I’m not joining Comrade Hornbeck’s FreethoughBlogs-flavored Mastodon Instance myself for a few reasons, most notably that I didn’t have a Twitter to replace, never found that school of social media-ing appealing. But if you want to join, you can comment here with the handle you’d prefer. I can see your email in my admin panel and pass along word to HJ within 24 hours or so, and help him vet entrants with the relevant info.
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Great American Satan
Opposing any & all Status Quo Warriors
no takers, lol. at least hj’s fees will stay low.
Patience! Musk added a billion dollars a year in debt payments to Twitter. Their primary source of revenue is advertising, and Twitter has lost something like 40 to 70% of their ad revenue. Twitter Blue is nowhere near to recuperating that, and might wind up a net loss for Twitter by disabling ads for their hardcore users. Things are so dire they’re no longer paying rent. leading to two lawsuits and an eviction. Oh yeah, and the US FTC might open an investigation and hit them with a billion-dollar fine.
Twitter is on its way out, the only question is how quickly. And once they’re out, we’ll see a few takers.
will we tho, comrade? WILL WE? i keed, i keed. how does it feel swimming around in the pachydermous void?
I never bothered to get a Twitter account, because I’d heard so much about the platform being used for harassment. My current YouTube viewing, in fact, is one on JK Rowling by Jessie Gender talking about the sheer amount of hate directed at her via Rowling. I nonetheless snooped on a few Twitter accounts to keep up with the news.
Since I set up this Mastodon instance, I rarely go back to those Twitter feeds. I’m not as up-to-date on US politics as I used to be, but I’ve been exposed to much more global and local news. There are still a lot more journalists on Twitter than on Mastodon, but there’s enough active ones over here to keep me happy. I’ve also been pleasantly surprised by the number of atheo-skeptics present on Mastodon; one of my reasons for setting up the instance was to get more of them involved, and yet I see a decent number of familiar names already there and tooting.
As for harassment, I have yet to see any. I know it exists, since I occasionally drop in on the darker side of the fediverse as part of my mod duties, but I have yet to spot an example of it in my timeline. That’s rather impressive, as the general rule seems to be that Mastodon is an order of magnitude more lively than Twitter, per-capita, with some people claiming it’s more like two orders of magnitude. It’s also quite common to see people proclaim that Mastodon is friendlier or Twitter is filling up with hate, though these are pretty anecdotal.
Do I have gripes? Sure. There aren’t enough content warnings for my liking. While the complaints of racism have died down, Mastodon still skews white and European. A number of the people i follow aren’t actually on Mastodon, but use bots to copy-paste their Twitter interactions over here. I may not be seeing that harassment due to technical issues, as replies to posts made elsewhere tend not to show up unless you visit the foreign instance. There’s still fewer people on here than on Twitter, and the nicer environment may be dependent on keeping it that way.
Still, I find it far superior to Twitter overall and nothing like a void.