Skip to main content
notes.jays.net

Mastodon

You'll find me here on Mastodon, micro-blogging ~daily. I love it.

Mastodon vs. Bluesky, etc.

You do you. People like different things. I got sick of Nazis on Twitter in 2017, so I left[1]. Some of my friends prefer Bluesky. Here's a little grid of the features I care about:

Mastodon Bluesky
Clean feed of follows
Alt text for images
Edit posts
Content warnings
Hide boosts from a follow
Pick your moderators
Migrate elsewhere
Discoverability 🟡

If the main thing you care about is discoverability, then Mastodon can be a pain in the butt. I don't care about that. There are thousands of fascinating people on Mastodon, that's enough for me. Way more than I could ever read. I give zero shits about following celebrities / mass market accounts.

Less important to me, but very cool things Bluesky does that Mastodon doesn't:

Footnotes:

[1] I never actually delete my account anywhere. Because I always have a specific cousin who only uses FaceBook, a specific friend that only uses Twitter, I get fired so need LinkedIn again, etc. I just ignore those networks completely until I need them. At which point I log in once, do the thing, and leave. If my account existing gives Musk a $65B bonus, so be it. (Oops.)

Who I follow

(Originally from 2022.)

Not that anyone does or should care about any of this, but I'm hyper-self-analytical, so here's me trying to write this down so I understand my goals inside my own brain:

I enjoy my Home timeline as a diverse cross-section of people all over the world with extremely varied interests. I'm fascinated by artists and how their minds work. Also niche technologists, scientists, philosophers, psychologists, podcasters, and political scientists trying to think deeply about trying to solve problems.

I have zero interest in my Home timeline being a firehose of breaking news or political shitshows. I use other vectors for those purposes. So if you post non-personal politics without a CW I (probably) don't follow you.

Please DO rage against injustice you are personally experiencing, with or without a CW (your choice). If shit is happening to YOU I want to support you and know what's going on. I would love to know how to help, if there is some way I can help.

If, on average, you post 15+ times a day I don't follow you. I might love you to death and check in every once in a while, but you're drowning out the other (~350, apparently) people I'm trying to follow.

Again, I don't recommend giving a shit whether I follow you or not. But this helps me understand how my mind is working(?), so this post is helpful to me? Maybe?

Be safe out there, friends. Be kind to one another, if you can.

Q&A

Cleo asked research questions:

Q: What was the final straw that finally got you to make an account here?

I was a semi-early adopter of Twitter. It was good, fun, for years. In 2017 I couldn't put up with their timeline fuckery anymore. I just wanted a clean list of tweets from the people I chose to follow.

And assholes kept leeching into my Twitter experience via replies on my follows' tweets. I couldn't block them all, the space felt more and more hostile.

And Twitter kept sending me notifications I didn't want or opt into.

Q: Did it take you a while to figure out how the fediverse works, or did you take to it right away?

Federation is complicated, it takes a while to wrap your head around. If you join a big server you might find life easier as a beginner? It didn't seem too hard to me, but it is/was buggy, frustrating sometimes. Presumably, lots of people just want it to work, have no interest in how.

I'm a weirdo ("engineer") who enjoys understanding how things work.

Q: Do you still use mainstream social media? How often do you post there vs here?

I might check in on other social networks once every month or two to check on specific people. I almost never post on them. See Footnote [1] above.

Q: What is your level of tech expertise? Were/are you already a tech expert?

Decades of computer programming.


Sagaliciouzzz asked: How do you recruit people into the Fediverse?

"Federation is the right thing to do. But it’s confusing. Join us! You’ll hate it! 😉"

(Which I originally wrote on Twitter in 2017.)