I thought of this title this morning, and it really was too good not to use, even though a quick google found a story by that title already existed. Well, I’m not going to let that stop me.
This post was going to be about how to join Mastodon and find a group of instant friends that will bring you back ten years, back when Twitter still existed and also was good. And, I still will. Hence the header image there. But as I was checking in on Masto during the work day, I just got kinda angry.
These social media sites were good once. And then they became shitty. Famed blogger and author Cory Doctorow calls it the “enshitification” of social media. Doctorow has a Kickstarter out right now for a book that explains how we can take back control of our lives from the giant corporations that own us, called “The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation”. Check it out.
Tom Eastman famously wrote, “I’m old enough to remember when the Internet wasn’t a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four.”
And I read from somewhere else today and I would love to remember where so I could link to it (may have been Doctorow, but I couldn’t find it easily if so), that all the big social media sites have the same arc:
Make the users happy
Invite businesses in to market to the users
Forget the users, make the businesses happy
Forget the businesses, time to cash in
Social media site dies
(Here’s the original quote: “Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.” – Cory Doctorow, Tiktok’s enshittification)
Facebook, Ex-Twitter, Reddit – all of them are nearing the end of that list. Google Plus traced this arc years ago, start to end. Still angry about this. We lowly users make all the content that made these guys rich. Most of us never saw a penny for our work to make these places interesting and enticing. Our lives and experiences are being ripped to train large language models but we, the ones that did this work, are prevented from benefiting from it.
I’m kinda over all this. Just seems to be so many people trying so very hard to make things worse for the greatest number of people. I don’t know anyone that looks forward to what the future holds, anymore.
Anyway! Let’s get on Mastodon! You’re probably there already but just in case….!
When I joined Mastodon, I joined one of the big servers – mastodon.social, I believe. I drowned in the content. I then followed a friend to one called elekk.xyz, but didn’t like the rigid restrictions they had there on what could be posted. I then moved over to masto.ai, which was actually very nice. I then made one more move to gamepad.club when that opened, as it looked like a lot of fellow Twitter refugees were moving there.
This is the cool thing about Mastodon. It’s so easy to move and bring all your follows and followers along. But today, I just want to talk about getting onto the last of those, gamepad.club, the official Mastodon server for Blaugust 2023.
Sign up.
Set up your profile with a profile picture and an introduction. Very important. Few people will follow you if they don’t know who you are. So let people know who you are.
Once signed up, your timeline will likely be empty. You can look at the local timeline, which will probably contain a lot of Blaugust discussion, or the federated timeline, which will be a firehose of content, consisting of all the other Mastodon servers that anyone from gamepad.club has ever interacted with. This is what they mean by federation.
Follow anyone who seems interesting. They will usually follow you back if they like your profile. Some Mastodon servers have house rules that require you to interact with someone before following them, but this isn’t true on gamepad.club (you can read the rules for this server here).
Now here’s the fun part. You can follow hashtags. Since there is no “search everywhere in the Fediverse for this search string” function, searching is pretty useless. Text searching isn’t even allowed on this server for some reason (not sure if it’s just this server or all of them).
You can’t search for arbitrary text, but you can search for hashtags. In the search box, start a search with “#” and a few letters. Like Final Fantasy? Sure you do.
Looks like the most popular hashtag is just #FinalFantasy. Selecting that first one brings up the latest posts from the federated servers with that hashtag.
You’re just about there at this point. To the right of the “< Back” link is a person icon with a plus sign next to them. This is the Follow button. Click that, and now any post made among the federated servers with the #FinalFantasy hashtag will appear in your feed.
Try this with #Blaugust2023. Try other hashtags. In almost no time, you will have customized gamepad.club (or any other server of your choosing) so that it gives you exactly what you want, with no advertising or algorithm to get in your way. It’s your social media now. And if you see that some people who really get you are on some other server… feel free to go over there. All your hashtags, follows and followers will come along.
YOU are in control. Shouldn’t you be?