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Posts about Mastodon (RSS, JSON)
Friday, 26 January 2024
Saturday, 17 June 2023
— Mastodon’s cultural and user-experience deficits impede its wider adoption. Much has been written about this recently but Bloonface’s post drives home an important point: users don’t care about the philosophy underpinning a technology, they just want to get stuff done.
Tuesday, 02 May 2023
— Mastodon announces an improved sign-up flow and new features in the future. Eugen Rochko’s posts reads like a direct reply to Erin Kissane’s critique from Sunday.
Monday, 01 May 2023
— Erin Kissane dissects Mastodon’s shortcomings, in terms of user experience and openness to better the experience for diverse(r) group of people.
tl;dr
If we want more people to enjoy what we believe are the benefits of something like Mastodon, it’s on us to make it delicious and convenient and multi-textured and fun instead of trying to shame people into eating their soysage and unsalted soup.
I hope all of that is actually possible for Mastodon, because a lot of great people very much want it to become a more welcoming place. But the longer Mastodon stays in Linux-on-the-desktop mode, the more likely those people are to take their energy somewhere where it’s valued.
Thursday, 20 April 2023
— Flipboard now offers four curated feeds—as in curated by humans—on Mastodon from their News, Technology, Culture and Science desks. And because these feeds are on Mastodon, they are also available as RSS. I’ve subscribed to the technology and culture feeds.
Monday, 10 April 2023
Mastodon Is a Lot Like Twitter
— This post on Mastodon concerning the 15-minute city demonstrates what I’ve been saying all along: When you purely look at how people argue, Mastodon isn’t any different than Twitter.
Here’s the post:
“My hot take on ‘15 minute cities’ is if you can get to the coffee shop within fifteen minutes, but the barrista who makes your drink can’t afford to live closer than a half-hour away, then you live in a theme park.” - Gareth Klieber #cities #urbanism #housing #transit #cycling
The take is not wrong. But it condenses one opinion about a hot-button topic to 278 characters. It’s pointed and missing nuance, which makes it more provocative aiming to receive more interaction, comments and shares. And it worked; it landed on Kottke’s blog, which has tens of thousands of readers.
Mickey Mouse and Goofy won’t be parading down the street at noon if the staff in a coffee shop have to travel more than fifteen minutes to work. The idea of the 15-minute city—to have all important amenities, including work, available within a short walk from your home—that ideal just isn’t fulfilled in the scenario. Although closer to the truth, phrasing it this way sounds rather boring. So many important questions are not asked: Is the ideal 15-minute city even attainable? What needs to happen to change our current cities? What role does public transport play? Would the car-manufacturing lobby play along?
And the replies: Pseudo-philosophic ramblings about privilege. Someone has to point out a small typo, to which the original author obviously needs to reply. Another person says “working class,” and the discussion only spirals around that for a while. Only a few comments dissect the issue with the original statement.
Is that any different from Twitter? Is that the nirvana of civility that the loudest advocates of Mastodon promised a couple of months ago? We’re past the honeymoon period now with Mastodon. A lot of people have joined the platform, and more conversations involve more participants. And the people that were the loudest on Twitter become the loudest on Mastodon: People with a puffed-out sense of mission, confidence and extroversion. None of this is worth moderating; there’s no bullying, nothing illegal or offensive in this conversation. But there’s no exchange of ideas, no listening—it’s people talking at each other instead of with each other.
It’s what drove me away from Twitter three years ago and what drove me away from Facebook before that. The underlying protocols and technology can change, but it will always be humans arguing on the Internet—it won’t ever change.
— The Verge’s Nilay Patel interviews Eugen Rochko, creator of Mastodon, the platform, and CEO of Mastodon, the company; covering a wide range of topics from the growth of Mastondon and its effects on the platform, open source governance structures, decentralised social-media protocols and, of course, content moderation.
Saturday, 28 January 2023
— The timeline era, a notion from Luke Harris, resonates a lot:
I’m bored of what I call “the timeline era”. Scanning an unending stream of disconnected posts for topics of interest is no longer fun, I prefer deciding what to read based on titles, or topic-based discussion.
What Twitter always lacked, what Mastodon already lacks, is deep thought. The technology behind Mastodon is exciting, but the way it works, the timeline, the reposts, and how people use it are no different from Twitter. Mastodon is too close to Twitter to present a viable alternative.
Tuesday, 27 December 2022
— Journalists don’t understand Mastodon. I’m glad we’re discussing another variation of “media people don’t understand blogs.” I can’t wait for “Tooting isn’t tweeting” and “Can Mastodon users also be journalists?”
Wednesday, 21 December 2022
— One of my gripes with the current hype around Mastodon is that the discussion around social-media alternatives focusses mostly on Mastodon, presumably because it’s that resembles Twitter the most.
But as Bastian Allgeier points out that Mastodon is just one part of a puzzle. Using IndieWeb protocols, other platforms, even websites, can exchange data with Mastodon and between each other.
There’s a lot of wisdom in being careful after all we’ve seen happening to Twitter in the past weeks. There’s even more than enough reason to be cynical about any future form of social media. Mastodon is being praised a lot right now and it will most definitely not be a magic healing potion for all our social problems.
But Mastodon is not a platform. Mastodon is just a tiny part of a concept many have been dreaming about and working on for years. Social media started on the wrong foot. The idea for the read/write web has always been different. Our digital identities weren’t supposed to end up in something like Twitter or Facebook or Instagram.
Decentralisation, Federation, The Indie Web: There were many groups silently working on solving the broken architecture of our digital social networks and communication channels – long, long before the “web 3” dudes tried to reframe it as their genius new idea.
Tuesday, 15 November 2022
— brands.town is a Mastodon instance that houses fake accounts of well-known brands, including a surprising amount from Australia like CentreLink, Metro Trains and the Australia Australia Australia Party. Full of valuable information.
Monday, 14 November 2022
— How big tech could hijack and crush Mastodon:
I think the real danger for the Mastodon/greater Fediverse community is that, should Mastodon really become the “next Twitter”, it will catch the attention of the other FAANGs. And the way the Fediverse is structured currently, it appears highly vulnerable to the old Embrace/Extend/Extinguish playbook
Quite ironic that the author decided to post this on Hacker News of all places.
Wednesday, 09 November 2022
— Simon Willison uses an interesting analogy to explain how Mastodon works. It’s like blogs. You can host your own or use a shared instance, and it also acts as a feed reader.
I sure hope that the rekindled interest in blogging won’t be stifled by everyone just moving from Twitter to Mastodon. Despite what everybody says, how different Mastodon feels, the parts I always hated about Twitter, the condensed hot takes optimised for likability and shareability and devoid of nuanced thinking — we would see that too on Mastodon once it takes off.