November 25, 2022
So, we're all having a good time watching Elon Musk set $44 billion on fire in an attempt to get everybody to stop laughing at him. (He may also be running it into the ground on purpose to get some kind of tax break, but given his man-child priors I'm not convinced.)
That does leave a small problem: Despite its well-earned status as a hellsite, there are things about Twitter I enjoy. And the replacements are lacking.
Mastodon has been around for a few years now, and I've had an account there since 2017. I signed up hoping for "Twitter Minus Nazis" but until recently it was "Twitter Minus Everybody". It's been the default destination for people leaving Twitter, but I think it's ultimately doomed to fail.
Mastodon is "federated", which is Techbro for "balkanized". There's no single Mastodon server, there are hundreds (maybe thousands at this point) of individually-run servers all talking to each other. Or, at least they talk to each other as long as the admins let them. If Admin A decides than Admin B is a dickhead and/or doing a bad job, they drop the connection. Anyone on one server following somebody on the other can no longer see those posts.
There are people who think this is a feature.
Already, the "main" instance, mastodon.social, is being threatened with "defederation" on account of bad/stupid moderation. Come to our instance, the admins cry out, our hall monitors are totally better than yours. I never wanted to know what happened when an HOA ran a web site but now I do. Yay.
The relative newcomer is Hive. At the moment it's app-only which is annoying -- I very much prefer to type on a real keyboard instead of subjecting myself to the whims of Autocorrect -- but it has the advantage of being a single server. Their admins are of the mindset of "Nazis fuck off" so they may wind up being what I hoped Mastodon would be. And once they get their top priorities (accessibility seems to be high on the list) taken care of maybe it'll grow a web interface. Much easier to post my Wordle scores that way.
And if you want to see those Wordle scores:
Twitter: jasonfdc
Mastodon: @jasonfdc@mastodon.social
Hive: jasonfdc
