So far I really like the fediverse, but I am really missing some cross server follow suggestions. I was hoping someone here had some good suggestions on who to follow?
Mastodon has been the social media experience we've been hoping to someday find. Much more content rich than twitter, and discussions that go somewhere interesting.
There are too many bright people on Mastodon, and it's wonderful... just a few...
Rob Carlson (author of "Biology is Technology...")
@rob_carlson@mastodon.world
George Dyson (great for history of science posts)
@gdyson@sciencemastodon.com
Tags are the way, the whole ethos of federation is about not being a sheep who needs to participate in some self-important global cult of personality to feel like they matter. Just follow your interests.
In the standard web client, search for the hash tag (including the initial `#`) in the "Search or paste URL" form in the top-left corner. Hash tags matching your search will appear just below that form. Click on one you want to follow. A column of toots with that hash tag will appear. At the top of the column on the right-hand side is a small person icon with a "+" in it. Click on that, and you will be following that tag.
Seems like there ought to be a simpler way. I just kind of stumbled into this approach.
Well, shit. It doesn't show up for me when searching (edit: unless I search for it exactly), but this appears to be the official: @archlinux@fosstodon.org
Basically you click to view someone's profile, then click this extension's button in your toolbar and it will take you to YOUR instance, where you can follow that person with just one click (no copy+paste+search)
From looking at the source on Github, it appears that this extension attempts to work with simple string rearrangement AFAICT. Unfortunately, this approach doesn't generalize, as I discovered myself while attempting to build a similar extension.
It will work in many cases, but it will also fail in other cases. It's not universal.
The only reliable method is to use the search field on your instance, or to directly query the Mastodon API.
Good feedback. I've used the button now around 60 times. The times when it "failed" were typically related to a temporary outage of the instance, or rate limiting. For example I used this thread to follow about a dozen new people, and eventually was blocked by "rate limiting".
Please don't just post a bunch of links! Try to give a short introduction or explanation on why that person is interesting or otherwise worthy of following.
@breakingtaps@universeodon.com: electron microscopy images and hobbyist nano-scale maker and tinkerer. Has a youtube channel.
@gregeganSF@mathstodon.xyz: the science fiction author, mostly posts about math.
@danluu@mastodon.social: tech writer/blogger, his articles often make HN's top page.
@johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz: famous physicist, posts about math.
@TechConnectify@mas.to: whimsical and eclectic youtuber, thorough explainer of things like dishwashers, toasters, and LEDs.
@TomDuff@mastodon.social: inventor of Duff's device, posts about music and pen plots.
@robpike@hachyderm.io: inventor of Plan 9 and Go.
@aram@mastodon.sdf.org: don't follow this guy!
Also mathstodon.xyz, math-oriented mastodon instance.
Kind of reminds me of the early days of the web, you have a feeling there's good websites out there, but there's no established mechanism to find them.
Yep, which is exactly what makes it exciting an awesome too. Lots of people experimenting and no centralization of dominant ideas. it’d be cool if mastadon stays more like the early web
The people who post to hashtags that I'm interested in, mostly. Try searching for your interests and you'll get cross-server results that should help you build up a network of people from other servers.
https://mastodon.social/@PragmaticAndy - Andy Hunt, co-author of The Pragmatic Programmer among other endeavours. Also tends to boost interesting or funny stuff.
https://mastodon.social/@jonoxer - Jon is an awesome bloke in Melbourne, Australia who is really in to electronics and home automation.
Until recently, I most of my stream was politics, and I was missing the gamer crowd I used to hang with on Google+. Turns out they're all on dice.camp, and now that I found them, my stream is happy again.
So I'm mostly following a lot of RPG designers, but a few non-RPG-related names are: Cory Doctorow (super interesting of course), Neil Gaiman, Stephen Fry (sometimes receives a lot of pointless responses, which makes it frustrating to engage) and George Takei (always receives a lot of pointless comments; I'd like to be able to hide other people's comments from his posts, because it's all noise).
Of course not everybody I'm following is on Mastodon. I'm not even on Mastodon. The Fediverse is a lot bigger than that.
Has anyone written a Chrome extension yet to take the username/server combinations of the top posted names and make them easy to click links? Like I can't click:
"Rob Carlson (author of "Biology is Technology...") @rob_carlson@mastodon.world"
Clearly troll bait, but I just wanna say that no one is repeating twitter. This is decentralized. Even if corporations move in and create their own instances it will still remain decentralized. Even if it splinters into pockets of federation, it will still be more of a public domain than twitter ever was, being owned by one corporation.
With all the dangers of disinformation and "echo chambers", but a bit bigger. And what for? So more people can feel they have followers and spend time cultivating that?
You have to take the good with the bad. People seem to like being social online.
I never understood it myself, was never active on anything but IRC. But ActivityPub seems truly magic when it comes to promoting communication across boundaries such as corporations and software stacks, so I jumped on it back in 2017 and loved seeing it blow up in 2022.
There are clearly a lot of very nice, and very normal, people on there who just love the concept of microblogging. Who am I, or you, to stand in their way? And why should they depend on one corporation to communicate when they can take it into their own hands?
It's really a very natural progression, just like we have many ISPs, phone companies, or anything else in society.
> There are clearly a lot of very nice, and very normal, people on there who just love the concept of microblogging. Who am I, or you, to stand in their way? And why should they depend on one corporation to communicate when they can take it into their own hands?
Because many are not nice and the platforms clearly have been abused, drive division in society and are bad for mental health. That's why we can't have nice things.
Yes, let's all stay in the existing disinformation echo chambers.
If you see disinformation and find yourself in an echo chamber on a platform where you can chose who you see and engage with, I am afraid it's not the platform's fault.
People need to see this play out again in order to rule out the possibility that the problems Twitter had and caused were just due to that particular platform, in that particular scenario. If Mastodon (or any of the other alternatives) go down the same road, they'll begin to wonder if the cause may be something deeper. But, they won't arrive at that conclusion by abstraction, or else they would have already.
I'm a pessimist too, however you may be discounting the effect of capitalism in your analysis. To me it seems reasonable that efforts of a group of cooperatives instead of a group of for-profit companies could lead to a different result.
Of course there are and will also be highly negative effects, but the hope is they will be more easily isolated as a result of many cooperatives taking action to exclude those negative effects and their propagaters, rather than rely on policies and practices of a small number of profit-seeking companies.
It’s not capitalism, it’s society. The problem wasn’t twitter, the tech or the company, but the way it was used and consumed. The same actors with the same audience will have the same effect on Mastodon. Only this time there won’t be someone to moderate.
Rob Carlson (author of "Biology is Technology...") @rob_carlson@mastodon.world
George Dyson (great for history of science posts) @gdyson@sciencemastodon.com
Rudy Rucker (mathematician, author, artist) @rudytheelder@sfba.social
Alberto Cairo (data visualization - infographics) @albertocairo@mastodon.social
James Gleick (author of "Chaos", "Genius", etc.) @JamesGleick@zirk.us
Anne-Sophie Pereira De Sá (data visualization) @wonderveilleuze@vis.social
Maggie Koerth (Senior science writer at @FiveThirtyEight ) @maggiek@sciencemastodon.com
Vicky Veritas (Geologist, GISMS Earth science, kind person that gets people connected) @vickyveritas@c.im
this is barely scratching the surface.