Networked

It appears Mastodon is a thing again.

Apparently I signed up for it back in 2016, in the first (?) wave of Twitter panic. And now it’s back.

First impressions, is that it’s very much like the Twitter of old, even down to the aesthetics. I like how they’ve obviously learnt from the problems that have beset Twitter, and how the federated aspect allows for a more sustainable future.

That said, with federation, comes more complexity, and I’m not sure there’s quite enough mainstream ‘user friendliness’ to make it something I’ll consistently use. There’s a lack of help/documentation (it’s mostly focused on technical documentation), so it’ll take a while to learn, but we’ll see what happens.

Certainly the fact that it feels smaller and more community based is a plus. If only there was a way of easily transferring tweets and (probably selected) followings over.

In a similar vein, 1Feed is rather nice, in that it removes the ‘real time endless feed’ in favour of categories of users, with their tweets grouped by time period (today, yesterday, last week etc). Plus, it works with both Twitter & Mastodon accounts (and others too), so as a consumption experience, it’s very good.

Finally in ‘indie-web’ news, I’ve always liked the look of Multiverse. Never quite got the hang of it (are you spotting a theme here? I should hand in my geek badge), but the spirit of it is A++.

Maybe the future is here, we’ve just not learned to use it fully yet.