Today I joined Mastodon via Medium (me.md)
New Medium account ->> https://me.dm/@jdavidnet
I’ve been a long user of social media, and I clearly remember one of the first times I signed up for Twitter. It’s a fond memory and kind of the beginning of my adult tech career. Twitter was the first time I had used a social network professionally, even before Facebook was a thing.
At one such event, a few of us found ourselves talking about having a local afterparty, and we were organizing car pools. People who didn’t know each other were going to get in a car together, and again this is before Uber or Lyft, and most of us had horror stories from our parents running through our minds, and one person shouted out, “It’s OK, they are on Twitter” as if that was some sort of social validation that they were a good person.
I remember the early days of Twitter when people used #Hashtags to stay safe while they were traveling, and people would watch for a safety post saying they got home or to their destination safely. Twitter was so much more personal and intimate.
Over the years, this intimacy fell away. The network grew, and your close friends kind of got lost in all of the entertaining chaos.
Then the algorithms got ahold of the service, and it was all about promoting the content they wanted to promote — either ads or for people who figured out how to manipulate it. Twitter was no longer an honest place.
I’m not even going to get into what Twitter is now that Elon Musk owns it, but it’s safe to say I just didn’t feel like I wanted to invest my time into social networks like Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. These networks just don’t feel like home, and I have to wonder what the motives are or who is serving them.
Now, I might still be a bit too naive, but it seems like there is hope for Mastodon. It’s a distributed and federated social network, so no one service, company, or organization has control over how it works. Mastodon is open source and so the primary contributors have the most influence, but each host is able to change the code, layout, and style of the application to suit their needs and preferences.
I spent most of today in a sort of reverse #FollowFriday following 80+ people I know or kind of know of that are on Mastodon. I hope more of my friends join the network and we can start fresh.
In my brief use of the network, it’s more useful than early Twitter, but I do wish there were algorithms I could use or install to make filtering easier. It seems like the best way to use the app right now is to leave it open while people post.
How do you make Mastodon useful?
