fadeaccompli | (no subject)

I decided to grit my teeth this morning and try to sign up for Mastodon. (Not entirely as a way of procrastinating on my dissertation & job application duties, I assure you.) So far it appears to be the most annoying aspects of Discord (everything is fragmented and split into a bunch of servers you have to know about to find!) with the least fun aspects of Twitter (tiny posts! usernames & display names may vary! images everywhere! obscure rules! hard-to-find settings for any damn thing I actually want to set about my experience, if the option is there at all!), but, I don't know, maybe I'll come to like it eventually?

To be honest, the main things I want out of a Twitter replacement are 1) a handy way to casually browse lots of tiny comments from acquaintances about their current life experiences, 2) a good place to livetweet the lectures & academic books I'm experiencing myself. Everything else, well, I got Dreamdwidth for long-form posting and Slack/Discord for small locked communities of chatter with friends. So I don't know if Mastodon is gonna do me any good at all.

But I really do hope not to lose that livetweeting of cool academic things. I've met a lot of neat people and gotten a lot of interesting conversations, that way.

I miss the era of sandwich tweets.

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Can I ask which mastodon server you joined? I am contemplating if I should open an account, but choosing a server seems like...a lot? Even though it also maybe doesn't determine that much?

I think I just joined the generic default one? So I'm

fade@mastodon.online over there, don't understand the whole server concept much beyond the very basics, and don't especially want to have a zillion accounts for different locations anyway.

For what it's worth, the way it's set up, you don't have to have a zillion accounts - with some exceptions, people on one server can follow people on most any other.

...you probably know that. Followed you from weirder.earth.

I was very worried about the federated aspect of Mastodon, but now as more people I know are joining various different instances, I'm finding the aspect less worrisome than I feared. As long as the two instances talk to each other, following a person on a different instance is just as easy as following someone on the instance I belong to. And I'm already getting the effect of finding people to follow (both in- and out-instance) through reposts from people I follow.

I also like that "follow" is a built-in function equivalent to my "reading list" on twitter. If I want to taste the firehose, I can check the whole-instance feed. If I want something manageable, I can read the feed of people I follow. Now if only I could figure out how to reliably make the screen stay on the current post when I expand "new posts".

I was fussing at the instances, but my spouse pointed out it's basically like signing up for an email address; you can have as many as you want, and a given server can block certain other ones (email does it mostly for spam, Mastodon seems to mostly do it for the 'fuck off, Nazis' thing), but you can still email anyone at another address pretty freely and vice-versa. So with that in mind, it's feeling like it could be a pretty decent replacement for casual 'whatever thought just came to mind' social uses of Twitter.

I don't think it's going to get enough people--nor have the infrastructure/UI to do so--that it'll replace the "Hey, I can livetweet academia, and all sorts of people might casually run into that and read!" aspect, which is sad. But maybe I'll find another place for that. Or maybe it'll surprise me.