The only proper way that I can see to join Mastodon is to have your own personal instance. And maybe that's how social media should be, but then the difference between that and a webserver with an RSS feed is getting quite small.
And I think there’s value in decentralization even without the granularity of a server-per-person. Sure, some Mastodon servers might go down, or some admins might do unwise things, but damage should be limited. the entire network - I hope - would not fail.
Of course, I’ve lived through the death of Usenet, so perhaps I should not be so optimistic :-/
Edit: not to mention the arguable centralization of email, blogging, and perhaps soon podcasting :-(
Definitely not! It just seems a bit ‘risky’ to use another centralized Twitter-like when Mastodon seems to be working. I’d rather we gave it a try than another centralized service.
Sure, but there are other centralized services not implementing such policies, and I don't think Twitter would exist today in current form if not for being centralized & well funded. I guess there are just tradeoffs in either choice.
I have a Mastodon, for what it’s worth, but never really figured out how to find a community that resonates with me. It’s quite possible I’m using it wrong in some way.
I’m never sure what people mean when they say things like this.
I found community in Twitter by following people I knew, a small number of organizations, websites and celebrities, then occasionally following people I learned about through retweets or replies.
How did you do it on Twitter? Did you use the search functionality? What did you do with it? The idea of doing that just seems overwhelming to me.
I mean all this genuinely - this is not intended as a snark post! I am sure your way of using Twitter is just as valid as mine, and maybe it’ll give me some ideas for things I could do differently.
I wasn’t able to find anyone I know, and the incoming discovery feeds were people I didn’t know anything about talking about stuff I wasn’t interested in. Overall it was just really quiet and felt empty. Maybe this means I joined the wrong server, not sure. Eventually it seems someone deleted the server I was on, I am not sure if I can do anything about that or not.
When I first joined Twitter it seemed like more people I knew where there, so that initial bootstrapping was a lot easier.
It sounds like another server would’ve served you better - but I get what you’re saying, it’s not only that, it’s the nature of Mastodon (or, ActivityPub, I guess). Servers basically only know about their own users, and people they follow.
I joined Twitter in the fairly early days, and my network grew from tech folks I’d met in real life out (‘Are you on Twitter? What’s your handle?’ was a common refrain at meetups and conferences). Later, non-tech friends, news organizations and celebrities joined. It was easy to organically grow my feed without search or algorithmic recommendations, and I never came to really use either.
If you were to try Mastodon again, my recommendation would be to initially join either a large server (mastodon.social, mas.to etc.) or one that targets an interest you have (tech?). On the targeted one, the local feed might be interesting. On the larger one, the federated feed will be pretty complete and searchable for hashtags.
Wherever you join, as you follow people it’ll become more rounded out and you’ll start to see boosts from people you follow that might reveal others to follow - from all sorts of servers. It’ll feel more like early Twitter before the algorithmic feed.
I have to admit, server choice paralyzed me for a long time! I finally joined a local geographic one - sfba.social - and it’s pretty good. Being the SF Bay Area the local feed can have a good mix of local and tech stuff (and a lot of random uninteresting ephemera, I will admit…) and it’s big enough that the federated feed is pretty full too (perhaps too full!). But server choice doesn’t _really_ matter - it’s easy to move and I haven’t seen any criticism of folks moving.
