TheaNov 6, 2022

I keep seeing people say Mastodon is nothing like Twitter. And they’re right.

Mastodon is an echo of the old internet, it’s decentralised, chaotic. What you get depends on your sysadmin. You can’t search, everything has to be shared to you by a human. Networks split apart and rejoin. What you see is your unique connection to it.

Is this good? Maybe. But for me that’s the internet I grew up with. No algorithms, no targeted adverts, just human interaction, and it was glorious.

Show threadTheaNov 6, 2022

This also is very much like early Twitter. I joined in 2007. Twitter was a cheap group SMS service, it connected you to your friends not to companies and celebrities.

I get that I’m not like most people. I grew up in a very conservative rural area so the internet has always been my connection to friends and peer groups, a way to converse with people rather than a way to escape or get famous.

Show threadactual chris  Nov 6, 2022
@sitharus I came here to say this and you beat me to it. My first experience of the internet was BBSes I paid actual money to connect to. I also joined Twitter in 2007. Back then, you didn’t need to worry about your “reach”, you just posted whatever you were thinking even if it was like what song happened to be playing at the moment.
Show threadJeff RobertsNov 6, 2022
@jazzsequence @sitharus have been thinking about how this has that fabulously weird BBS feel. It’s a great feeling to rediscover!
Show threadOnemorejess3
@reliablyjeff @jazzsequence @sitharus If I can add (sorry to barge in), yeah, I had been thinking of the old newsgroups, the sci./alt. ones back before the Web was really a thing outside universities. 😀
Dec 12, 2022 at 2:10pmMastodon for Android