I thought of this title this morning, and it really was too good not to use, even though a quick google found a story by that title already existed. Well, I’m not going to let that stop me.
This post was going to be about how to join Mastodon and find a group of instant friends that will bring you back ten years, back when Twitter still existed and also was good. And, I still will. Hence the header image there. But as I was checking in on Masto during the work day, I just got kinda angry.
These social media sites were good once. And then they became shitty. Famed blogger and author Cory Doctorow calls it the “enshitification” of social media. Doctorow has a Kickstarter out right now for a book that explains how we can take back control of our lives from the giant corporations that own us, called “The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation“. Check it out.
Tom Eastman famously wrote, “I’m old enough to remember when the Internet wasn’t a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four.”
And I read from somewhere else today and I would love to remember where so I could link to it (may have been Doctorow, but I couldn’t find it easily if so), that all the big social media sites have the same arc:
- Make the users happy
- Invite businesses in to market to the users
- Forget the users, make the businesses happy
- Forget the businesses, time to cash in
- Social media site dies
(Here’s the original quote: “Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.” — Cory Doctorow, Tiktok’s enshittification)
Facebook, Ex-Twitter, Reddit — all of them are nearing the end of that list. Google Plus traced this arc years ago, start to end. Still angry about this. We lowly users make all the content that made these guys rich. Most of us never saw a penny for our work to make these places interesting and enticing. Our lives and experiences are being ripped to train large language models but we, the ones that did this work, are prevented from benefiting from it.
I’m kinda over all this. Just seems to be so many people trying so very hard to make things worse for the greatest number of people. I don’t know anyone that looks forward to what the future holds, anymore.
Anyway! Let’s get on Mastodon! You’re probably there already but just in case….!
When I joined Mastodon, I joined one of the big servers — mastodon.social, I believe. I drowned in the content. I then followed a friend to one called elekk.xyz, but didn’t like the rigid restrictions they had there on what could be posted. I then moved over to masto.ai, which was actually very nice. I then made one more move to gamepad.club when that opened, as it looked like a lot of fellow Twitter refugees were moving there.
This is the cool thing about Mastodon. It’s so easy to move and bring all your follows and followers along. But today, I just want to talk about getting onto the last of those, gamepad.club, the official Mastodon server for Blaugust 2023.
- Follow this link
- Sign up.
- Set up your profile with a profile picture and an introduction. Very important. Few people will follow you if they don’t know who you are. So let people know who you are.
Once signed up, your timeline will likely be empty. You can look at the local timeline, which will probably contain a lot of Blaugust discussion, or the federated timeline, which will be a firehose of content, consisting of all the other Mastodon servers that anyone from gamepad.club has ever interacted with. This is what they mean by federation.
Follow anyone who seems interesting. They will usually follow you back if they like your profile. Some Mastodon servers have house rules that require you to interact with someone before following them, but this isn’t true on gamepad.club (you can read the rules for this server here).
Now here’s the fun part. You can follow hashtags. Since there is no “search everywhere in the Fediverse for this search string” function, searching is pretty useless. Text searching isn’t even allowed on this server for some reason (not sure if it’s just this server or all of them).
You can’t search for arbitrary text, but you can search for hashtags. In the search box, start a search with “#” and a few letters. Like Final Fantasy? Sure you do.
Looks like the most popular hashtag is just #FinalFantasy. Selecting that first one brings up the latest posts from the federated servers with that hashtag.
You’re just about there at this point. To the right of the “< Back” link is a person icon with a plus sign next to them. This is the Follow button. Click that, and now any post made among the federated servers with the #FinalFantasy hashtag will appear in your feed.
Try this with #Blaugust2023. Try other hashtags. In almost no time, you will have customized gamepad.club (or any other server of your choosing) so that it gives you exactly what you want, with no advertising or algorithm to get in your way. It’s your social media now. And if you see that some people who really get you are on some other server… feel free to go over there. All your hashtags, follows and followers will come along.
YOU are in control. Shouldn’t you be?
I ended up on mastadon.social but logically feels like I’d of been better off starting on gamepad.club as it seems to be attracting most of the folks I follow.
However, even as a super technical person, I still can’t wrap my brain around the fediverse and whether there is any value of me moving over or how I move over to a knew mastadon server. Any thoughts here?
It’s largely to make your local feed useful, if I’m being honest. The local feed on mastodon.social is a firehose and there’s no way to process all that. The local feed on gamepad.club is mostly Blaugust bloggers.
You should google how to move, because it is a process. Basically, you make an account on your destination — gamepad.club — then go back to mastodon.social and tell it to move all your info to gamepad.club and it will set up a redirect to send people there from then on. It’s not as complicated as it sounds. I’ve moved many times.
Going to start the process to move today and maybe write up a little guide; we’ll see 🙂
The journey is the reward. Or something :-0 See you on the other side!
All done! https://gamepad.club/@heartlessgamer
Sigh . . . I’ve been avoiding Mastodon, but I followed the link!
ONE OF US! ONE OF US!
I followed your advice and migrated my existing Mastodon account to the gamepad.club. Thanks for the clear instructions in your post.
I saw! Welcome to gamepad.club!!!
“I don’t know anyone that looks forward to what the future holds, anymore.” Well you know me… About the only thing I don’t look forward to about the future is how little of it I’ll get to see.
As someone who made a conscious decision to leave Yahoo Groups back around the turn of the millennium because I could see how it was eating up my free time and I didn’t like it, I get the exact same feeling about Mastodon, so I’m staying well clear.
I’ve almost completely side-stepped the whole social media era anyway. I never used any of the famous sites or apps so I only have a prurient, outsider’s curiosity in the way they’re all collapsing now. As for the Internet as a whole, I don’t have any real issues with how it’s changing. I probably prefer it as it is now, if anything, because I can find the stuff I want a lot more easily than I could a decade ago.
I do see that it’s largely lost its homespun, DIY aspect but that’s really a matter of perspective. All the clunky, awkward, idiosyncratic options are still there, pretty much where they’ve always been, with their niche userbases of people who never left or went there specifically to get away from the corporate giants. They only retain their quirkiness by dint of the low interest they attract, though. I think the idea that some new operation is going to be able to keep those feels and somehow serve the tens and hundreds of millions that the sites we’re all supposedly migrating away from is fanciful. They’ll either stay small and therefore insignificant or they’ll turn into the new Facebooks and Twitters and start to matter.
Meet the new boss… as Pete Townshend said.
I absolutely understand. I have definitely gone away from social media — back In The Day, I was always on forums, Facebook, Twitter, everywhere.
Thing is, I’ve met so many incredible people — you included — via social media, either directly or indirectly. I thank Twitter and the larger blogosphere for that. We’re atoms in an expanding universe, and we need to form bonds that matter in order not to end up entirely alone.
The internet was once about freedom. Now it is about control. It’s used to attack and scam people. Influence elections. Wage wars. And those with the most money are in control and they do not want what we want. It’s like communism. The idea makes sense, but the implementation always ends up in the same place. The internet allows unlimited surveillance and I don’t like that. I have script blockers on my browser so that that spying little JavaScript only works when I want it to. Facebook trackers are blocked, and some of Google’s trackers. (Since I use Google Analytics in my blog, it would be a little disingenuous to block them all).
Back decades ago, we ran a BBS in the FidoNet network. We owned and controlled all our content, but we could connect with other BBSs and be part of our chosen communities. Later, the same thing happened with netnews, AKA Usenet. We grabbed what we wanted onto our own personal servers, etc. This whole monolithic big business social media is NOT the way the internet started out, and it was BETTER. Anyone who was on the net in the 80s and early 90s will say the same thing. That’s what I want to bring back in any small way I can. And part of that is urging those people who are interested in the Twitter-like experience to try a different option and see how they like it.
Modern social media is poison, though, and I admire those who can pull off quitting cold turkey. Me, I still want to chat with friends old and new through that microblogging metaphor, but I don’t want to be used.
One thing I’ve realised is that I’m not the same person that I was in the heyday of forums, IRC etc.
For example, I wondered why I’d dipped from the Blaugust server and on rejoining I realised it was very intensely active, it being the Blaugust festival and all.
I saw the lit up channels and realised I’m no longer looking for a digital home and the firehose of notifications taking up my Discord interface activated my fight or flight response. I see the highlighted unread channels and instead of being excited about joining a new community I feel overwhelmed.
In my teens, I would have had the time, curiosity and inclination to really dedicate myself to new communities, and the lack of self awareness about how much of that process was about fueling my own ego.
I would say that I’ve slowly become a hermit, but in many ways I always was. Ego remains an issue; maybe Twitter shaped me furthermore into a self-centered mindset, where I’d be posting for my own gratification and not forging two-way relationships with other Twitter users.
All this said and I’ve not really addressed your point about enshittification. I guess, the more we as users get familiar with the cycle, the more fatigue builds up when evaluating new places to move to, even when they look good.
I joined Mastodon with the November exodus. It feels a little bit like retiring to the countryside. I still pop into the big cities now and then but it’s strange to read my Blaugust entries from last year where I speak with vigour about renewing my social media presences.
Well, re: Discord, I feel that. I am in so many Discord channels now that I don’t go to any of them. Even the ones set up for me and my friends — it’s too overwhelming.
TBH, Twitter was getting that way for me. I’d never feel I had a handle for what was going on, plus, their algorithm meant sometimes I’d see posts I really would have wanted to see sooner, days later. Very frustrating.
I dallied in Mastodon for awhile, not really being too active, but I have stepped up for Blaugust because I have to be the change I want to see in the world. I like chatting with people and I like having interesting people with whom to chat, and that means encouraging them to come to place where this can happen 🙂
I’m very much an introvert, but on the other hand, I hate being lonely. I do live with my son and a guy I love quite a lot, but ever since I started working at home, I find I miss talking with other people. Mastodon fills a hole, and I like it for that. It certainly isn’t for everyone. Especially since it does require a little work with finding people and hashtags to follow until you’re seeing the stuff you want to see. I’ve read that a lot of people just go to social media to browse; Mastodon really doesn’t make one way interactions easy.
Yeah, I like the pace in Mastodon too! I guess in line with my “retiring to the countryside” comment the interactions are kinda like having to get to know your neighbours, and feeling that the connections are genuine instead of rat-race posturing.
I also like that when I do do the passive engagement things – the simple “I have seen your post and liked it” – that it is no more than that. It doesn’t get used to push that “Alecat liked this post” to my mutuals. It’s a quiet appreciation from me to the poster.
After reading this I considered going in search of a Mastodon instance that felt right for me, but then I thought about how much time I used to spend on Twitter and then on masto.ai or whatever it was.
Just a few weeks ago I jumped on the Threads bandwagon and, yeah, suddenly I was wasting way too much time doomscrolling again.
I feel more at peace without social media in my life, it turns out. I do ‘cheat’ a bit in that I have a small group of folks I’ve done for decades in a Facebook group, but the group is small enough that one visit/day is sufficient to keep up on everything going on there.
Sounds healthy 🙂
We now know that we are being manipulated, knowingly, by many people in social media. The more you use it, the more you are manipulated. Being chatty on computers, though, for me, has just been a part of my life since college, so I’m probably always going to find ways to social media. But I want to do it responsibly 😉
Obvs I’d love to chat with you on Mastodon, but you have to do what’s best for you.
Y’know now that I think about it, I COULD set up a Mastodon account and just follow the handful of folks I enjoy chatting with and just ignore the firehose. It’s sad and a little disturbing that I just now thought of that possibility! (Talk about being manipulated by social media!)
I mean, by default you get nothing in Mastodon, so it’s easy to just add what you want.
I really wanted to join gamepad and be with my buds but I really love the vibe on my server, wandering.shop, and can still interact with my friends on gamepad! And I love that about Mastodon. I find some really interesting things on the server I’m on, through the hashtags I pinned, and I’m meeting some interesting people! It’s just such a great experience.
Oh yeah, it’s awesome that you can keep looking for that perfect spot and never lose anything.