2/ Mastodon is the closest I've come to recovering the feeling of the old Usenet. I had forgotten how sweet that felt. (Yes, I realize that people like me are the Eternal September of M, etc.)

But Usenet didn't have a global feed. You had to figure out your different personalities and interests and subscribe accordingly. There was not a lot of adventitiousness. I really like adventitious discovery: my constitution is wired for that. Twitter, of course, has it in spades. But M does, too. ↵

3/ There are three things that I think are truly great about Twitter that may not be reproduced here, and will be a loss.

1. Many of the (in their minds) great and good felt they had to post on Twitter. But they usually couldn't control roomie73 writing a poorly-punctuated, eviscerating take-down response that was half truth, all snark, and all the likes of which we had rarely seen as a global cultural communication phenomenon. It's a thing to behold. ↵

4/ 2. It was a stunningly full of posts that were brilliant, profound, obscene, and all of the above in a way that just made me marvel at the wonders of the human mind. No other SM I have been on had anything like it. Other SMs tend towards the ponderous; Twitter's 280 chars is the home of the hit-and-run. So many of those were written by one-hit-wonders, yet became cultural memes. It has literally changed my language. ↵

5/ 3. It was a great connection to a local community. I slowly realized there were far more people in my area on Twitter, and developed a much better understanding of what was happening around me.

In particular, a ton of great Providence reporters and journalists are on Twitter, and they performed the vital truth-telling that democracy needs. That *can* be reassembled, but it will take time and effort, and it may fragment (whereas Twitter was the clear one-place-for-most). ↵

6/ On the other hand. Every time I go to Twitter now, I'm reminded of JUST HOW MUCH DRAMA it is. The grifters! The posers! The influencers! The hashtaggers! The clout-chasers! The trending! The recommendations!

The signal IS the noise IS the signal. It's like walking into a REALLY LOUD CONCERT. Either you walk right out or you stay long enough and your ears numb as you desensitize. Either way, it's a REALLY LOUD CONCERT. And you know what you do at such a concert? YOU TALK REALLY LOUD TOO. ↵

7/ The most interesting, to me, is that we may witness a new era of SM experimentation. It's been too long since someone tried something new. With Fb wandering off one way and Twitter another, there's a lot of ground that is being ceded. ↵

8/ It will anger some here for me to say I'm intrigued by post.news. (a) I think journalism should get paid (I pay for multiple papers), but the paywall method is nuts. (b) I've sort of followed the long, sordid history of failure of micropayment on the Web. Maybe Post will crack the latter to solve the former. But there are also *so* *many* *things* that can go wrong (as just one example: by analogy, sites like Spotify did something similar for songs, but it's not at all clear *artists* won). ↵

9/ This toot by saying this is very unfair: Post is in its very early days, etc. But I have been lurking on Post in case that becomes the way I end up keeping up with the journos from Twitter. And so far, Post has been…boring. It's like Facebook with a pay button.

I wonder if it's their signup process. "Tell us who you are!" Well, then you just get boring establishment people like me, not roomie73, whose sole claim to fame is "lots of people loved my funky meme reply to <important person>". ↵

10/ So maybe the cool, funny, clever, obnoxious, scathing nobodies that made Twitter fun are on Mastodon, not on Post.

I've spent a lot of time trying to re-find the funky liberal artsy types of my college years. They're innkeepers by day and flamethrowers by night. They live off breakfast cereal and hot takes. They create memes and trends precisely because they aren't trying to—because they can't help it. I'd never get into their club, but I can be on their SM. I want to go where they do! ↵

11/ What I am still getting used to is the nature of the Mastodon feed. It's…not great. Yes, I know, "you are the algorithm", etc. But there are some really basic things that could be better (like aggregating likes). It's definitely rough around the edges.

But, you know, that's okay. The medium is very much part of the message (if you don't believe that, I have one measure for you: 280 characters), but it's not the whole thing. It needs to be just good enough to get the right people. This is. ↵

12/ What I am most excited about is the potential for improvement. I predict that a bunch of ambitious coders and students from systems, HCI, etc. will want to hack on this (I'm intentionally being vague: "this" means protocol, implementations, etc.) so they can write give talks saying "I made Mastodon better".

There's a lot of glory lying around waiting to be picked up. Because it's open source, you really can push your contribution, not just peek in from the outside. ↵

13/ Where I do hope my fellow academics will be responsible is holding the line: no cheapo papers about pseudo-Mastodons or fake-ActivityPubs. Mastodon and ActivityPub aren't a commons to be exploited and depleted. You have to actually have improved the thing you claim. Certainly, if I'm your reviewer or audience member, that's what I'm going to ask you about. ↵

14/ So my optimistic side says maybe something wonderful can happen here. All the right tools are in place. Protocols! Open Source! Federation! Just the things you need for incremental innovation to take hold.

There are still many issues that need to get resolved (managing costs, moderation, scaling, yes — onboarding!, and so on). But have you seen the alternatives? •

@geomblog @shriramk

Maybe (short term) but, man, this thing was more of my feed than Elon for a couple days: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/chrisstokelwalker/raspberry-pi-hired-ex-cop-mastodon-controversy

(And to be clear, the pile-on here was kinda deserved, as they often are: but also, not what I'm here for.)

@ricci @geomblog Thanks, Rob, that's a really great take (about the second-biggest SM). The city analogy is also great.

And yes, I was not surprised to see the Pi pileup, and indeed thought, "Okay, here we go!" But I also felt it was a necessary moment for those who had thought—contrary to reason or instinct—that Mastodon would remain some kind of pristine Rivendell. [*]

I guess Slack is a kind of SM? But mostly closed…

[*] NB: Have not read Tolkien, analogy could even be 180° off.