I made a friend on Mastodon today. I may’ve been his first follower on Mastodon. It’s lovely serendipity when you and another have enough time at first meeting to learn there are at least three subjects in common dear to your hearts.
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Is Mastodon really that good? I’ve heard it described as Twitter without the twits. I’ve wanted to try it, but haven’t gotten around to it.
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Mastodon is Twitter without the twits. It does have bots though, but so far no political ones. Some of the BoingBoing people who created accounts after Mark F. posted about Mastodon haven’t posted much since; neither has Mark. However, the generous character limit allows for decently descriptive introductions and interest hashtags and better interactions.
The low traffic for this anglophone (the Nihongo/Japanese language bot accounts dominated my timeline) sees “toots” boosted more commonly than they would be on Twitter.
It’s great for people whose interactions or lack of on Twitter have left them with unfathomably low expectations of social media interaction as the frisson and dopamine hit of having a toot read, favourited, boosted or responded to are rewarding. Someone clued me into an operating system’s creator’s presence on Mastodon, for example, and I enjoy more lateral and enriching conversations about niche interests like fountain pens than I have had on BoingBoing’s BBS.
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Mastodon is okay. I think the “Twitter without the twits” is true for now, but I think that’s likely the result of the (much) smaller number of people there (and general obscurity of the system).
It’s also kind of a pain to use- you need to pick the instance of Mastodon you’re on pretty carefully (as they’re a PITA to change, and individual instances can go belly up and leave you in the wind).
Also: and this is just a thing for me- when you claim a username, you’re only claiming the username on that instance. So if I’m nothingfuture on one instance, somebody else can be nothingfuture on any/all other instances. So usernames are more like email addresses than we’re used to thinking of usernames.
I see it as a useful thing, to be sure. But it’s distributed nature is both a strength and weakness. Much of what (can) make twitter so powerful is given up to make Mastodon distributed.
My $0.02 (not that anybody asked).
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彼らはロシアのボットとアメリカントロールとナチスよりも優れています。
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And now we get to the elephant in the room.
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The first Mastodon instance I registered for, and thus I was the most active on, mastodon.cloud is giving 521 Web server errors today. It had a lot of users, so I thought maybe it was stable. The web server being down is not nice, as I didn’t make a list elsewhere of the accounts I was following. I have a second Mastodon instance on the server I wish had existed at the time I first learned of that social media platform, but I’m starting from scratch.
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Actually, I just fired up Amaroq on my iPhone (the best Mastodon client I knew/know of), and it’s… I dunno. Buggered? Hooped? Knackered? Broke?
No error message, no nothing. Just… nothing. I was logged into a pretty big instance, so I’ve no idea what happened.
Know what? Mastodon is just a free-for-all version of Slack. Keeping track across multiple instances (or slacks) is a pain in the ass. The benefits are so slim compared to twitter or slack, it’s just not worth the effort to me. Besides, it’s just a matter of time until the trolls and chan-ers descend (if they haven’t already) or before you’re driven out by the place getting overrun by bots (already).
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Just saw your account(s). I’ve learned the server hosting one account each for you and me was undergoing data migration. It’s back up now.
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Tonight my tea mostly consisted of vegetables grown by me. I grew the potatoes, carrot, broad beans and chard as well as the green beans and onion in the tomato sauce.
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Is this the right place for a story like this?
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As a favour to someone I asked a celebrity to appear on the Vodcast “Hot Ones” (YouTube channel of ‘First We Feast’) and via his personal assistant who works half the planet away I received a kindly worded “no can do” statement with very understandable reason given for refusal. The acknowledgment my letter was read by the eyes I intended billows my heart.
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Am not sure if this went in ‘joy’ or ‘culture’ or even merited its own topic:
When a Classic Hollywood fan meets a superhero comic aficionado, this page will unite their delight.
This drawing below activates joy cells I did not know I had. William Powell as Doctor Strange
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I found the open-ended notarized multi-entry letter permitting me to take my dual-citizenship kid to my homeland.
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I’ll ignore that this hasn’t been used in over six weeks.
My penfriends are all sorts of wonderful, but today what makes my <3 go giddyap is the image taped onto an envelope of a coffee carafe pouring the sweet, sweet nootropic bean goodness into a corpus callosum, with “Loading…” and activity bar below.
This is awesome too:
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Bram Stoker needs more fog.
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I am 3 for 3 today in remembering passwords for forums I hadn’t logged onto in some time (One case was nearly a decade since last login - eep! )
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Nice. I clearly remember a password that I used 25 years ago (quarter of a century!) but I only know 2 of the passwords that I use now. 
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Those are pretty amazing.
But I would like to see Victor Mature as a dark, brooding Thor. Even though his hair would be the wrong color.
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