The Fall of Twitter
For those watching the mess that Musk is making of Twitter, you might wonder what some alternatives are. For myself, I've joined Mastodon. It kinda seems like Twitter, but it's not.
First, if you already know Mastodon, I'm at https://fosstodon.org/@ovid (Also: @ovid@fosstodon.org). To "friend" someone on Mastodon, paste one of those in a search box and you will usually see their name pop up. Click on it and then click "follow."
If you don't know Mastodon, it's a Twitter-like social network, but a key difference is that there is no "central" Mastodon. Different groups set up different servers (also known as "instances"). Yes, you can see posts of your friends who are on different servers. There are thousands of Mastodon servers, so it can be overwhelming, but here's a tool to help you choose a server, along with an introductory guide to Mastodon. Here's a follow-up to that guide.
People complain about the "distributed" nature of this social network, but think of it like email: your email server talks to other email servers and you don't even think about it. Mastodon still needs some work to make this seamless, but once you get the hang of it, it's pretty good.
In general, Mastodon servers tend to support content moderation and often actively block any servers which have extreme content. Also, there's not "algorithm." "Toots" (the Mastodon version of "tweets") are shown newest first. There's no "hey, this has lots of likes, so we'll show it to you."
Also, about "likes" on Mastodon: you will see who has liked your posts. Others will not. "Liking" a toot is just letting the author know. You're not being gamed.
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