Mastodon has gotten two things right that no other social media giant has even seriously attempted:
- If you follow someone on Mastodon, you’ll see everything they post; and
- If you leave a Mastodon server, you can take both your followers and the people you follow with you.
The most common criticism of Mastodon is that you must rely on individual moderators who may be underresourced, incompetent on malicious. This is indeed a serious problem, but it isn’t the same serious problem that Twitter has. When Twitter is incompetent, malicious, or underresourced, your departure comes at a dear price.
On Mastodon, your choice is: tolerate bad moderation, or click two links and move somewhere else.
On Twitter, your choice is: tolerate moderation, or lose contact with all the people you care about and all the people who care about you.
I’ve been feeling exactly what Colly articulates here:
I’m aware that smart friends still tweet passing thoughts without a care, and I can’t understand why. Some seem happy to repost damning articles about the situation and then carry on tweeting without a care.
Ben has written a superb article outlining the hows and whys of distributed social networks with hCard and XFN, finishing with an inspiring call to arms.
As promised by Kevin Marks in the Q&A after my panel at South by Southwest, the Google Contacts API now supports OAuth. w00t!
Liveblogged notes from a discussion I participated in at BarCamp Brighton 2 about Social Network Portability.
A nice summary of the technologies presented at my SXSW panel.
Cross-posting to wherever is flavour of the month.
Posting notes from my own website to my Mastodon account.
Mastodon is a vibe shift in the best possible way.
The dream of the 2000s is alive on the web.