[Discuss] Mastodon?

[smallm at sdf.org (Mike Small)]

Eric Chadbourne <sillystring at protonmail.com> writes:

> Anybody else playing around on Mastodon? Come say hi. https://securitymastod.one/@sillystring See if this thing works.
>
> It feels a bit like twitter but I know even less people.

I got on sdf's instance for a bit and read some "toots." Yes, it does
seem a lot like twitter, in the sense for me that it was mostly nonsense
and on the whole of no value.  Yet for awhile, despite that, I felt an
odd compulsion to keep up with the postings.  This would keep me doing
basically nothing for up to an hour at a time and feeling slightly sick
about it afterwards.

I first checked it out after sensing the enthusiasm from the hosts of
Libre Lounge for their own technical work on activityPub and for the
idea that this would be different by being de-centralized (and involving
more free software?). But I wondered if mastadon hadn't inadvertently
pulled in some serious undesirability by aping twitter. People who hate
tinfoil hat stuff should stop reading at the next punctuation mark, but
I was imagining a team of unscrupulous behavioural psychologists working
at Twitter Inc. to make their site maximally addicative, by having it
tweak but never fulfill whatever lack sends people like me to the
computer in search of connection or whatever else. That's what I thought
mastadon inherited and why it's something to avoid.

-- 
Mike Small
smallm at sdf.org