FACTS ABOUT MASTODON

If you are curious about leaving the cooked turkey site and going to the elephant site, here are some important tips:

1. It sucks. But then, so does every site.

2. You can still shitpost. Take great glee.

3. Picking your server instance is super important.

Ideally you should start at a large instance, and leave because it's full of white suburban NIMBY reactionaries who joined in November because they were promised 0 uncomfortable experiences in their lives and lash out whenever this turns out not to be the case.

Then you move to a smaller server where suddenly you can't talk to your friends because the admin of your instance is feuding with the admin of their instance. Then you wait a month before you can move again.

In this regard, the feudal structure of Mastodon instances is very like early 2000s message boards, whenever the admin got drunk and deleted the site.

4. You can work around the feudalism by running Mastodon yourself. It's the size of a mastodon and costs a fortune.

You can run Pleroma, which is smaller, and is also favoured by Nazis by unfortunate historical accident. Pleroma is perfectly good software that fulfils a need for something smaller than Mastodon, but also the devs are definitely not Nazis but are the other ten guys at the table.

There was a hilarious moment where the guy behind Spinster was so obnoxious he got kicked out of Pleroma and started his own fork called Soapbox/Rebased. He is now known as Soapbox Terf.

The nice people went to Pleroma fork Akkoma, which Soapbox Terf calls the "tr***y server", a review I understand they were delighted by. Try that.

There's also Misskey, which is a bit weird and Japanese, and supports cat ears right there in the protocol.

5. Any bozo who complains about your posts with assertions about the Fediverse that assume it all runs on the rules of mastodon.social is one of the suburban NIMBYs and invariably joined in November. Block and don't look back.

6. If anyone annoys you about your posting, you can improve their feed for them by blocking them from ever seeing your posts. The blocking tools are marvellous.

7. There are NO QUOTE TWEETS on Mastodon and anyone who wants QUOTE TWEETS is an invader, pollutant and corrupting influence despoiling the suburban vistas of Mastodon who only wants quote tweets so they can wreak EVIL.

So quote-tweeting is well supported in Akkoma and Misskey (and forks thereof), is in the Treehouse fork of Mastodon, and will be coming to more Fediverse software soon.

UPDATE: once enough other fedi software adopted quoting, Mastodon finally put it in, implemented gratuitously differently because fuck you.

8. In Mastodon, Eugen Rochko has achieved the creation of something greater than himself. And he will *never forgive it*.

9. The Fediverse interprets Website Boy as damage and routes around him.

10. Mastodon is yet another demonstration that worse is better. So come onto Mastodon, and *be* that worse.
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EDIT: this post is attracting some very dumb reply guys. Consider *not* posting debate club fatuity.

@davidgerard I was lucky to drop right into a lovely instance
@mechmouse @davidgerard Same here. My one concern is that M* currently doesn't seem to be super-welcoming to BIPOC and I have zero idea how to go about fixing that. (Then again, I am one of those suburban NIMBYs that joined in November, so...up I shut.)
@thelaughingmuse @mechmouse @davidgerard What would "super-welcoming to BIPOC" look like?

@miasmo @mechmouse @davidgerard I have no idea. I've only a) seen few of my #BIPOC mutuals from Birdsite migrate here and thrive, and b) seen comments from BIPOC saying that they don't feel welcome here. I like @hellsop mention of specifically finding BIPOC mods/making sure your modstaff is not all of one mold, but building & maintaining MastoCulture shouldn't just be left up to admins/mods.

All I personally can think to do is, follow tags and boost stuff. And listen more than I speak there.

@thelaughingmuse @miasmo @mechmouse @davidgerard Right, it shouldn't be up only to administration/moderation efforts. But what's changed at Twitter to make it worse IS moderation efforts; specifically the lack of. And the previous Twitter community members that have fled Twitter, some to fediverse (here).

In favor of "administration" the resources for not having to put up with the shenanigans of deplorables does largely depend on administration. Entire servers, or whole domains of server-hosting networks can be filtered, limited, suspended
So the key steps are to rebuild one's follow list by using the available twitter-to-fedi migration tools, and then find an instance(server) that DOES do the kind of moderation that fosters the kind of community one wants, and then move there (also via the available tools to do so).

@thelaughingmuse @miasmo @mechmouse @davidgerard People could probably use a bit more help in the "how to find an instance/server that's right for you" area. That's currently a yawning gap and "join mastodon!" guides largely focus on interest and hobbies and .... those are rather irrelevant to finding a comfortable place to be. (Ever met someone that shares a hobby with you who is just an utterly intolerable person otherwise and in spite of? I certainly have.) That's a very novel and new skill needed that monolithic Twitter didn't require of its users. Reviewing the policy documents and terms of service, lists of servers it has blocked and why if available, skimming the profile director if available, and any published goals that the instance publishes will help make that selection quicker, but sometimes one will just need to sign up, read the local timeline for a bit without following anyone in particular and see if the vibe is overall good for one's state of mind.