For several days I have replaced Facebook with Threads and the experience has been good. I have found that the community, so far, is ordinary, rather than geeky, and friendly rather than trolling or flamey.
I have been posting and commenting for a few days now and although four or five comments got me to block individuals the rest of interactions have been good. I feel I should elaborate about blocking.
Recently my Social Media Life has become dormant. I do visit Facebook every so often but I ignore Instagram, barely touch Mastodon or the fediverse, and in general have stopped looking at social media for a social life. It’s not that my life offline has become vibrant. It’s that online is empty of meaningful engagement, especially in winter.
From the nineties right up to around 2018 or so social media was a place to meet and be social.
For up to three months I was running my own instance via Masto.host and the experience was good. Setting up an instance is easy. Within a few minutes you can set up your own instance, post and perform administrative tasks such as accept trending hashtags and more.
No DevOps and No Code Required Masto.host is great for non-technical people because it doesn’t require any specialist knowledge. You create a Masto.host account, and then you choose the cheapest server option.
In an ideal world Silent Walking would make sense. In an ideal world the environment where you walk would be quiet and free from distractions. How many of us live somewhere that is far from cars, road works, construction, farming and other noises? During my walks I hear the sound of a motorway, the sound of a quarry, the sound of buildings being demolished, and the noises of construction. I also hear the sounds of cars driving too fast and too close.
On at least three occasions toots that were written as a cry for empathy, or at least venting, were interacted with by apathetic people. For this simple reason I deleted two Fediverse accounts. I deleted my Mastodon.social account, and my FireFish.social accounts. I have a precise desire, when using social media. That desire is to find a community of likeminded individuals that I have such enjoyable conversations with, that I want to meet them in person.
After my first post about playing with ClassicPress and the Fediverse it was suggested that I try the nightly build of ClassicPress so I did. The result can be seen here.
Mastodon and Firefish I have tested integration with the fediverse via Mastodon.social but also firefish.social and mastodon.social is faster, but mastodon.social eventually catches up. I tried posting a blog post, and commenting on blog posts and it works although not instantly.
Yesterday Twitter decided to re-brand as X. X.com redirects to Twitter.com. Within the next few days, weeks, months twitter will change its name and brand, and the URLs will be wrong. All twitter links, all embedded tweets, everything will become dead links. When we look for something on Twitter, we will be redirected to X.
The Podcast Legacy Every single website, every single CMS, every Static Website, everything, will have to be re-written to point to the new domain name.
Mastodon is a federated social network where people can join a server, based on their interests in tech and more. Most people join the servers that are open and easy to join but in doing so we have communities that grow, without becoming communal. I am on at least three different Mastodon servers.
Instances I am on Mastodon.social, Techhub.social and Calckey.social and so far my favourite is Calckey.social because that’s where I got the strongest sense of community.
Since 2006 I have thought of Twitter, Jaiku, Mastodon and Plurk as conversation channels, rather than microblogging. I go to these places and use them as chatroooms rather than microblogs. If I want to blog I have my full scale blog. This website, to keep me entertained.
I bring this up because at lunchtime today, the time at which I usually get tired with social media, two people frustrated me. One person asked for what reason Musk should have been stopped from buying twitter.
Today during the walk I saw an orange van moving by the side of the road slowly. It was stopping regularly. I crossed the road and looked towards it. I saw an open door and a person placing traffic snow poles into the bollards at the side of the road. Winter is coming and the roads are being made ready for when it snows. I wanted to film but I was told not to, so I didn’t.