Reply With QuoteI left Twitter in November 2022 and moved to Mastodon. I am content with Mastodon and I am glad I left the toxicity of Twitter behind me.
Y'know, I don't mind paying for a free (ad-supported) service if I use it a lot and there's some incentive to paying a bit. Been paying for Spotify since 2010 and even Youtube Premium for a couple years. But Elon's tainted Twitter with his stank to the extent that signing up for Twitter Blue feels like signing up for Team Musk. And there's just no way in hell, ok? I'm not gonna quit twitter, will keep my account in the hopes that things turn around somehow or Musk ends up selling it to someone else, and at least it's an entertaining shitshow right now. For the uninitiated: Twitter's blue checkmarks used to verify that important accounts really were who they said they were, but now these accounts have been stripped of their marks and Twitter Blue has been turned into a $8 per month subscription which boosts your visibility. Plenty of big names like LeBron James and Stephen King and @dril are saying "fuck that", prefering not to pay for the privilege of providing content for the platform. Afraid that a lot of the big name draws aren't on-board Elon is now foisting Twitter Blue on these people against their will. He keeps putting the checkmark on dril, who keeps changing his displayname which removes it again. Seriously, check out dril's latest tweets, he's on fire right now.
Anyway, it's a fun shitshow and everything, but where is this poor indiedev to turn when his tweets are getting increasingly less engagement? A lot of Twitter alternatives have sprung up over the last half year, but the one I'm liking the look of most is Mastodon. It's a decentralized social network, which means it's spread out over a bunch of "instances", and if the admin running your instance suddenly turns EVIL you can quite easily pack up your entire posting history and move to another instance. I'm on mastodon.gamedev.place, which is run by this guy and he seems like a nice bloke. If you're not a gamedev the most popular spot to set up camp seems to be mastodon.social. The user experience is pretty much the same as twitter. The only real drawbacks are that video support isn't as good. Uploads limited to 720p and 40MB, and of course there's no fancy Playstation or Switch integration like twitter has. Oh well, hopefully this stuff'll come in the future.
My mastodon feed ain't as lively as my twitter feed since I haven't found as many people I wanna follow yet, which is why I'm here to ask HEY TTLG, YOU GUYS ON MASTO YET? The only ttlger I've found so far is Dana. If you're on there: this is me, add me!
Last edited by henke; 12th Sep 2024 at 10:03.
I left Twitter in November 2022 and moved to Mastodon. I am content with Mastodon and I am glad I left the toxicity of Twitter behind me.
Well, I made an account on Mastodon, then started to think who I would actually want to hear from, so I went to search for Ian Bogost. There are apparently three accounts, each with identical profile picture, one of which has no posting history, one of which has exactly one post linking to an article of his that argues social media was a mistake, and one of which is a bot that's supposed to post his tweets there, but there's a grand total of two posts.
Oh well, I guess social media is not really for me after all.
Hey Henke - I just joined masto gamedev and added you. I’m @Skiffy. Twitter is getting more and more ridiculous so I can see me using MAstodon a lot more but I’m a noob at present.
Says the guy who's been a New Member since Oct 2003Originally Posted by G_ManX
Don’t all the game devs post on Discord now? Don’t ask me; I’m old and find Discord confusing.
Anyway, I’ve had an inactive Twitter account for years now, but once Musk decided to slap CBC with a “government-funded media” tag, I deleted my account in protest. For the record, CBC is government funded, but its editorial independence is enshrined in law, so it is unequivocally not a government mouthpiece, as the tag implies.
Yeah I'm on a handful of Discords, but I'm not keen on the fast pace of online chat. I prefer the slow pace of posting on forums or social media.
G_ManX, added you!
btw for anyone interested, here's a really great recap of recent events: https://brokentoys.substack.com/p/the-great-dril-war
People complaining that other people might think that they're not a freeloader is so 2023 it hurts.
I don't get Mastadon. When I go to it, the only thing I see is one post from Henke in Swedish from 2019.
Edit: Wait, wait, wait... you have to make a new account for every sub-group? Just to clarify what's going on... This looks like a Twitter version of Reddit, except you have to make a new account for every subreddit-equivalent page. Is that what it is?
That's kind of crazy... On Twitter I'm connected to I don't know how many different circles ... international law people, law academics, the human rights world, Japan law and politics people, most Southeast Asian countries' law and politics people, jazz piano stuff, synth people, indie music groups, game dev people, indie game groups, modern art groups, the AI art scene, cognitive science groups, programming groups, neuroscience groups, philosophy groups, quantum physics groups, cinema groups, groups for wargaming, flight sims, & car sims... and I still think that might not even be half of it.
So for Mastodon, would I need a separate account and page for every one of those scenes? I can understand Twitter is imploding and Mastodon is decentralized or whatever, but chotto fuck that. I can see it working for people whose whole lives revolve around just one or two things, but if they're into a lot of different groups, it's kind of unreasonable to expect them to make like 50 different accounts they'd have to log into separately. I'll see if there are a few I'd really like and join, but big oof.
Last edited by demagogue; 24th Apr 2023 at 01:40.
No, you don't need to make accounts on every server, one is enough. You can follow folks on other servers just fine, although when you first look up someone on another server up it'll say "Older posts from other servers are not displayed". You'll start seeing their posts as they come out once you're following tho.
Then again some servers have different interfaces and maybe even different rules, and I've heard some servers are just flat out blocked by other servers in which case yeah you probably would have to make a separate account on another server. Where did you sign up, dema? Again, I'd say mastodon.social is probably the best place unless you've got a niche interest you're really into. Yeah, it's definitely more confusing than twitter.
And I just signed up on masto last year so you're definitely not seeing one of my posts for 2019.
Last edited by henke; 24th Apr 2023 at 02:45.
Twitter has become a full-blown Nazi bar and they're not even hiding it. Latest stunt was removing transgender protection from their hateful conduct policy, which, okay, never worked in the first place because it's Twitter, but now it's just officially open season.
I get that you got history and networks and stuff and it's hard to leave all that behind, I understand I truly do (I left behind a wonderful writing community and many LGBTQIA+ contacts), but I beg you to consider the harm this site does and how your continued use of it, while not malicious in itself, contributes to vindicating hateful conduct and harassment that affects many minorities.
I'm begging you. Stop using Twitter. Quit that shithole.
Last edited by rachel; 24th Apr 2023 at 07:16.
Yes I've been on Mastodon.social for a while now under @Cade_Mosley, but I couldn't log into gamedev.place with that account and it told me I needed to make a new one for it. But I made it now anyway under the same name anyway and followed you and a few others I know from your follow list.
For everyone else, here are my two accounts so far then: social and gamedev.
You mean I followed the wrong @henke? XDAnd I just signed up on masto last year so you're definitely not seeing one of my posts for 2019.
I probably just searched the name and added it unprompted.
I should have known your nick is always only lowercase....
Edit: For reference...
Last edited by demagogue; 24th Apr 2023 at 12:58.
That Henke is an IMPOSTOR!
I followed both of your accounts. Tho when I searched for Cade_Mosley I just saw your gamedev account. Had to type "@Cade_Mosley@mastodon.social" to see the other one. Hmm... yeah this whole system is pretty wonky.
The prevailing view these days seems to be that the only real violence is words.
You can still follow a handle even if you're not on the same server, you don't need to create a new account, but yeah that's not really obvious...
Twitter started out as a site for sharing vacation photos or something. I'll never get why people suddenly decided it would magically make a great tool for protest.
I keep telling people their methods are shortsighted and they keep telling me I lack compassion.
Not only shortsighted, easely other-directed
I'm on Mastodon as @namelessvoice@mastodon.gamedev.place, but honestly? It seems pointless and I never look at it.
Almost no one posts there. I use Twitter to follow gamedevs, mostly immersive sim ones, and none of them are on Mastodon.
Twitter is also the platform that's actually used by public figures, and none of those post on Mastodon.
Theoretically, I like the idea of a network not owned by a crazy billionaire, but it's of no use until the people I'm interested in actually post there.
Anyway, I haven't noticed any "death" of Twitter. It feels like it should die with how many stupid things Musk is doing, but the core system still works. There's a bunch of nonsense about blue tickmarks and algorithms, but the whole beauty of Twitter is that you can turn the algorithms off.
Yeah, there's been a bit of an uptick of hate since they fired all the content moderators, but it's not like the old Twitter team ever actually did anything when I reported posts anyway. If I was very lucky, they'd send me a message to tell me that they'd looked at some vile post I'd flagged and decided that it was perfectly acceptable behaviour, so no real change there.
The solution is just to never read replies to any public figure. The tweets and replies of the imm-sim developers on there are nearly always wholesome, I can't think of any vile behaviour I've seen there.
Edit: Also, I hate Mastodon's use of "favourite" for "like". The two are completely different things, the word favourite makes no sense in that context. Especially when it also has bookmarks.
Okay, let's kick the hornet's nest. As much as I hate Elon Musk, this is honestly one of the few positive things he's done. It's ridiculous that some countries' media is tagged as "government-funded", to try to de-legitimise its reporting, while other countries' state-run media doesn't get the tag.
Last edited by Nameless Voice; 8th May 2023 at 20:08.
Funded and controlled are not necessarily the same thing. ...Especially when there's a legal requirement against the latter.
Well then it should be easy for you to see the posts of the people who DO post there, ie ME! So make it with the faves and the boosts CHOP CHOP
Also, you're following 12 people. Gotta get that number up if you want your Home feed to start resembling what you see on twitter.
There's a lot of cool folks on masto, but I do wish the crowd was more diverse tho. It's all pretty much just a whole buncha NERDS! And yeah, I'm a nerd, but having some normal people posting there once in a while would really liven the place up.
Last edited by henke; 9th May 2023 at 02:30.
I am on @masto.ai and use the "Mastodon for iPhone and iPad" app since November 2022. Here is my experience so far:
- Home: I follow about 15 accounts and one hashtag. There are new posts about my interests every few minutes. I appreciate there are no ads on Mastodon and no algorithm pushes content into my home stream.
- Search: I usually search for hashtags which I don't want to add to my home feed because I don't want to read about these topics all the time. For the topics I am most interested in, I find less content than I got on Twitter, but much higher quality overall. This area of the app also has tabs for "News", "Community" and "For You", but I never use them because they show content on topics I am not interested in.
- Notifications: My content gets mentioned, boosted and favorited by people who follow me or sometimes by people who found my content by searching for the hashtags I used in my content. It is about the same level of interaction I got on Twitter.
Overall, I am very satisfied with my experience on Mastodon. For my personal interests, I get enough content and interaction.
Funding definitely affects bias.
It's a moot point anyway, as I believe Twitter just got rid of all those funding labels again now.
Except all the people I'm following on Twitter aren't on Mastodon. I don't want to just follow random people on there!
In other words, the technology doesn't really matter, the most important thing is which platform everyone uses.
There's a great difference, though, whether a news organisation receives 1-10% of it's funding from the government and might therefore be biased towards pro-government messaging and whether it gets its marching orders from the government and is immediately punished should it publish something critical of it.
But I guess Russia Today and NPR have the same ideological bent of being "state-affiliated" in the eyes of some people.
CBC doesn't do pro-government messaging. They do stories on climate change and trans rights, sure, and they've endured decades of budget cuts for being just barely on the left side of centre, but they're equally critical of government as they are of opposition, despite what the conservatives who don't actually read them say.
As for Musk, what he actually put was a "69 percent government funded" tag because the CBC said they were less than 70 percent gov't funded and he apparently thought that was hilarious. He's an early 2000s edgelord in charge of several billion-dollar companies.
