Social plumbing during the Mastodon Moment

· 757 words · 4 minute read

The Mastodon Moment is making me think about the socials again. I like a nice, tidy flow where I don’t end up repeating myself on a given channel because I have looped an input into it twice, or have accidentally round-tripped something into it.

Consequently, I take a view that you should have a hub through which other things flow. micro.blog is my hub. It takes a few live inputs, and it pushes to a few outputs.

Socially, I like the way micro.blog feels day-to-day. I don’t follow a lot of people, and the vibe is way more relaxed than anywhere else. I appreciate the fusion of a timeline-like feed with the ability to tip over into more traditional blogging.

I like the nervous, buzzy energy in Mastodon right now. I am not sure what will happen next, but I’m content to hang out there.

I like Mastodon’s CW convention a lot because I live in tension between some relatively spicy political ideas and an awareness that some people might prefer to bypass that topic generally, or just not need to really engage with my ideas in particular.

I think it will be interesting to see if all the Mastodon instances begin to sort themselves out into legitimate communities with their own norms, and I hope that the choice to opt out of federation with other instances will tend to be more rare than not, aimed primarily at Nazi farms and troll factories.

This could be a real test of where we all are culturally: People have wildly varying ideas of what constitutes acceptable and unacceptable levels of disagreement, what is “fash adjacent,” etc. I’ve heard a few reports already of instances de-federating with other instances over matters of taste about how social media is supposed to work. It’ll be interesting to see what meta-norms take hold among the instance owner/moderator class, which wields a huge amount of power over your individual experience on an instance-by-instance basis.

I’m curious about how Twitter will pan out, but it has not really been anything more than a publishing endpoint to me over the past few years. It creates a little friction because I start most of my social content from micro.blog, but if I want to spare people on Twitter a click-through, I have to watch the character count, because north of 270 and it’s best to just give a micro.blog post a title and make it a standard blog entry. But I probably didn’t start writing thinking of it as a blog entry, so now maybe I can just expand this idea and … on and on. I can see pitching my content for Mastodon’s character limit.

I also have some general beliefs about Twitter that leave me feeling just fine if it becomes uninhabitable. As much as there’s currently a sort of “prison riot jubilee” vibe in the air there, and as much as a few Notable Personalities are tentatively planting a flag in the fediverse, I know there are many, many influential people for whom Twitter is a major marketing outlet, and who have accrued a huge amount of status.

I was in online media during the early social era, and I witnessed and was part of the first stilted, clueless, awkward attempts among reporters to establish a social beachhead. I don’t think they’re going to easily decamp, and they’re the ones who are going to decide whether to continue to legitimate Twitter or not, no matter what crabby people like me think.

For now, I’m content to treat it as an end point I publish to. There are people who matter to me and for whom it is their primary social outlet, and I am long past my angry “just get rid of your t.v.” phase where Twitter and Facebook are concerned. But I do wish people would just get rid of that particular t.v. I believe it is harmful, and in a way that is deeper than the obvious “problematic content appears there” sort of way. I believe it harms the way we think about how to interact with each other and communicate ideas, partially as a result of its own limitations and partially as a result of norms that have grown up in the extended Twitter community that reinforce narrow, cramped perspectives.

Anyhow, not quite ready to delete my account. I do have it wired up to Semiphemeral, partially as a way to help me think of it as anything but home, partially because it’s one less thing to irritate my preservationist impulses.