Tag: #mastodon

Twitterrific has been discontinued

A sentence that none of us wanted to write, but have long felt would need to be written someday. We didn’t expect to be writing it so soon, though, and certainly not without having had time to notify you that it was coming. We are sorry to say that the app’s sudden and undignified demise is due to an unannounced and undocumented policy change by an increasingly capricious Twitter – a Twitter that we no longer recognize as trustworthy nor want to work with any longer.

iconfactory January 19, 2023

I don’t want to work with Twitter either. Iconfactory is currently developing a Mastodon client. Find me at @vowe@home.social.

Shariff unterstützt jetzt Mastodon

Mit Shariff schützen Webseiten-Betreiber die Privatsphäre ihrer Besucher vor der übertriebenen Neugierde sozialer Netzwerke wie Facebook oder Twitter. Für die Besucher reicht ein Klick, um eine Seite mit Freunden zu teilen.

So sehen die Buttons aktuell aus

Für Shariff gibt einen WordPress Wrapper als Plugin, den ich jetzt eingebaut habe. Unter jedem Beitrag findet sich nun eine Leiste mit bunten Knöpfen. Wenn Euch etwas fehlt, dann sagt mir Bescheid. Das steht zur Auswahl: addthis, bitcoin, buffer, diaspora, facebook, flipboard, linkedin, mailto, mastodon, mewe, mix, odnoklassniki, patreon, paypal, paypalme, pinterest, pocket, printer, reddit, rss, sms, telegram, threema, tumblr, twitter, vk, wallabag, weibo, whatsapp, xing.

The power of Mastodon

I ran a quick poll yesterday on both Mastodon and Twitter. You can see the polls below, and I will comment on the results further down. The poll wasn’t really meant to find out anything about Covid. There are way better studies out there. What I was trying to find out was how the engagement on Mastodon is, compared to Twitter. Three numbers:

  • Mastodon (2400 followers): 11667 votes, 1381 boosts, 298 favorites
  • Twitter (6800 followers): 330 votes, 22 retweets, 5 likes

I have about three times as many followers on Twitter than on Mastodon, but the engagement is so much higher on Mastodon, that the two do not even compare.

The results are mostly useless. People do not know how often they have been infected and the medical standards vary widely between the US and EU. You can safely assume that there are more infections, but you can also learn that infections are not inevitable. I have many replies from people who mask religiously because they have other medical conditions that would make an infection with Covid-19 much more dangerous that to the average person.

Your next steps:

  1. Sign up for Mastodon. If you have trouble finding an instance, go to https://home.social
  2. Search for me as vowe@vowe.net and follow.

Find me on Mastodon with my custom mail address

However, there is one thing I would like my own server for: discoverability. Much like with e-mail, I want folks to have an easy address to find me, and one that I can keep giving out to everyone even if later I switch to a different Mastodon server. A bit like e-mail forwarding to your ISP’s e-mail service.

The good news is: you can use your own domain and share it with other folks. It will link to your actual account.

Go on, try it. Search for @maarten@balliauw.be, and you will find my @maartenballiauw@mastodon.social.

Maarten Balliauw

I have adapted his solution and now you can find me on Mastodon by searching for vowe@vowe.net and you get my as @vowe@chaos.social. If I ever move to a different server, I change the webfinger to the new address.

[Thanks, Andreas]

Taking a leave from Twitter

The wrecking ball has been taken to Twitter, and much in the same way that I have taken a leave from Facebook, I am now taking a leave from Twitter.

It pays off that I never depended on any commercial network. Xing, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, they have always been playgrounds. This circus has now moved to Mastodon, on the chaos.social instance. My address is @vowe@chaos.social and it resides at chaos.social/@vowe. If you do not intend to join Mastodon, my page also has a public RSS feed: chaos.social/@vowe.rss.

Your journey from Twitter to Mastodon

Musk is sinking the Twitter ship much faster than I expected. Lots of people like Mastodon as an alternative, and I don’t believe it’s quite there yet. But it’s a safe way to interact with decent people with a much nicer experience than on Twitter. I will explain how they get rid of the toxic discussions later.

I am not going to use Mastodon terminology but words you understand, like “server” instead of “instance”. I am also not going to explain the Fediverse. But you must know a major difference:

My name on Mastodon is not @vowe as it is on Twitter but rather @vowe@chaos.social – yes, like email addresses with an @ in front of it. It is a federated infrastructure of thousands of servers.

Step 1: Find your server and find your followers

People have started to add their Mastodon names on their Twitter profile, as either @vowe@chaos.social or https://chaos.social/@vowe – you can click this now.

There is a tool that lets you scan all your followers and lists on Twitter. We will use this to find the best server for you. https://fedifinder.glitch.me/ You need to authorize it to read your Twitter data. It’s open source. Check if you don’t trust.

If found 293 friends out of 6843 accounts. It shows them organized by server and it will let you know if the server has open registrations. You download the list as .csv and keep it for later.

Now you pick a server. I recommend a local one where you live (for local content) or a server with likeminded people. Go to that server and register. Take a note of your new profile address and add it to your Twitter profile so that others can find you.

Log into the server and check the browser UI. You can enable an expert mode that shows you multiple columns.

2. Start following people

Remember the .csv file from the last step. Go to Settings and upload the file. Boom. You just requested to follow all people you followed on Twitter that have made their address available.

Mastodon is not exactly like Twitter but you can just start using it like it was. Once you get your feet wet, you can look at two other feeds, next to your Home feed which contains all your follows. “Local timeline” shows you everything going on on your server, and “Federated timeline” shows you everything available to you.

3. Don’t cancel Twitter

Keep your Twitter account. You can still find your old follows once they add their Mastodon names. You also want to leave your Mastodon name on your Twitter profile so that they can find you.

4. Why Mastodon is less toxic

You can report bad people and your local admin might ban them. And you can report bad servers (racism, conspiracy, Covid deniers, holocaust deniers etc.) and your server might stop federating with them. Here is a list of the servers my server blocks.