Preliminary mastodon; and feelings

[superborb]

I have been using mastodon lately in lieu of twitter (I'm @superborb@federatedfandom.net), and I have some preliminary thoughts. I also am having FEELINGS about another platform disintegrating, which are mostly like, me wanting to get them out somewhere.

Mastodon is (to me, anyway, and based on how I used twitter), very much like open source twitter, which makes it a great replacement for how I like to fandom. Of course, the critical component is user uptake, which is unknown at this time and also what led to being all up in my feelings re: platform disintegration.

Things I like about mastodon:
- I prefer to follow specific people, who have a broad range of interests, with forays outside my circle akin to 'friendsfriends'. The 'local' and 'federated' timelines, at least at this point when things are moving but not ultra fast, substitute well. (For those who do not feel this way, mastodon does have hashtags one can to follow and a.gup.pe for a DW comms / groups equivalent.)
- I like being able to see who people follow. I find others' followings to be an easy way to browse for interesting people and thoughts, and better than general hashtags, which I never really understood.
- I prefer a platform to be text-first, with some images/videos for flavor.
- I require the ability to turn off boosts (the reblog / retweet equivalent) on a per-person basis. (This is, I suspect, why I never was able to jive with tumblr.)
- As your server does impact your experience, the ability to download all your data and move servers becomes a necessity.
- Philosophically, I believe in open-source and federated software.

Things that are annoying about mastodon:
- There is no equivalent to a friends-lock. The followers-lock + requiring followers to be approved combination kind of substitutes, but it's clear that it's conceptualized as a public forum first.
- Threading is terrible on my server, though there are alternatives like glitch that potentially fix this.
- People seem to find it confusing and hold misconceptions about it, which I must resist reply-guying. This is a me problem.

Things that other people might want to consider:
- People with admin access to the server's backend can see your DMs if they put in effort to deliberately look.
- There are single-user activitypub instances, which is an interesting possibility for experimentation. Also, then you can pick the server name to be ~aesthetic~.
- The server you pick affects your experience, though as mentioned about, you can always switch at a later date. The biggest impacts AFAICT are: 1) your local (okay, and federated too) timeline is based on your server; 2) if you pick a server that has bad behavior, you'll find other servers have defederated it; and 3) lots of user experience choices come down to the exact software the server is using and mod choices. For instance, editing toots, content warning policies, and threading are all server-based.

Okay now FEELINGS:
The saddest part of a platform disintegrating -- and this time, happening much faster than usual -- is the loss of loose connections. Anyone I talk to often is, of course, a relationship unlikely to be lost by a platform change. I also recognize that, after I looked for people still in fandom after a decade away, the folks who were still in fandom were easy to find and the folks who still wanted to be found were easy to find. But a lot of my acquaintances, caught up in real life and already drifting away from fandom, are likely to be lost, and I'm sad about it! I know this is a little bit like, well, you never regularly talked anyway, but a) when we did talk, I found a lot of value in it! and b) unlike IRL, the chances of reconnection drop precipitously once someone's abandoned their nym.

I suppose I ought to cultivate more of a sense of 'if it's meant to be, we'll reconnect in the future'. After all, I found people again after fandom left for tumblr.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

This is imp, I'm too lazy to log in - a friend set up fanglitch.space if you want to try glitch! You should be able to ping thedeadparrot for an invite.

[superborb]

Ooh, thanks, I'll check it out!

[momijizukamori]

Unfortunately I think rn you can't actually move all your content to an new instance - you can move your following list, but not your content. One of a handful of flaws I see in ActivityPub, I think.

Worth noting (more for any readers, as I think you probably know this already) - 'admins can read your dms' is true on every social media platform, and the only different with Mastodon is that 1) there are a lot more potential admins and 2) many of them may have less reason to not abuse this power compared to say, Dreamwidth staff. Though you do have the additional hiccup of 'Admins of your server can read all your DMs, and admins of servers with users who those DMs are sent to can also read the DMs sent to those users'.

But yeah, losing touch can be sad, even if it's a natural part of relationships and the passage of time. But fandom can be a very small place and I've had absolutely wild coincidental reconnections after years and years.

[superborb]

Oh dang, I didn't realize you couldn't import posts. I guess it's an open (popular) ticket, so I hope it'll come eventually.

[momijizukamori]

Yeah it does seem to be a common request! I think part of the problem is that ActivityPub doesn't have a syntax for saying 'this post that was in X location is now in Y location.' So even if you have direct database access to dump entries from one instance and move them to the db of another, you effectively now have two different versions of a post (like importing LJ into DW, I guess. Everything referring to old LJ posts won't be automatically forwarded to the DW version)

[superborb]

I guess I'd personally be fine with the LJ->DW solution, but maybe people want something more complete. Still, I feel like it'd get 90% of the way there.

[bluapapilio]

Every time I found a server I was okay with it either had a rule I didn't like or was closed due to the influx of users overwhelming them so I gave up;;

[superborb]

Oh no... The server I'm on still has open registration, I think, but it also has rules.

momijizukamori stood up a single user instance though (of https://docs.microblog.pub/) and I think will post some instructions this weekend, if you want to go the hard route.

[bluapapilio]

I ended up joining the server you're on and followed you (I'm bluapapilio), thankee.

[jo_lasalle]

Thank you for the this summary of your experience. I'm personally still feeling quite in the weeds with mastodon, but your summary of the local vs federated timelines really made something click for me.

(And I feel you on the loose connection. Maybe Mastodon will end up giving me that option of catching casual glimpses of people's lives that Twitter is best at - like, I post about my IKEA furniture because I like seeing other people's posts like that too! - but I'm sure people will get lost in the shuffle.)

[superborb]

Right, I think the local+federated timelines will satisfy that, but only if it has enough uptake... The jury is out.

[ehyde]

Mastodon hasn't quite clicked for me although to be fair, I haven't really tried that hard. I joined an instance where a few friends had settled that seemed fannish but not *fandom*, (I'm ehyde@wandering.shop) but I'm not sure if that was the right choice--I'm a little wary of a fandom specific space (esp if it's new and doesn't have much of a history as is the case with all of them I've seen) devolving into constant Discourse, but then again I want to feel comfortable talking about fandom stuff, but then again if I'm actively using it I'm also going to be talking about non-fandom stuff and would that be out of place on a fandom server?
...anyway, I haven't actually posted anything yet, so it's not like moving would be a problem, but I think I'll wait a little longer and see who settles where.

[superborb]

Yeah, I guess the problem is none of these servers (after the influx) are really established enough for lurking until you get an idea of the culture! My bayesian prior would be that either server would okay with talking about both non-fandom and fandom stuff, but groups can get weird.

[cyandemise]

huh, cool! Interesting to hear thoughts from people who are trying out non-tumblr platforms, since anecdotally at least, it seems like most people hopped back over there? I never really made an attempt to mastodon or cohost, and tbh the idea of picking an instance gives me mild choice paralysis at the outset :p

I'm also feeling sad about people splintering off and drifting apart though - it's sad to see people go, even if we barely interacted (speaking of which hello, I think we've barely interacted!)

[superborb]

Yeah, from the outside looking in, I think most people did go back to tumblr. q_q Leaving me behind again...

TBH I was highly tempted by the single user instance as a way to avoid the question of choosing a server, but then I'd have to NAME it.

Hello!!!

[shati]

How did you decide on a server? Or look for servers? That's where I keep stalling out. (I'll probably find another place to stall out if I get past that one though...)

Agreed on the loose connections! I like seeing little updates on the lives of people I've talked to directly like twice in my life. :(

[superborb]

I just joined impertinence's server, since she's a friend! The lazy option...

[chestnut_pod]

Interesting to hear your thoughts on the mastodon experience! Mainly, though, sympathies and commiseration about losing touch with Internet friends. There's a particular kind of wistfulness to it.

[superborb]

It's oddly different from RL friends!

[adevyish]

i use twitter the opposite of how most fandom people use twitter, in that it’s sort of my msn messenger status message and way to keep up to date on fannish friends’ personal lives. twitter circles is my favourite feature, and i don’t know if there’s any good replacement for that sort of non-instant, semi-private, text-based communication?

in terms of mastodon, idk. i think i probably need to write a user style to shrink all images — the third-party twitter client i use only shows tiny thumbnails for media, and right now all the images in my mastodon feed are way too massive for my taste. and i suspect i’m also in the same boat as other people where i don’t really know if i want to engage with fandom on mastodon, because i don’t enjoy discussing opinions about fandom in a public square.

[superborb]

Yeah, I guess it can currently essentially replicate the 'locked twitter' experience. I do see that some kind of groups feature is planned, and depending on how it's shaped, it might do something similar? But it's not here NOW.

I think the image style is fixable, but the public square issue is not yet there and may/may not be there depending on how it goes in the future. Of course, twitter only slowly rolled out things like circles, so...

[x_los]

It sounds so deeply like tech-person-first oriented in a way? And I'm kind of not whining about me here, more--that sounds like a relatively big area the service can't or won't recoup, like anyone my level of tech-comfortable or less.

[superborb]

Obviously, I can't fully judge, but I think if you're just a user in a server, you don't really see any of it? Like, IMO it's probably less technical than something like DW, where the html is exposed to you, and your posts/skin are all editable; on mastodon you, as a regular user, can't do much other than post shit.

OTOH, it isn't a slick user interface, which might be what you're talking about.

[halfcactus]

- This is a really useful rundown of Mastodon to me!

- Re: lack of friendlock - yeah unlisted and follower-locked seem to fulfill similar functions? I really like Twitter’s Circles feature and am so annoyed that I got the feature too late.

- Re: losing people to the combination of migrations and people dipping out from fandom - same.

Recently I’ve actually been thinking about how I might just not enjoy being *in* fandom or fandom spaces? My positive feelings for Twitter and Tumblr are probably because I’ve been there before fandom migrated to them, and I have more specific uses for them that are independent of fandom communities. (I’m definitely more there for the art and the blogging, with fancontent as a bonus.)

For Tumblr, I think it just needs to give me the option to create friend lists, and see only original posts. I like having an image-first platform, but I’d like to be able to customize my browsing experience lol.

[superborb]

Mmm, yeah, I think I do prefer a less fandom-specific timeline. But I often prefer fannish people, who are socialized to the same norms as me, I guess :P

Isn't most tumblr content in the form of like, tags? That's what's tripping me up, it's not a 'pure' reblog.

[halfcactus]

Same! There was a brief window of time when I really enjoyed Discord, because I was fresh off tumblr and interaction-starved. Now that I’ve made friends, I only haunt that non-fandom parts of the fandom discords I’m on, lol. Fandom-adjacent is the way~

tumblr interactions and comments happen a lot in tags, but you don’t have to read them? If you post a lot they’re kind of hard to track. Tags are at least less annoying than QRTs. And some people use the reply function, now that it’s a thing. Tumblr now lets you disable reblogs for individual posts now though, if reblogs + tags bother you. (But I’ve never tried it or seen it applied.)

[halfcactus]

I typed “now” way too many times in that comment. 😂😂😂 THINGS HAVE CHANGED OK

[superborb]

Deep sigh, maybe I should give tumblr a go again next week. We'll see...

[dragongirlg]

I'm on tumblr because a lot of people seem to be going back there, and I enjoy the shitposts, but I agree it's overwhelming! I'm never really sure if I'm doing it right. I just found out about the new xkit this morning, which lets you filter out reblogs and only see original posts, so I'm going to give that a try.

Part of me is relieved that my circle is becoming a lot smaller, but another part of me is mourning the loss of loose connections as well. Twitter created a very nice distance between dreamwidth (where I feel like there's a higher baseline intensity due to the longform posting+access filters+demographics) and tumblr (where everyone is shitposting so there's not really a chance to connect). I'm still active on discord, so I think it'll fill the loose connections niche for now, but it was nice having an intermediate.

[superborb]

Ohh, I didn't realize there was a different xkit. I guess most people don't post a lot of original posts though, because the dynamic around interaction is so different?

I mean, my dream is DW + a chat application probably, ahahahahah.

[dragongirlg]

Oh, DW + chat would be awesome.

And yeah, the "welcome back to tumblr" and "intro to tumblr" posts floating around have really solidified that the dominant tumblr culture is sharing other people's stuff and/or adding commentary as you wish. If you only post original stuff without interacting it's considered a faux pas (even though tumblr is set up really nicely for original blogs, including the messaging system and the community aspect!) Ah, well. I'll stay on it and try to navigate it, and just kind of see where I land.

[superborb]

I don't really understand that, but I suppose that's why I never jived with tumblr. I guess I'll continue crossposting to the annoyance of anyone who stumbles upon my tumblr *shrug*

[dragongirlg]

I'll be crossposting most stuff myself!

[narie]

I'm liking Mastodon so far, because it has the same sort of new smell that fandom twitter had for me when I fell into it 3 years ago. I think we'll have to see if it can lead to sustainable communities, but right now everything feels untarnished and it's a lot of people I've never interacted with before. I do think I'll migrate my account to blorbo.social, though, if only because I keep interacting with people there instead of on my own instance...

I was feeling very locked in on twitter for a bunch of reasons, and also disillusioned with my current fandom, so for the time being it feels like a breath of fresh air, although I do share other people's misgivings here about scale and tight boundaries around fandom content not allowing any glimpse of the person behind the posts, which is really not what I'm in this for either, so we'll see, I guess!

[superborb]

Interesting, I suppose a new platform also gives rise to a new people mixing period!