It's clear that Twitter has been circling the drain for years, but things have been especially bad in recent times. I haven't quit (I have some sympathy with the viewpoint don't cede territory to fascists) but I try to read it much less, and I certainly post much less.

Especially at the moment, I really appreciate distractions.

Last time I wrote about Mastodon (by which I meant the Fediverse1), I was looking for a new instance to try. I settled on Debian's social instance2. I'm now trying to put any energy I might spend engaging on Twitter, into engaging in the Fediverse instead. (You can follow me via the handle @jon@dow.land, I think, which should repoint to my actual handle, @jmtd@pleroma.debian.social.)

There are other potential successors to Twitter: two big ones are Bluesky and Facebook-owned Threads. They are effectively cookie-cutter copies of the Twitter model, and so, we will repeat the same mistakes there. Sadly I see the majority of communities and sub-cultures I follow are migrating to one or the other of these.

The Fediverse (or the Mastodon-ish bits of it) should avoid the fate of Twitter. JWZ puts it better and more succinctly than I can.

The Fedi experience is, sadly, pretty clunky. So I want to try and write a bit from time to time with tips and tricks that might improve people's experiences.

First up, something I discovered only today about Mastodon instances. As JWZ noted, If you are worried about picking the "right" Mastodon instance, don't. Just spin the wheel.. You can spend too much time trying to guess a good answer to this. Better to just get started.

At the same time, individual instances are supposed to cater to specific niches. So it could be useful to sample the public posts from an entire instance. For example, to find people to follow, or decide to hop over to that instance yourself. You can't (I think) follow an entire instance from within yours, but, they usually have a public page which shows you the latest traffic.

For example, the infosec-themed instance infosec.exchange has one here: https://infosec.exchange/public/local

These pages don't provide RSS or Atom feeds3, sadly. I hope that's on the software's roadmap, and hasn't been spurned for ideological reasons. For now at least, OpenRSS provide RSS/Atom feeds for many Mastodon instances. For example, an RSS/Atom feed of the above: https://openrss.org/infosec.exchange/public/local

One can add these feeds to your Feed reader and over time get a flavour for the kind of discourse that takes place on given instances.

I think the OpenRSS have to manually add Mastodon instances to their service. I tried three instances and only one (infosec.exchange) worked. I'm not sure but I think trying an instance that doesn't work automatically puts it on OpenRSS's backlog.

  1. the Fediverse-versus-Mastodon nomenclature problem is just the the tip of the iceberg, in terms of adoption problems. Mastodon provides a twitter-like service that participates in the Fediverse. But it isn't correct to call the twitter-like service "Mastodon" because other softwares also participate in/provide that service. And it's not correct to call it "Fediverse" because that describes a bigger thing, with e.g. youtube clones also taking part. I'm not sure what the right term should be for "the twitter-like thing". Also, everything I wrote here is probably subtly wrong.↩
  2. Debian's instance actually runs Pleroma, an alternative to Mastodon. Why should it matter? I think it's healthy for there to be more than one implementation in an open ecosystem. However the experience can be janky, as the features don't perfectly align, some Mastodon features/APIs are not documented/standardised/etc.↩
  3. I have to remind myself that the concept of RSS/Atom feeds and Feedreaders might need explaining to a modern audience too. Perhaps in another blog post.↩

Comments

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comment 1
Not everyone you don't agree with ("tolerate") is a fascist.
Comment by Anonymous,
comment 3

Not everyone you don't agree with ("tolerate") is a fascist.

Of course not. I don’t have a problem with things I disagree with. I welcome debate! Twitter’s problems are much deeper than that. It’s overrun with bots and astroturfers. Those aren’t tools of honest debate. It’s also tolerant of some people with hateful ideologies, that aren’t worthy of debate, and shouldn’t be tolerated in any civic space.

jon,
comment 5

The Pleorma link in the footnote is broken.

Thanks for pointing that out; I've now fixed it.

jon,

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