doom toots as he pleases

[wembley]

Anyone trying Mastodon out? I'm really enjoying how slow and sane it is (though I guess I could do with it being a little less slow... famous last words, lol). I preferred the usenet, mailing list and LJ/Dreamwidth days for overall fandom experience to Tumblr, Twitter (x a billion) and now Mastodon, but it is wayyy easier to post to Mastodon using mobile, and I use mobile for pretty much everything now. (I am enjoying Discord, but I'd also like a non-chat text-based fandom experience that's more like what I had back in the day. But, like, politically in step with 2022, lol. But minus all those values being completely dumbed down, curdled and weaponized, lolsob.)

Anyway, if you wanna try it out, here's an invite to fandom.ink: https://fandom.ink/invite/wfitpUqz

It's an instance/server/whatever designed for pervy Fandom Olds like myself -- no ship-hate, no anti behavior, no DNIs (ie you have to manage your experience through blocking and muting instead of expecting others to do it for you), though you do have to use a bump/buffer if you're posting porn. Also there's a big culture on Mastodon as a whole right now of using the Content Warning feature BUT honestly it really is basically just a Cut/Read More, or a blur you tap if it's an image and honestly? It's not only fine, it's great. Much easier to curate your experience.

"What's an instance/server/whatever?" With Twitter, you just log into Twitter and boom, you're on Twitter. With Mastodon, it's like... Mastodon is the ocean, and it's filled with islands. Each island is independently operated by someone. You can create your own island (aka instance aka server) if you want! You hang out on your island, but you can follow people on other islands, and see people your friends followed on other islands.

I think federation could be really good for fandom, much better than us all being stuck in one place. Being able to put up walls and curate spaces is, I think, the only way forward, now that everyone is on the internet. It's really basically the same as LJ communities. Or Discord servers.

Also, because Mastodon is open source, if folks end up not liking it, anyone could, hypothetically, create a fork(? is that the right term? I am not tech-savvy lol) and do other stuff with it.

Off-topic Dreamwidth question: if you're using the new Create New Entries page, is there a way to get a WYSIWYG editor on this thing? Or is that only the old-style post editor? I love the design of this one, except for having to do HTML because I'm lazy.

Comments

[pauraque]

Hmm. If I sign up via that link, will I be immediately Perceived by everyone, or can I lurk under the radar until I figure out what's going on? None of the explanations of Mastodon I've heard have made any sense to me and I feel like I need to actually see it before I'm going to get it, but it's not clear to me whether you can really do that without doing it in plain view of a lot of people.

[wembley]

I assume the moderators of the instance will see that you signed up, just like if you signed up for a Discord server, the mods will know, but you don't have to post (aka Toot, lol; instead of "tweets", they're called "toots" lololol) until you feel comfortable, or at all! You can just lurk. In order to see people on your timeline, you do have to follow people, just like with Twitter, and they'll be notified if you follow them -- again, just like if you follow someone on Twitter or on Dreamwidth. But if you want to visit individual people's timelines (just like visiting someone's individual journal on Dreamwidth), you could do that instead and no one would know.

Once you sign up for fandom.ink, you can check out their directory and check out people's individual timelines/pages/whatever that way. Does that make sense? If it doesn't, tell me and I'll try to find a different way to explain. Also if you have more questions, I'm happy to answer to the best of my ability! I agree that Mastodon is kinda confusing, it takes a bit of getting used to.

[sara]

I've been playing with it for a few days, and am at https://mastodon.sdf.org/@sarae.

But expect to be roughly as fannish as I am here, which is to say, culturally yes, and content-wise not really.

[wembley]

Gotcha and thanks for linking!

[dancesontrains]

Ooh, that sounds like the first truly interesting instance I've heard of.

(Doombots to go with the post heading!)

[wembley]

Omg doombots!