5 ms·

I didn't find anything interesting about Mastodon. It felt like just another Twitter to me. I don't care about some random dude's cat pictures or their takes on

I didn't find anything interesting about Mastodon. It felt like just another Twitter to me. I don't care about some random dude's cat pictures or their takes on politics or what they had for lunch. Is there something I'm missing?

beej71 3y ago
Don't follow #cats or #politics or #lunch. :) I care a lot about some random person's astronomy pictures. They're fun to look at. And some random person's programming content, or history or geology content... Good stuff. You can seriously curate your own feed on Mastodon.
IanCal 4y ago
My mastodon feed is generally people talking about stuff they find interesting. Twitter is 95% like this X is really important. 5 things you have to know: (thread) All because of trying to game/use all the engagement figures about what shows your post more. Splitting your content into two tweets with half the people clicking through after reading the first results in half the people actually getting the information but massively more engagement stats so Twitter thinks it's much more important.
- blitzar 3y ago
  > 5 things you have to know: (thread) This seems to be a trend amongst wannabe influencers - sader than the lack of actual content is that you see the same thread copied and pasted and used by multiple accounts.
  - a_bonobo 3y ago
    I deactivated my Twitter account (set to private), from time to time I take a peek and it looks like the new algorithmically generated timeline really seems to push these garbage listicle tweet-threads.
    - blitzar 3y ago
      If your version gets pushed I might as well do copy & paste and get my impressions up too ...
nstart 4y ago
To be fair, if you don't use Twitter then you are already well removed from the target demographic that might find Mastodon useful. That said, there are a lot of really useful takes on Mastodon on various topics. Politics is probably the area where you will find the most number of takes. But in infosec, and game development at least, there's a lot of interesting info. The biggest issue with Mastodon or the fediverse rather is the lack of full text search and the cultural push back against it. I don't view the push back as negative. It's a sign that the community has strong opinions and that's a good thing. But the lack of search does make it hard to peek into a conversation around a topic which to me takes away from the experience of jumping into communities of interest.
- WA 4y ago
  I agree. I find it interesting that we took search on Twitter for granted and only realize later that it is probably more important than expected. Maybe a search engine for Mastodon can fix this.
  - WJW 4y ago
    AFAIK there have been several attempts at this, but Mastodon deliberately does not support arbitrary search and some communities are extremely hostile to having their posts scraped.
    - MichaelZuo 3y ago
      This seems like it guarantees political battles of some sort? Whether intra or inter-community.
      - WJW 3y ago
        Given how many political battles there are on platforms that do have full text search, I don't think it's the lack or presence of full text search that causes such things. Rather it seems likely that political battles naturally arise on any social media platform that allows broadcasting your opinion to the whole world.
tptacek 3y ago
If you don't care about Twitter's service model, you don't care about Mastodon.
DoItToMe81 3y ago
You aren't missing anything. It's not a forum, it's just people from mainstream social media who have sought to leave mainstream social media for various reasons. There are some interesting tech people on some instances, but it's generally not worth wading through the hundreds of people attracted to the idea of a more hugbox Twitter.
nicoburns 3y ago
I've found twitter/mastadon useful to follow updates from specific open source developers whose work I know and am interested in.
- yutijke 3y ago
  How do you find the time to go through it all? A lot of open source developers also post about other topics like their cats, dogs and favorite types of bread. Which is fine. It's their profile. With twitter I could filter out these with carefully crafted search queries on separately maintained lists since I only have so much time in my day to devote to Tech, I cannot do this on Mastodon since no one is diligent about hashtags and it is an explicit policy to cripple search. I've most stopped following open source developers since then.
  - nicoburns 3y ago
    > How do you find the time to go through it all? I'm not consistent with it. I just check it occasionally. For people I'm particularly interested in (and who don't post that often!), I'll go to their profile and scroll down that separately to if there's anything I've missed. For others, if I didn't see it then that's ok. > A lot of open source developers also post about other topics like their cats, dogs and favorite types of bread. I just don't follow (or later unfollow) anyone who does this.
_khhm 3y ago
[dead]

beej71 3y ago

Don't follow #cats or #politics or #lunch. :) I care a lot about some random person's astronomy pictures. They're fun to look at. And some random person's programming content, or history or geology content... Good stuff. You can seriously curate your own feed on Mastodon.

IanCal 4y ago

My mastodon feed is generally people talking about stuff they find interesting. Twitter is 95% like this X is really important. 5 things you have to know: (thread) All because of trying to game/use all the engagement figures about what shows your post more. Splitting your content into two tweets with half the people clicking through after reading the first results in half the people actually getting the information but massively more engagement stats so Twitter thinks it's much more important.

blitzar 3y ago
> 5 things you have to know: (thread) This seems to be a trend amongst wannabe influencers - sader than the lack of actual content is that you see the same thread copied and pasted and used by multiple accounts.
- a_bonobo 3y ago
  I deactivated my Twitter account (set to private), from time to time I take a peek and it looks like the new algorithmically generated timeline really seems to push these garbage listicle tweet-threads.
  - blitzar 3y ago
    If your version gets pushed I might as well do copy & paste and get my impressions up too ...

nstart 4y ago

To be fair, if you don't use Twitter then you are already well removed from the target demographic that might find Mastodon useful. That said, there are a lot of really useful takes on Mastodon on various topics. Politics is probably the area where you will find the most number of takes. But in infosec, and game development at least, there's a lot of interesting info. The biggest issue with Mastodon or the fediverse rather is the lack of full text search and the cultural push back against it. I don't view the push back as negative. It's a sign that the community has strong opinions and that's a good thing. But the lack of search does make it hard to peek into a conversation around a topic which to me takes away from the experience of jumping into communities of interest.

WA 4y ago
I agree. I find it interesting that we took search on Twitter for granted and only realize later that it is probably more important than expected. Maybe a search engine for Mastodon can fix this.
- WJW 4y ago
  AFAIK there have been several attempts at this, but Mastodon deliberately does not support arbitrary search and some communities are extremely hostile to having their posts scraped.
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    This seems like it guarantees political battles of some sort? Whether intra or inter-community.
    - WJW 3y ago
      Given how many political battles there are on platforms that do have full text search, I don't think it's the lack or presence of full text search that causes such things. Rather it seems likely that political battles naturally arise on any social media platform that allows broadcasting your opinion to the whole world.

tptacek 3y ago

If you don't care about Twitter's service model, you don't care about Mastodon.

DoItToMe81 3y ago

You aren't missing anything. It's not a forum, it's just people from mainstream social media who have sought to leave mainstream social media for various reasons. There are some interesting tech people on some instances, but it's generally not worth wading through the hundreds of people attracted to the idea of a more hugbox Twitter.

nicoburns 3y ago

I've found twitter/mastadon useful to follow updates from specific open source developers whose work I know and am interested in.

yutijke 3y ago
How do you find the time to go through it all? A lot of open source developers also post about other topics like their cats, dogs and favorite types of bread. Which is fine. It's their profile. With twitter I could filter out these with carefully crafted search queries on separately maintained lists since I only have so much time in my day to devote to Tech, I cannot do this on Mastodon since no one is diligent about hashtags and it is an explicit policy to cripple search. I've most stopped following open source developers since then.
- nicoburns 3y ago
  > How do you find the time to go through it all? I'm not consistent with it. I just check it occasionally. For people I'm particularly interested in (and who don't post that often!), I'll go to their profile and scroll down that separately to if there's anything I've missed. For others, if I didn't see it then that's ok. > A lot of open source developers also post about other topics like their cats, dogs and favorite types of bread. I just don't follow (or later unfollow) anyone who does this.

_khhm 3y ago

[dead]