I’m a fan of Mastodon, the new microblogging service that is trying to break the hegemony of Twitter. It’s better, cleaner, free of most of the trolls, and promises to take seriously complaints about racists and nazis and misogynists, unlike Twitter. It also has an interesting approach, decentralizing the servers who manage the whole show, so you can even pick Mastodon servers that best reflect your interests.
But that might also be a vulnerability. I went for octodon.social, was trying to contribute regularly to it, and then…kablooiee. It’s been down for a couple of days now. It appears to be no fault of the administrator, but the hosting service itself has screwed up.
Anyway, just be prepared for occasional breakdowns. Mastodon is great, but it demands some flexibility that you don’t get with the monolithic monolith.
I’d noticed that it was down when I went to log in on Monday and again today. That’s not great news. I may want to look for a backup instance just in case.
So maybe a decentralized server system that back each other up and share all new postings and fail over to one another…
Oh look. We’ve re-invented Usenet.
Basically having a Usenet type backbone for Mastodon would be ideal, and would be less intensive than Usenet ever was, I would imagine. I really miss the decentralization of our older communication systems. It’s one reason I’ve never truly liked Facebook or its equivalents (before or after).