henke on 23/4/2023 at 10:24

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Y'know, I don't mind paying for a free (ad-supported) service if I use it a lot and there's some incentive to paying a bit. Been paying for Spotify since 2010 and even Youtube Premium for a couple years. But Elon's tainted Twitter with his stank to the extent that signing up for Twitter Blue feels like signing up for Team Musk. And there's just no way in hell, ok? I'm not gonna quit twitter, will keep my account in the hopes that things turn around somehow or Musk ends up selling it to someone else, and at least it's an entertaining shitshow right now. For the uninitiated: Twitter's blue checkmarks used to verify that important accounts really were who they said they were, but now these accounts have been stripped of their marks and Twitter Blue has been turned into a $8 per month subscription which boosts your visibility. Plenty of big names like LeBron James and Stephen King and @dril are saying "fuck that", prefering not to pay for the privilege of providing content for the platform. Afraid that a lot of the big name draws aren't on-board Elon is now foisting Twitter Blue on these people against their will. He keeps putting the checkmark on dril, who keeps changing his displayname which removes it again. Seriously, check out (https://twitter.com/dril) dril's latest tweets, he's on fire right now.

Anyway, it's a fun shitshow and everything, but where is this poor indiedev to turn when his tweets are getting increasingly less engagement? A lot of Twitter alternatives have sprung up over the last half year, but the one I'm liking the look of most is Mastodon. It's a decentralized social network, which means it's spread out over a bunch of "instances", and if the admin running your instance suddenly turns EVIL you can quite easily pack up your entire posting history and move to another instance. I'm on (https://mastodon.gamedev.place/) mastodon.gamedev.place, which is run by (https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@aras) this guy and he seems like a nice bloke. If you're not a gamedev the most popular spot to set up camp seems to be (https://mastodon.social/) mastodon.social. The user experience is pretty much the same as twitter. The only real drawbacks are that video support isn't as good. Uploads limited to 720p and 40MB, and of course there's no fancy Playstation or Switch integration like twitter has. Oh well, hopefully this stuff'll come in the future.

My mastodon feed ain't as lively as my twitter feed since I haven't found as many people I wanna follow yet, which is why I'm here to ask HEY TTLG, YOU GUYS ON MASTO YET? The only ttlger I've found so far is Dana. If you're on there: (https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@henke) this is me, add me!

https://www.dropbox.com/s/128j8djs78ex63s/theWaterIsFine.gif?raw=1

Starker on 23/4/2023 at 11:59

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Well, I made an account on Mastodon, then started to think who I would actually want to hear from, so I went to search for Ian Bogost. There are apparently three accounts, each with identical profile picture, one of which has no posting history, one of which has exactly one post linking to an article of his that argues social media was a mistake, and one of which is a bot that's supposed to post his tweets there, but there's a grand total of two posts.

Oh well, I guess social media is not really for me after all.

hopper on 23/4/2023 at 16:10

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Says the guy who's been a New Member since Oct 2003 :p

henke on 23/4/2023 at 16:51

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Yeah I'm on a handful of Discords, but I'm not keen on the fast pace of online chat. I prefer the slow pace of posting on forums or social media.

G_ManX, added you! :thumb:

btw for anyone interested, here's a really great recap of recent events: (https://brokentoys.substack.com/p/the-great-dril-war)

demagogue on 24/4/2023 at 03:25

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I don't get Mastadon. When I go to it, the only thing I see is one post from Henke in Swedish from 2019. :erg:


Edit: Wait, wait, wait... you have to make a new account for every sub-group? Just to clarify what's going on... This looks like a Twitter version of Reddit, except you have to make a new account for every subreddit-equivalent page. Is that what it is?

That's kind of crazy... On Twitter I'm connected to I don't know how many different circles ... international law people, law academics, the human rights world, Japan law and politics people, most Southeast Asian countries' law and politics people, jazz piano stuff, synth people, indie music groups, game dev people, indie game groups, modern art groups, the AI art scene, cognitive science groups, programming groups, neuroscience groups, philosophy groups, quantum physics groups, cinema groups, groups for wargaming, flight sims, & car sims... and I still think that might not even be half of it.

So for Mastodon, would I need a separate account and page for every one of those scenes? I can understand Twitter is imploding and Mastodon is decentralized or whatever, but chotto fuck that. I can see it working for people whose whole lives revolve around just one or two things, but if they're into a lot of different groups, it's kind of unreasonable to expect them to make like 50 different accounts they'd have to log into separately. I'll see if there are a few I'd really like and join, but big oof.