the elephant thing

[wrog]

ok, so I'm on Mastodon (as @wrog@mastodon.murkworks.net, for now).

I will readily admit I never actually used Twitter (creating an account once upon a time was as far as I got) and still don't understand how it was ever supposed to work. I've got Local and Federated feeds spewing endless streams of spam; it's like sitting in the LambdaMOO living room but with 10,000 people there.

I'll be trying out the Lists feature (something similar worked well enough dealing with Livejournal at its height, but even that was far less traffic...).

I really miss Usenet and trn

link

Comments

[nosrednayduj]

So to make twitter manageable, what you need to do is have people you follow. In twitter, there are two options which allow you to get either only the things that people you follow post and repost, or else you can get a random collection of things that twitter thinks you might like to see, which includes most (but not all) of the things that people you follow post and repost and like, and "things twitter thinks are similar", and "things that twitter wants you to see regardless of your desires". (Usually this is too much for me, but I switch to it periodically.)

On mastodon, what you want to do is also follow a bunch of people, and then you will get things that they post and repost (toot and boost), and anything that mentions you. Probably you don't want to get the fire hose of "everything". The only purpose of the firehose is to give you an idea of who to follow. Mastodon doesn't seem to have the second option for your Home stream.

Now, I already follow a bunch of people on twitter, and a number of them said on Twitter what their mastodon handle was, so I was able to go and find them and follow them. One thing you can do is click on the profiles of people you follow and see who they follow, and see if you want to follow those people. Then, when people boost things, you can discover new people you want to follow. I so far don't have "enough", because the amount of text I wish to stream by when I say "I'll go check social media" stops too quickly. But there are people whose stuff I am sort of interested in who I am not following, because they post every hour and that's too much. I'm hoping that somebody I follow will follow them and boost only the good stuff. Curation!

Mastodon also allows you to follow hashtags, but I haven't tried that yet. Haven't really thought about hashtags I'd like to follow. Will anybody use #LambdaMOO?

[wrog]

Will anybody use #LambdaMOO?

Short answer: Yes. Or at least, it's now in my bio, FWIW.

Search isn't yet turning up anybody else, but we'll see…