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unspeakablehorrorI've noticed huge influxes of leftists to Mastodon from Twitter (who apparently has been banning leftists worldwide). Like there's been a ton of new Indian users, people from Spain, and I recently heard that some people were being blocked just for retweeting a No War With Iran image (regarding the recent US assassination of General Soleimani). I don't know the details of the Twitter bannings because it's not something I've investigated closely, this is just what I've heard. Anyway, whatever's going on means Mastodon is looking a lot more lively these days, but it's really chilling to think what this must be doing to Twitter's already questionable environment. Definitely sounds like a place that gets unsafer by the day. To me Twitter has never seemed hugely appealing due to its character limit, and even Mastodon's larger 500 character limit is too confining for me to use for most purposes, but I highly reccomend it if you are looking for something that is basically Twitter, but better.
Some people might be a bit confused by Mastodon at first, because it uses a process called federation. What this process does is allow people on different servers to interact almost as if they were on the same server. So for example, I am on mastodon.social, but people can follow me from other servers that my server federates with, and I can see their posts in the global timeline on mastodon.social, and if I follow them I see their posts on my personal timeline. Servers can block other servers in addition to users being able to block other users, which allows the moderators to decide acceptable content and users (ie. servers with incompatible moderation policies exist, but one or both may block the other). This way if one server has a policy for banning users for expression of nazi sentiments (as mastodon.social does), and another server refuses to ban users like that, the server blocking people for nazi sentiments can block that entire server.
Anyway, if anyone is interested in joining Mastodon and needs help doing so, just let me know. I mostly use my Mastodon account to practice languages, but feel free to follow me there as well if you like. Or if you don't want to join but just want to browse my account, you can do that, too.
Some people might be a bit confused by Mastodon at first, because it uses a process called federation. What this process does is allow people on different servers to interact almost as if they were on the same server. So for example, I am on mastodon.social, but people can follow me from other servers that my server federates with, and I can see their posts in the global timeline on mastodon.social, and if I follow them I see their posts on my personal timeline. Servers can block other servers in addition to users being able to block other users, which allows the moderators to decide acceptable content and users (ie. servers with incompatible moderation policies exist, but one or both may block the other). This way if one server has a policy for banning users for expression of nazi sentiments (as mastodon.social does), and another server refuses to ban users like that, the server blocking people for nazi sentiments can block that entire server.
Anyway, if anyone is interested in joining Mastodon and needs help doing so, just let me know. I mostly use my Mastodon account to practice languages, but feel free to follow me there as well if you like. Or if you don't want to join but just want to browse my account, you can do that, too.
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Date: 2020-01-06 08:55 am (UTC)