Glenn Fleishman on Getting Started on Mastodon
Glenn Fleishman at TidBITS:
You can think of Mastodon as a flotilla of boats of vastly
different sizes, whereas Twitter is like being on a cruise ship
the size of a continent. Some Mastodon boats might be cruise
liners with as many as 50,000 passengers; others are just dinghies
with a single occupant! The admin of each instance — the captain
of your particular boat — might make arbitrary decisions you
disagree with as heartily as with any commercial operator’s tacks
and turns. But you’re not stuck on your boat, with drowning as the
only alternative. Instead, you can hop from one boat to another
without losing your place in the flotilla community. Parts of a
flotilla can also splinter off and form their own disconnected
groups, but no boat, however large, is more important than any
other in the community.
If you’re a regular Twitter or Facebook user — or avoided both
those and similar services — and want to understand what Mastodon
is, where it seems to be headed, and how to join in, read on. You
don’t need a lot of technical details to understand why Mastodon
and the Fediverse exist in sharp contrast to commercial social
networks and why they hearken back to some of the more enjoyable
aspects of earlier stages of Internet interactions.
I don’t think Mastodon is confusing, per se, but its federated nature makes it inherently at least a bit more complex than a centralized commercial network like Twitter or Instagram. Fleishman’s piece here is a wonderful overview.
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Glenn Fleishman at TidBITS:
You can think of Mastodon as a flotilla of boats of vastly
different sizes, whereas Twitter is like being on a cruise ship
the size of a continent. Some Mastodon boats might be cruise
liners with as many as 50,000 passengers; others are just dinghies
with a single occupant! The admin of each instance — the captain
of your particular boat — might make arbitrary decisions you
disagree with as heartily as with any commercial operator’s tacks
and turns. But you’re not stuck on your boat, with drowning as the
only alternative. Instead, you can hop from one boat to another
without losing your place in the flotilla community. Parts of a
flotilla can also splinter off and form their own disconnected
groups, but no boat, however large, is more important than any
other in the community.
If you’re a regular Twitter or Facebook user — or avoided both
those and similar services — and want to understand what Mastodon
is, where it seems to be headed, and how to join in, read on. You
don’t need a lot of technical details to understand why Mastodon
and the Fediverse exist in sharp contrast to commercial social
networks and why they hearken back to some of the more enjoyable
aspects of earlier stages of Internet interactions.
I don’t think Mastodon is confusing, per se, but its federated nature makes it inherently at least a bit more complex than a centralized commercial network like Twitter or Instagram. Fleishman’s piece here is a wonderful overview.