My Mastodon dilemma
I'm a few days in — and slowly wrapping my head around what it means to “join #Mastodon.”
It's really not like joining Friendster, or Orkut, or MySpace (or whatever).
It's kind of like getting an email address, but not exactly.
Like email, you get your Mastodon address from someone in particular. There's not one “provider” who gives (and controls) all the accounts.
Unlike email, the user experience is really changed depending on who you get your account from. The people running a particular Mastodon “instance” do things like set moderation policies (and do the moderation).
You might think, then, that you want to get your Mastodon service from some big entity — like as a student or faculty member you might want it from your school. Or maybe you just want to join the seeming-default instance run by the nonprofit that oversees Mastodon (mastodon.social, where my account is for now).
But at least at this moment, that's pretty problematic. This is because your Mastodon instance serves as something like a “neighborhood.” Or maybe a better analogy is that it's like a “mailing list.”
One of the main ways to interact with the Mastodon network is to read the feed of other folks on your instance. For the “default” instance, however, that experience is garbage. The posts are super-random and the moderation is, er... let's say “limited” would be kind.
But don't worry, a lot of cool people have set up their own instances. I see a number of the folks I follow are on lurk.org, gamedev.place, and friend.camp. (Actually, 2/3 of those run a modified Mastodon server called “Hometown” maintained by Darius Kazemi, which indicates that's what I should probably do if I ever set up an instance.) These then operate as a community — either topically or just because the individuals already are, or aspire to be, a community themselves.
This itself, however, seems to create a dilemma. My current stage of thinking about Mastodon is that I don't understand the way past this dilemma. (I'll try to post more if I do.)
The dilemma is: if my “home” on Mastodon is organized by a topic, then it's like a mailing list. If I want to post something “off-topic” I should really mark it specially. But I don't think I have a primary topic I want to post about. Should I just join a bunch of instances and post from different accounts on each topic? That feels kinda weird, because I would like to follow some people's posts, no matter the topic, and I assume there might be some people who feel the same about me.
Alternately, I could try to join an instance where everything the people there post about, no matter the topic, is something that interests me — that is, it's a community of folks I already enjoy hearing from, or who are like-minded in some important way. A number of folks like that are already on Mastodon, but should my goal be to persuade them to “leave” their current homes and set of a community with them? And what happens if the people we want in our community are non-overlapping?
Anyway, for now I'm definitely enjoying trying to figure out the best Mastodon experience more than I was enjoying Google+ or whatever. But I am hoping to reach another level of understanding before too long.