Twitter harakiri‘d. All was gone.

[Tuxman]

Ugh.

https://www.macrumor...ns-third-party-apps/

I mean, I gave Elon Musk the benefit of the doubt when he bought Twitter and everyone started screaming.

Time to start screaming myself.

I wish it would only be a software and not an important part of who I have become.

[app103]

I deleted my account when he lost his privacy and security execs. It wasn't much of a loss for me, though, considering my main social media usage has been on Mokum for quite a number of years, now.

[Tuxman]

I had never even heard of Mokum before - thank you.

[app103]

Most of us on there are Friendfeed refugees that needed a place to call home (that wasn't Facebook), after Facebook killed off Friendfeed. It's also a decent substitute for Medium, supporting similar style long form articles (Texts), formatted with markdown.

Feature-wise, it's a bit like if Twitter, Facebook, and Medium were whipped up together in a blender, but without any of the stupid corporate BS or drama. It was built by a fellow Friendfeed refugee who fully understood what it was that we all really wanted.

It has an API, if you want to roll your own tools and apps that can work with it, or you can use this guide and example to import your activities from your other social networks and websites, with IFTTT.

It has groups, but they aren't listed anywhere officially, and you can't search for them, which is why I created this group to catalog the English speaking ones. Between this and the Firehose, they would be your best options for finding people to follow.

Or you could follow me, or at the very least hit up my subscriptions list, which has most of the English speakers on Mokum.

[rjbull]

Time to start screaming myself.

-Tuxman (January 20, 2023, 09:26 PM)

I was never interested in social media, but I had a Twitter account for a short while.  I just didn't 'get' it, and only wanted to follow three things, two of which I lost interest in.  Then Twitter pestered me to follow more people, so I closed it.

I'm very wary of what now calls itself 'Meta' for its creepy surveillance practices and the way it awards itself free usage of anything you post.  I did, however, want to follow some local artists, and they were all on Instagram.  Hence I inched closer to getting an Instagram presence, only to find several articles raging about Instagram's sudden aping of TikTok, spamming you with auto-playing videos instead of things you actually want to follow. Exit Instagram.

In another part of the wood, I really liked using Simplenote to transfer text items between Android devices and the PC.  I used Glance Note on Android (at one point, recommended by wraith808) and CintaNotes on the PC, both of which keep data in local databases.  But now Simplenote have gone like Twitter in dropping the API and banning third-party applications, which would mean sticking to their own apps - apparently their PC app is a huge Electron thing - and worse, keeping my data solely in their cloud.  Well, I want access to it even if I don't have an Internet connection.  The latest iteration of their Android app includes "Simplenote Sustainer.  Help support the ongoing development of Simplenote with an annual subscription."  We know that keeping things forever free is a hard ask, but I'd have preferred them to make it payware or even donationware from the beginning, and retain third-party API access.

The moral seems to be beware big tech companies offering "free" goodies.  As for Twitter, Mastodon looks set to gain.

[Tuxman]

Mastodon has an entirely different target audience (and technology) than Twitter. Just because it looks similar, it isn't similar. Too many people think otherwise.
Twitter has a special place in my heart. After all, my Twitter handle is (as my artist name) a part of my passport...

[app103]

I was never interested in social media, but

-rjbull (January 22, 2023, 04:57 PM)

But you are here, on this forum, which is an older form of social media. 

[Tuxman]

... and a better form because there is no character limit (except the database server hard disk limit, of course).

[wraith808]

Mastodon has an entirely different target audience (and technology) than Twitter. Just because it looks similar, it isn't similar. Too many people think otherwise.
Twitter has a special place in my heart. After all, my Twitter handle is (as my artist name) a part of my passport...

-Tuxman (January 22, 2023, 05:10 PM)

Why do you think it's not similar?

[Tuxman]

Twitter is centralized, made for easy access (get an account and post stuff). ActivityPub, including Mastodon, is more complicated, both during signup and during actual usage, especially since you can find everyone on Twitter, but not all ActivityPub instances talk to each other.

I registered on Mastodon when still virtually nobody except a few IT nerds was there. It’s quite good for IT rants. Sadly, the wave of Twitter users tries to turn it into just another political network. Ugh.

[Gothi[c]]

I've never been big on social media myself either,... but I like that mastodon is a thing, since it's not centralized at any big corporate entity, and brings us back to how things should work.
I've been running a Mastodon instance if anyone wants to join

https://mastodon.linkerror.com/  (I hacked away the default character limit)

I post from time to time, but not all that often ( https://mastodon.linkerror.com/@jns is my profile ) - While mastodon is vastly better that most other forms of social media, in that it's not corporate owned, it still exhibits some problems that come with social media. Like anything anyone posts may get boosted onto other people's timeline, which may cause context to get lost, resulting in people rage-replying on things they didn't get the context for. That, to me, means, that you can't really treat it as regular conversation - and you kind of have to be mindful what you put out into the world. You also have the siloing problem on mastodon to some degree... and while I still feel a bit uncomfortable posting a lot of times, I'll take it over the reddits, twitters, facebooks of the world. The problems I mentioned were not so much of a problem before the Twitter exodus, because the community was pretty good, but now that the Twitter crowd has a lot of people moving to Mastodon, things are starting to get worse a little bit, I noticed,...

[wraith808]

Twitter is centralized, made for easy access (get an account and post stuff). ActivityPub, including Mastodon, is more complicated, both during signup and during actual usage, especially since you can find everyone on Twitter, but not all ActivityPub instances talk to each other.

I registered on Mastodon when still virtually nobody except a few IT nerds was there. It’s quite good for IT rants. Sadly, the wave of Twitter users tries to turn it into just another political network. Ugh.

-Tuxman (January 23, 2023, 03:23 AM)

So you're just referring to implementation details rather than the idea? I can see that- the implementation is different on purpose. I don't think it's more complicated during signup nor vastly more complicated during use- you just have to be aware of instances.