Sticking the Tusk to Musk

TL:DR – Focusing my social media attention on Mastodon and Sciencebase. I’ve had an account on a Mastodon instance almost as long as Mastodon has existed. Nominally, my start date was November 2019, but my account told me I’d logged on in 2016 just after the first instance was launched. Anyway, I may have been … Continue reading "Sticking the Tusk to Musk"

TL:DR – Focusing my social media attention on Mastodon and Sciencebase.

I’ve had an account on a Mastodon instance almost as long as Mastodon has existed. Nominally, my start date was November 2019, but my account told me I’d logged on in 2016 just after the first instance was launched. Anyway, I may have been an early adopter, but I really didn’t recognise the relevance of this distributed, federated system until April 2022, when it started to come up on the radar as a good alternative to Twitter, when talk of Musk buying it was headline news.

In November 2022, just after Musk took over Twitter, a lot of people started signing up, I imported many of the people I was following on Twitter who did so. But, in the months since it would seem that a lot of those newbies have left their accounts inactive, many for a month or two, but many more since that November. Presumably, many of them saw the advantages of the federated system, as deficiencies and opted to either head back to the Twitter or else seek out other social media platforms.

Indeed, in recent weeks, several have emerged, Spoutible and Substack’s version of Twitter, known simply as Notes, for instance. I see a lot of the people I’ve known on various social media over the years having given Mastodon a try and now jumping over to those centralised sites. Many of them are very enthusiastic about their chosen destination. Unfortunately, it seems, as with Twitter, those sites will inevitably suffer from the problems of being centralised. Inevitably, if any of them become very successful, they will succumb to the business tide and likely be sold off to the highest bidder for some ludicrous amount of money, the likes of which could solve real-world problems rather than simply lining an entrepreneur’s pockets and funding their rockets.

Anyway, I do generally sign up for any and all new accounts as they appear, so I have a presence on some of these other Twitter alternatives, but fundamentally, I maintain Sciencebase as main virtual residence as I have done since July 1999. In the meantime, I am hoping to reduce fragmentation and may well focus entirely on Mastodon (and perhaps Medium where I have a couple of thousand followers), rather than trying to engage with people on those newer sites.