[dwighttk]

I opened a Mastodon account and me and one other person I know who opened an account toot at each other every 6 months or so... I guess there is another person I know who opened one but never toots...

I try to pretend it doesn't matter to me, but calling individual posts "toots" really does keep me from talking about the service with other people.

[metildaa]

There are lots of interesting people on Mastodon, I would recommend searching by hashtag and joining an instance that matches your interests (eg: sdf.org, sergal.org (furries), cybre.space, etc).

Many instances block Mastodon.social and other massive instances, and different instances will have different views of the network (based on who the users of the instance follow and how long toots are retained).

[baroffoos]

I do wish mastodon had the concept of groups so I could join all the groups I'm interested in rather than having to sign up for an account on each one.

[metildaa]

Generally you just follow people, making accounts on each instance would be rather silly.

[dwighttk]

eh, I don't really even use Twitter to talk with randos online... I get enough of that here. But I can see that people do use Twitter and Mastodon that way...

[Not_anchovie]

If "toots" is the one word that keeps it from getting ruined by mainstream adoption, then so be it. The cycle always seems to be:

1) Look at this great thing a few geniuses developed

2) The intellectuals and forward looking people early adopt

3) It slowly turns from being cool trendy and useful, into a Walmart-like all things to all people behemoth of gross negligence.

4) Some heavy abuses are uncovered, and using it is no longer valuable to anyone.

[ryu2k2]

just call them "posts" or "microposts" if you don't like "toot"

[dwighttk]

mostly off topic:

Most of my friends are on Instagram and think I’m funny for being on twitter anyway. They have a business twitter account that they only use at conferences and socialize on IG.

I tried setting up a new ig account (deleted my first when they sold to Facebook) and couldn’t get past the input phone number portion of the signup.

Anyway trying to convert people from twitter to mastodon is sorta hard. If I couldn’t get them to go from to IG to twitter there’s very little chance I’m going to get them to go from ig to mastodon.

[rtkwe]

> Anyway trying to convert people from twitter to mastodon is sorta hard.

That's because going from Twitter to Mastodon is a downgrade in pretty much every concrete way and only an upgrade in less concrete more esoteric terms.

From most people the main benefits I've seen cited are censorship resistance (how many people encounter significant censorship on twitter today?) and decentralization (which only really matters philosophically, to the user on the site the decentralization gets hidden).

On the downsides though there's plenty right on the surface for users: limited users (like all social networks if the people you want to interact with aren't there it's useless), mediocre default layout (the 3 column default doesn't make good use of space and give equal importance to everything cramping the main thing you want to see the toots) and discovery (the main way I've found people to follow on Mastodon? finding them on twitter where I already follow them and seeing they're on Mastodon too).

To a random user who doesn't really encounter censorship on twitter or care about decentralized/federated networks it's just a sub-par version of Twitter with a worse interface, a sparser social graph and longer handles.

[afiori]

> (how many people encounter significant censorship on twitter today?)

The point is not that you user are being censored, but that twitter "lies" to you about social dynamics with their obvious (yet hidden) biases.

Twitter promotes the extremes and hides the middle. If this is not enough they also apply a consistent political agenda (by protecting their main cash cow of liberal journalist) and lie about it.

Perfect example is what happened with the Convington kids and journalist calling for doxxing.