Mastodon Social - What's your opinion?

Lounge EndeavourOS pub
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I’m so bored of the mess that X (Twitter) has become over the years. So I just joined Mastodon. So far I’ve only followed EndeavourOS. I’ll dig more into Mastodon after work this evening. But, in the meantime, what’s your opinion on Mastodon? I’m assuming it’s far better than X? Curious if it’s worth jumping in full force or not.

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Social Media?

Here’s my opinion. On all of it: :face_vomiting:

X, Mastodon, Facebook, Myspace, Linkedin, instagram, whatever… :nauseated_face:

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I use Mastodon as a source for entertainment and topic specific news. But I’m mostly a silent reader.

I can’t say nothing about Twitter/X never used it, nor do I use facebook.

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Checkout https://fedi.tips/ and https://fedi.directory/ for interesting topics/accounts.

I use mastodon as general source of information, mostly for popular or interesting FOSS/Privacy/Security/Technology related news/discussions.

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Forgot to mention just like most ActivityPub based projects Mastodon supports RSS so that we can follow their toots without coming to the site :slight_smile:

I do have a folder in my RSS reader named “Mastodon” to follow some* of project news as I’m not a active user of mastodon.

e.g.

etc…

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premise: I loathe all social media.
Once that is clear, personally, I prefer Pleroma over Mastodon, as the latter has suffered too many heavy hits from political agendas (which I loathe even more than social media).

Observing the media scenario zooming out, I would say that centralized social media will still exist in the future for a long while, because they serve some purpose (think in terms of business, for example, and the need to generate leads and conversions).
However, I also think that some form of decentralized social media will reach a dominant position and will be used to exchange unfiltered-uncensored news and information. Will it reach a significant market share? unlikely, for many reasons: masses are easily attracted by content that is easy and fast to consume, and the bulk of content exchanged can’t really be monetized by businesses (which are the main driving force behind any significant change in technology); furthermore, fringe social media are magnetically polarizing, as they are the crossroad where ‘niche geek’ and 'hipsters" meet, and I don’t know how many of you can be bothered by either of the two.

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I’ve moved over to the fediverse entirely since Twitter and Reddit started going down the toilet. Mastodon and Lemmy are much better, although they do suffer somewhat due to having fewer people around in general.

The userbase of the fediverse seems to be 75% linux users, though, which is a plus :smile:

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I use mastodon for news I curate on the world’s conflicts. I find it infinitely superior to the old Twitter, BlueSky, FlipBoard, FB, Reddit… Having said that, I’m not a great social media guy. :older_man:

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I’m not that social, with or without media :sweat_smile:

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I just use it to follow projects I am interested in and open-source-related channels/individuals. Those and some artists.

I dedicate about 15–30 minutes a day to actual social media, while I have this forum open all day and check it in between work, studies, hobbies, etc. One of the perks of working remotely.

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For the most part, I use Mastodon for gaming/tech news.
I definitely find it much more relaxed than Twitter/X :slight_smile:

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I haven’t used it, but I heard a lot about it. I still think YouTube is the the only S tier social media. It has problems, 100%, but it offers basically unlimited creativity to the creator.

Isn’t this forum sort of a social media platform too?

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I wouldn’t call it a type of “social media”, in my password manager it’s under “forum” category (different than socialmedia). Forum is a special kind of social platform where ideas/discussions are exchanged focused on specific topic only. For us it should be EOS/Arch only.

But we know it’s much more than that, specifically when you post in “Lounge” category.:upside_down_face:

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I left Twitter, ReddIt and the likes behind, never went near any of the Meta stuff anyway and set up my own, 1 user, instance of Akkoma (a Pleroma fork) a few years back.
Haven’t looked back.

Also ran a Lemmy server for a while but decided I don’t want to donate that much time to Social Media and hence not active on Lemmy any longer.

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twitter and reddit were always in the toilet tho… Especially twitter, I don’t remember a time when it wasn’t pure cancer, dunno wtf elon musk was thinking buying said cancer, normally you’d want to cut out a cancer, not pay for more of it in your life.

Youtube is pure garbage too, the only difference between it and the rest is that there are actually things of value to be found on it so i do use it sometimes, but goolag has been actively trying to destroy the platform for years with restrictions, censorship and just general assholery (don’t be evil, amirite?!)

No, we had forums long before we had social media. But you make a good point, where is the line drawn where something becomes social media in the first place? Does the term really mean anything at all anymore or is it like the term ‘modern art’ which can basically mean literally anything (and therefore means actually nothing at all)?

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Well, yes. That’s why I said “it has problems”. It absolutely has problems regarding itself, but I personally don’t agree with the idea that Google somehow destroyed this platform. They bought it back in 2006, only a year after its inception, and brought it through its best and worst eras. The restrictions, censorship and general assholery exist so that YouTube can continue being. I personally believe that they exist so that YouTube doesn’t end up becoming a site similar to 4chan or the Kiwi Farms.

I said before that YouTube being a shitty platform isn’t a new conception within the YouTube community. There are things to criticize, but, in my opinion, you haven’t brought any real examples of YouTube being “pure garbage”.

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This is the closest thing I have to using social media. I did’nt know about the mastadon rss feed thing though, that’s kinda cool.

I guess.

Maybe someday I’ll look at it. Probably not today though.

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Forums as far as I know can’t actually turn over personal information to the Authorities. Places like Facebook and X depend on you signing up on those platforms as your true identity. While you can use an Alias they have all kinds of other tools to help with exact location and IDENTIFICATION. Something forums just don’t waste money on.

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Massive amount of self-righteous lunatics.

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First to go was Facebook, followed by Twitter. Next I tossed Instagram. This was a giant upgrade to my mood of the world. After Reddit implosion, I haven’t been back after nuking that account. Tried Mastadon and Lemmy.world. Lemmy.world was slightly more useful then Mastadon and more like Reddit with specialty topics. In the end I nuked my accounts for both of them. After being targeted by hackers I hibernated LinkedIn. The bonus there is I don’t get annoying recruiter calls anymore.

In the end I am on 3 public message boards and 1 private message board.

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