Naunihal SinghDec 28, 2022

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.

Show threadNaunihal SinghDec 28, 2022

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

Mastodon: The Platform Taking Twitter's Worn and Weary | On the Media | WNYC Studios

What happens when you slow down socializing?

WNYC Studios
Show threadNaunihal SinghDec 28, 2022
Basically he was smug and entirely uninterested in the use of social media for social change, and was happy to jetison it all. He compared Mastodon to his private BB with guitar nerds where anything you wrote was read by 100 people and that was fine.
Show threadNaunihal SinghDec 28, 2022
Mastodon does have a history of being Queer friendly (one app even asked me if I wanted to join an instance which was for Furries) but that gets used as a shield when people point out how unfriendly these spaces are to lots of other people. Heck, I saw parts of Black Twitter return to Twitter and say they would rather deal with the Nazis where they had community than stick around on Mastodon. It also does have decentralized moderation which makes it easier to ban Nazis.
Show threadNaunihal SinghDec 28, 2022
What it lacks is the ability to Quote Tweet, that is to add your own comments to what somebody may have said, which is often used in social mobilizing. It also doesn't have full text search. This was all done intentionally. But as a result, it's much harder to reach out of your networks to other people. I used Twitter to follow multiple social movements, as well as to learn about people in other countries. Mastodon isn't useful for any of that. And it doesn't want to be.
Show threadNaunihal SinghDec 28, 2022

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.

Show threadHilaryDec 28, 2022
@naunihal I see you are on .social which I believe is a large and quite generic server.
I agree some features inhibit virality, but in terms of meeting people you might perhaps do better to move to one that's more suited to your interests. Then looking at and interacting with the local and even federated (as I'm doing here) timelines might be worthwhile.
Show threadNaunihal SinghDec 28, 2022
@regordane How do I check out other servers? I can see a "sciences.social" server, but I don't know how to see what is being posted there.
Show threadHilaryDec 28, 2022

@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.

sciences.social

Non-profit, ad-free social media for social scientists. Join thousands of social scientists here and across the fediverse.

Mastodon hosted on sciences.social
Show threadNaunihal SinghDec 28, 2022
@regordane I'm not seeing much use of hashtags on peoples posts. It's one of the reasons why full text search is useful :( Maybe people will change but even guessing which hashtags are the right ones is not easy (for either posting or searching). And if you have to search 7 variants for each possible hashtag, it increases the load on the user.
Show threadacm
@naunihal You definitely need hashtags -- almost every post in my feed has at least one, and some have a bank of them. You can search for some hashtags that seem intuitive and then click on others where posts have several, and soon you'll find yourself where you wanted to be. You can actually subscribe to hashtags here, which is powerful. I get lots of good stuff via #BlackMastodon (which is a community, and even some servers spaces), and lots of other communities define tags to gather.
Jan 16, 2023 at 9:52pmWeb