...because where else are we gonna go?
I admit I was a little sad to see twitter turn into what it's turned into. Why was twitter important? Because it was the place where the whole world went to argue about politics and current affairs, get it out of our system, and get on with our day.
That space - dare I say safe space?! - is breaking down under a toxic storm of rampaging trolls, declining numbers of real people (or "normies" in the local dialect) and a basically incompetent management. People are re-entering the real world after almost 3 years in isolation and they're tired, so very tired, of the yelling and posturing and pointless, performative arguments that never end.
Here's when you know things are bad: is when the Meta sites are where you go to relax and find peace. (Not that they haven't had their share of bad stuff, but I covered that on my other blog.)
And Mastodon really wants to take it's place, but...
First of all, go to mastodon.com and you'll find...backhoes and stuff like that. I bet they're wondering why their website stats are suddenly through the roof!
No, you're supposed to go to mas.to - that's just for the basic site. For many categories and specialty servers, you have to create an "instance" with it's own compressed URL. I've seen howlr.me and mamot.fr and toot.thoughtworks ... you get the idea.
And you then have to set up your username in the context of said URL, and then establish the rules and framework for your instance, and manage it after it launches. Yeah, I'm not looking forward to explaining any of this to my elder relatives either...
But the closest thing to a homepage Mastodon has is mas.to, and when you scroll the preview?
Yes, that's right. It looks exactly like twitter from about 2015.
Including all the same people. ALL of them.
Literally the only thing that changes is the colors, and you can tweet more characters. Sorry, did I say tweet? I meant toot.
Toot. Seriously.
Why is this any different from far right people leaving Fox News for Newsmax? Or leaving twitter for Telegram groups or sketchy apps like Parler or Gab? One sign your worldview is too toxic for anyone to deal with is when you describe everyone else in your life with terms like "normies", and another is when you have to leave the "public square" and find the secret clubhouses where freaks like you can tolerate each other.
But if that's how things are going to be, then I say get ready to adapt. Make a blog and include a blogroll (working on this as I type, really). If you want people to see the blog, make a Substack and promote it (not doing that yet).
Look for weird vBulletin sites that cater to stuff you like to do. They're harder to find because they might have bad SEO and Google discriminates against non-SEO-optimized sites regardless of how good they are. When you do find them, amplify them too. No algorithms, no AI...just word of mouth again.
Finally, if you have a good expertise in how the internet works, then set up tools that help people find what they're looking for and find their tribe online, without the interference of giant corporations or tyrannical megalomaniacs demanding obedience and silencing dissent.
We can do it!
