems pretty good actually. I've heard it described as "what Twitter was like before it got popular".

I'm @arthwollipot@aus.social if you'd like to hang out.
 
I just signed up on Mastodon.

Bit of a learning curve, hard to find the people I follow on twitter. The newspapers and media that I follow either don't have much presence or I just can't find them.

Not too complicated, it'll just take a bit of time to get the hang of it.
 
I also signed up for Mastodon, but haven't dived in yet.

Whatever state Twitter devolves into, the one undeniable fact is that Musk will never get close to recouping his investment.
 
crescent said:
I just signed up on Mastodon.

Bit of a learning curve, hard to find the people I follow on twitter. The newspapers and media that I follow either don't have much presence or I just can't find them.

Not too complicated, it'll just take a bit of time to get the hang of it.
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Have you tried Twitodon? It can help track people down.
 
I have signed up for Matodon and also Tribel. However, I was wondering how safe they are from malware?

I ask this, because not long ago I was daft enough to download a QR app, which turned out to be Chinese spyware which had access to all your details such as bank account passwords, so I uninstalled it. The stupid thing was, one's phone has a camera function that recognises QR codes so you don't need a QR app! _Doh!

I note with Mastodon you have to choose which network you connect to. I was surprised it was already showing a photo I received in WhatsApp before I had even opened the WhatsApp message myself, in the profile setting section. It didn't ask permission so I was a bit taken aback that it accessed all my google photos.

Should we be wary...?
 
catsmate said:
Have you tried Twitodon? It can help track people down.
Click to expand...

I'll have to try that.

The thing that got me into twitter in the first place was that if properly curated, Twitter can work as a pretty good news aggregator. Especially for fast moving local events that don't get a vast amount of rapidly updating news coverage. Like wildfires, for example.

You get wildfires near where you live, then Twitter is great for getting an idea of what's going on. Local sheriff's and fire departments posting, resident's posting, some pretty smart and dedicated mapping/GIS/Remote sensing geeks contributing. Much much better than just trying to use the TV news to or news websites to figure out of my parent's house is going to burn down, or if any of my coworkers have become homeless. Local things like that don't seem to attract a lot of trolls and bots and such so it works really well.

Mastodon isn't there yet for that sort of thing, but maybe it'll get there as more users migrate to it. Or maybe it is there but I'm just not bright enough to figure that part out.

Also I noticed that Mastodon is blocked by my office's VPN - can't check it during my breaks.
 
My "social media" needs are met more that adequately by this forum and Cosmoqest. And since they have vastly fewer users, that means vastly fewer idiots.
I did look at the Twitter for my electric utility a couple of times this past weekend to see if they were as incompetent on Twitter as they are at providing electricity. They are.
 
I wasn't using Twitter much. I used it a fair bit in the past. But I'm getting a bit into Mastodon.
 
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It's important to note that since Mastodon is open-source, there are a bunch of third-party apps that might work better for someone than the official default app. I'm on iPhone so I'm checking out this article, but there are alternatives for Android too.

ETA: that article I linked to is longer than my attention span so I lost interest.
 
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Wudang said:
View from some mastodon users about the exodus from twitter and cultural differences between the two. Please consider reading.

https://www.hughrundle.net/home-invasion/
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I did. And thank you for posting it. It looks like Mastodon and the Fediverse is far more my kind of place than what Twitter became. I enjoyed Twitter once, a long time ago, but it has since become a platform for self-promotion rather than a purely social space. I should have adopted Mastodon years ago.
 
I haven't tried any of the third-party apps yet. If I find that I want to do something that the default app can't handle, I'll look into it.
 
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