If this “outtage” hasn’t hit your Twitter app of choice, I don’t think burying your head in the sand and crossing your fingers is a good strategy, but that’s just my opinion.
Ivory, from the makers of Tweetbot, makes Mastodon feel pretty familiar, and there are a few other nice apps, too. Most “essential” people I follow (exceptions below), including some MPU folks, are on Mastodon.
I had a few lists in Twitter (sportswriters, weather, traffic) which I would visit on occasion after my move to Mastodon. I’ve now added those accounts into Netnewswire, my RSS reader, and just read them there. We’ll see how long that connection lasts before Twitter shuts it off.
Actually, it is, if that’s what you prefer. It always has been for me. I can’t imagine using Twitter — or anything else on the internet (or in life in general, really) — any other way. Much of Twitter’s original value for you came from spontaneous interaction. For me, it was the exact opposite. The value for me was the ability to narrow my exposure to precisely what I wanted to see, not what somebody else hoped I would see. Under those conditions, it was, for a while there, an invaluable source of endless discovery for me.
I’ve heard on a few tech podcasts that Mastodon is a much better community, less hate, less arguing.
I downloaded Ivory and scrolled through a bit last night. I don’t know I’d say it’s any better.
Firstly, unless the person is an iOS dev and liberal, they don’t seem to have moved to Mastodon. (I’m liberal too, not saying that as an insult).
Just regular, everyday people - they don’t seem to have left Twitter for Mastodon yet, maybe that’s about to happen.
What I’m seeing is a lot of complaining and virtue signally, not unlike Twitter.
I’m happier being off all of it.
And I know - it’s who you follow, what topics you’re interested in and so on. But with retweets (or whatever they’re now called) and trends, it takes two seconds to be reading an interesting tweet/toot and finding yourself in the midst of a where someone is going on about something and then ends their comment with “full stop”.
We need to stop spending so much time online arguing and complaining, that’s my takeaway.
FWIW I just discovered I can subscribe to my Twitter feed in NetNewsWire. Since I use Twitter as a news feed this looks like it might be a good solution for me.
But can you see everyone that is using Mastodon? Or just the people on YOUR Mastodon server? I’ve not tried it but I was under the impression that each server was a community of users and that “additional actions of some kind” were necessary to “reach outside” one’s own server.
No, not in any Mastodon app I’ve used (but maybe on your server’s website?). In most Mastodon apps, just go to the search field and start typing somebody’s user name, regardless of which server they’re on. I’ve never had a problem with it searching across servers pretty instantaneously. Then click the “follow” button, and they’re in your feed, just like third-party Twitter clients. Frankly, I don’t notice any difference in how to follow people between Mastodon and Twitter. I think if you only use your Mastodon server’s website, you might have to jump through some weird hoops, but in the third-party clients it is seamless and invisible.
This is incorrect. If I search for @ user on the website or in an app I get a list of users, beginning with the users with that username that I follow regardless of their instance, next in the results list is the username in my own instance, followed by people on other instances with that username or a portion of it. It’s very comprehensive in my experience. @karlnyhus
I don’t know how Mastodon recreates the critical mass that Twitter achieved. Mastodon lends itself to siloing from what I hear whereas the early promise of Twitter was a public square where all could meet.
The main friction I found building my network was in the “friends of friends” strategy. On Mastadon apps I used, the “Following” list of a user only includes the followers on your instance. To find followers on other instances requires going to the users profile page - a minor friction.
Twitter has been effectively down for me since they cut-off Tweetbot turning my gradual migration away into a sudden one. Most of the advertised challenges of moving did not materialize and the federated nature of Mastadon is mostly invisible in my use case (discovery and exploration). Utility depends on the communities you follow.
Not here it’s not. For me, this (reportedly) intentional action to f*** over a bunch of committed developers and their customers is the final proverbial nail in the proverbial coffin for the bird site
I don’t follow Twitter that much, but I have been using direct links to Twitter to read the original Twitter Files from Weiss, Taibbi, Schellenberger, Fang, Berenson et al. Online. It’s quite eye-opening and recommended reading.
where someone is going on about something and then ends their comment with “full stop”.