6 ms·
I'm getting a lot of value out of Mastodon. I found a medium sized instance who's moderator I trust, and whose culture matches matches what I want out of a soci
by polytely 6y ago
I'm getting a lot of value out of Mastodon. I found a medium sized instance who's moderator I trust, and whose culture matches matches what I want out of a social media website. Not having posts algorithmically shoved into your face helps a lot, because it is clear where posts on you home timeline are coming from and thus easier to customise your experience by blocking people.
The main problem with mastodon is that it's hard to discover a good instance to create your account on because you only get a good feel for the instances after you spend some time on there. This isnt all negative because the somewhat higher barrier of entry makes for a better userbase I think, because you need to do a bit of research.
I Honestly think that having a public square where people of all ideologies discuss everything is not that great. I don't want to discuss the US election with trump supporters, or read antisemetic garbage on my feed, I just want to shoot the shit with friendly likeminded people. I've been hanging around mastodon for 2 years now and I can count the times that it has made me mad or annoyed with another user on one hand. The ratio of positive experience to negative experience is way better than twitter.
For me mastodon is a place to talk about interesting tech, look at people's art, crafting obscure jokes that are only funny for an extremely online audience, and hanging out with a diverse group of techies, gamers, leftists, artists, philosophers, scientists, LGTB+ folks, solar punks.
- thelastname 6y agoYour diverse group isn't very diverse.
- BrianOnHN 6y agoWhy? Because it's missing hate groups?
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoBecause it's missing half the country, many of whom are not part of hate groups.
- polytely 6y agoI'm not American, so I don't really care about missing half the country.
- ihm 6y agoThere is no “teacher” who is going to grade you on how representative your social media feed is of the country. The point of creating an online feed could be entertainment, to arm you with the information and means of communication necessary to accomplish some goals you take part in, etc., but there is no point in trying to achieve some representative feed. You will not be rewarded for it.
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoThe original discussion was about the diversity of the feed, so...
- twalla 6y agoThis reads like you're implying anyone right of center cant be gay, into renewable energy, technology or the arts/philosophy.
- polytely 6y agoThey're more diverse than my IRL friends. It feels pretty diverse to me, I follow multiple types of communist and anarchists, some climate and privacy advocates, general progressives and even some more centrist EU people and a ton of people whose politics I know nothing about. When I follow people I mostly just check if they don't have any posts that are homophobic, transphobic or racist, because that is shit I do not want on my timeline. For the rest I don't really care, I just follow the people whose posts I enjoy reading.
- crocodiletears 6y agoThere's nothing especially wrong with keeping your feeds focused on like minded people, so long as you understand you're not the world. The alternative for many might very well be attempting to hunt down and censor anything they find objectionable, so their feeds can be both representative, and clean.