Back in August I had read about a recently-completed land art work in Nevada created by Michael Heizer called, simply, City (found in the Artnet article After More Than 50 Years, Reclusive Artist Michael Heizer Is Finally Ready to Unveil ‘City,’ His Life’s Work. Here’s What It Looks Like). It is a sprawling, 1-1/2 mile by 1/2 mile area in the desert consisting of several large-scale and widely-spaced concrete abstractions, precisely sculpted mounds, and wide paths. I immediately reacted to images of it with an ineffable and religious awe. I imagine walking through it would be like being transported to a city 10,000 years in the future. The structures and intents would be beyond understanding but still intimate a hidden meaning. That feeling hasn’t gone away.
(Here we are in the future debating the quality of our online social experience as opposed to 14 years ago when the debate was about whether online relationships can even be considered healthy and “real”.)
((Unrelated-but-related: this is my new account at Mastodon, the Twitter-like FOSS website.))
Back in Aug 2010 I had my eye on a website called Diaspora, which would be released two weeks later. Diaspora was/is(?) an open source platform that had all of the features of Facebook but, since it was federated, none of the… Facebook-ness. At the time I had been interested in the open source social media and social media-adjacent platforms that were being developed. And there were many. The primary reason for hosting my blog and my other web sites on my own servers is so that the semi-arbitrary pulling up of tent posts and monetary collapse of tenuous business plans didn’t degauss my entire web presence. I treat my web identity as my personal fidelity and Blue Check™, and control over the hosting server is the most basic way to do it.
(I understand the absurdity of the possibility of this approach being available to the general populace. <insert commentary on the techno-elite here>)
It’s interesting that the Facebook hate existed so long ago, even before insurrections made it a societal necessity. I think the general interest at the time was specifically that Geeks Hated Facebook, but it may have been more socially pervasive than within that one group. I know people today who still use FB and, though it’s reasonable for the non-technical, it’s baffling to me that people in my industry still do. However: sociologists never judge (to a fault) and I should instead be questioning why they continue affiliating with such a corrosive entity. The existence of activity justifies the reason for an activity. You can only investigate why it exists.
Back to Mastodon.
I really can’t add any insight to the Musk-buys-Twitter discussion than is already out there. He is and was a horrible person–let’s ignore of the fact that I praised his “quirky innovation” at times–and his treatment of people-as-people and as-workers is horrible. What he has done w/r/t Twitter post-purchase in such a short time is almost absurdist in its ineptitude. He has created nothing in his life and is merely ars gratia artis but with money replacing art. (It’s humbling to have so many individuals whom you once admired be unmitigated assholes).
Ok, now back to Mastondon.
I have no idea whether Mastodon is The One. Twelve years ago I had great hope that one of those many federated sites would be The One that would achieve the simple task of turning the underlying infrastructure of a social networking platforms into what email is. My email provider doesn’t restrict me from sending to another email provider. But it was not to be. At least in 2010 it was not.
A similar sequence of events happened with chat networks. AIM and MSN and ICQ and Skype should have been a frontend for their own networks but a client of a universal protocol. They garden-walled their protocol and the unfortunate, ultimate result was Slack. It glommed ICQ, Usenet, FTP, et al. into a proprietary protocol even as XMPP was being solidified as a universal protocol. I’m sick at the waste of potential that capitalism has corrupted within a free network.
How to move from one Mastodon server to another: Moving or leaving accounts. You’ll need to export/import, but this will create a redirect from your old to your new.
Server – Mastodon – Like the old-timey web directories, but with Mastodon servers categorized.
Export
Download Twitter Followers – Very easy. “Export Twitter followers list for free (first 2,000 followers), Export Twitter following/friends list for free (first 2,000 followings). I had 1,032 so it was free and they emailed it instantaneously.
How to Export Twitter Following List to CSV/Excel? – Going through the process right now and it’s supposed to take 24 hours. Went back in to check the status and got this message (screencap below) when attempting to verify via 2FA: “You have hit the limit for SMS codes. Try again in 24 hours.” Hilarious. Either they didn’t pay their bill (likely) or tens-of-thousands of people are attempting to get out (also likely) or there have been so many fake accounts signing up that they hit the limit (?!?). Choose your dumpster file.
Debirdify – Finds people on you Twitter account that have a Fediverse account name included in their display name, bio, website, or pinned tweet and exports those account names to CSV.
Instructions on using IFTTT to create a crossposter applet: Sync your Mastodon back to Twitter. You can only create one applet on the free tier, so this would be the only one ya cheap-o.
Mike Masnick has a great writeup on Some Tricks To Making Mastodon Way More Usefulthat includes a good tutorial on getting started (though there are a million out there now, including from major publications) and a few tools to make the Mastodon interface a little easier. Mastodon’s in a formative state now so, like any website, it has much to improve on.
One area that both Twitter and Mastodon fail at is list management. To fix that for Mastodon (and because it’s based on the open source protocol ActivityPub it can be fixed) there’s the Mastodon List Manager. It is very basic but gets the job done.
Another area that is confusing is the process of following people from other servers. Most of the time, when you click Follow the page will display a dialog with a URL that you must copy and paste into the search box on your server’s page. Most of the time. (Although I follow many account, I haven’t figured out when this is and is not required). Anyway, there’s a browser extension called FediAct that simplifies the process. It also has several other utility functions. I haven’t yet used it, but I’ve heard new users struggle with the follow process or even abandon Mastodon altogether because of it, so it’s definitely needed.
Updated 5 Jan 2023
Teri Kanefield’s article Twitter v. Mastodon v. Post v. Other Possibilities is a comprehensive and insightful overview of the current state of Twitter-replacement social media platforms including Mastodon, Post.news, Counter Social, and Sproutable (I hadn’t heard of that). She is in on Mastodon primarily (and her blog), but cross posts to Twitter to support her followers there, with a wait-and-see on what Twitter becomes and how much migration occurs. Post.news has problematic owners and Counter Social has toxic administrators and members. Her criticisms of Twitter are the usual but well expressed: a capricious owner selling faux free speech and using algorithms to spread the most divisive of speech.
I have a slightly different take w/r/t the “divisiveness” caused by an influx of Nazis to Twitter. Our presence as passionate moderates legitimizes a social media site that’s in moral disrepair. Rational users allow defenders to declare “See! There are a range of views!” as the Nazis seed chaos. In a similar manner that TFG didn’t affect my life as a citizen but his toxicity was unbearable, Musk’s and his band of idiots may not affect me but for all who it does affect, it’s unconscionable to allow. The difference is that leaving the US is of farm more consequence than leaving a micro-blogging website.
Another good article is Journalists (And Others) Should Leave Twitter. Here’s How They Can Get Started from Dan Gillmor (https://mastodon.social/@dangillmor) at Techdirt. His concerns include the capriciousness of a morally corrupted landlord, but he also emphasizes that communities, news outlets, corporations, and government agencies now have an opportunity to escape the walled garden of Twitter. Even though you can export your data in both Twitter (and I have) and Mastodon, the arbitrary rules of a single owner can be limiting, whereas since you/community/news outlet/corporation/government can spin up their own instance with Mastodon, you have absolute control over your data.
