TLDR: Mastodon is very white, male, status quo, global north, and designed in a way to limit its potential for use in social movements.
Mastodon feels very different from Twitter, deliberately. It is truly like Live Journal. It is about people who are happy with their social circle and who think of virality and discoverability as a problem. They just want to communicate with the people they know, and limit other things. Ironically, it is more like a private gathering than a public space.
In this episode of #OnTheMedia where a senior Mastodon community member says basically that they limited things that caused virality because they thought that was one of the worst things about Twitter, and then kinda shrugs when he says something like "Of course, that means that Mastodon couldn't have supported social movements like #MeToo or #BlackLivesMatter." He also concedes that Black Twitter folk have been made to feel unwelcome, but ... eh.
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/on-the-media-mastodon-may-take-twitters-weary
So I'm here. But even though my friends are awesome, I don't have any new ones I've made on Mastodon (unlike Twitter), and it is overall pretty boring and unlike Twitter it makes building a network feel like work. At the same time, it is of much less use for work. I have almost no Africa network, I have little interaction with journalists, and because the network is more closed, I learn less.
Whatever. It's fine but it's not a substitute for Twitter at all.
@naunihal just go to https://sciences.social/explore to take a look. Also, I take your point about the lack of African servers. Hopefully that will change.
Hashtags are also a very important way of finding people with common interests on Mastodon as they can be both searched and followed.
if you are not seeing the hashtags, it is most likely because the people are new.
there are many growing communities here and we find each other via hashtags. you can follow them, you can mark them, you can make sure that everytime it is used, you are notified.
it is not twitter and i am so happy about that... but you can make it work for you. also, there are instances in the fediverse that allow QTs. mastodon is just a small part of something much bigger.
@naunihal Using hashtags is essential for building reach.
I do not want another Twitter with an algorithm driven feed, so I am very happy to build my list of people to follow organically - by perusing the local and federated streams - in addition to looking at hashtags.
Another way is to look at posts that get traction and read the streams of people that make good commentary.
By using or not using tags, you sort of opt in or out of discoverability.
Going viral is not a requirement, IMO.
@LarsFosdal @naunihal
Yes, I also don't want a algorithm like in Twitter.
But what I realized very fast: a chronically timeline makes my experience far less international, the one thing I really liked on Twitter.
Here i have much more to do, to find informations from e.g. America.
So sometime I wish for at least a 'scroll to time xx:xx' function.
"I don't see any problem with the Mastodon status quo. Also, I'm a white male tech guy from the global north."
@naunihal @regordane certain communities use hashtags.
#ActuallyAutistic certainly does...
Attached: 1 image I've been creeping around looking at a lot of people's accounts (I'm doing a survey) Noticed that people with very few followers have one thing in common: they have not boosted the posts of other people often if at all. (When I see posts like this encouraging boosting I always think "well that person just wants boosts, whatever") That's not it. On twitter it was important to only boost exceptional content -- boost here to invite more people to join in talking about something.
@naunihal @regordane People post hashtags if they want to be part of the general discussion on a topic. They don’t if they don’t.
It gives control to the user.
Look at the hashtags and pick the ones that correspond to the discussions you want to join.
@regordane @naunihal https://sciences.social/public/local is better for getting a feel on what they talk about on that server in particular. The /explore timeline includes popular posts from other servers. Most (although not all) servers make one or both of these feeds public.
And Naunihal Singh excellent points in the thread! Not sure if you've seen The Whiteness of Mastodon but he talks about some of these issues https://techpolicy.press/the-whiteness-of-mastodon/
Naunihal Singh
Hilary
NotNowOrLater
Anne Carpenter
Lars Fosdal
Niqulei
Tom Holub
Josh Soref
Summer Breeze
Stop That
acm
The Nexus of Privacy
Martin Keller
Poliverso - notizie dal Fediverso ⁂