Mastodon has existed for a while. I think I made my account in 2017 after having similar thoughts as you describe and quickly finding out someone had already written the code. Possibly I read about mastodon on one of the techblogs. Back then there was NOBODY on Mastodon except some super-nerdy (I see myself as a nerd, just saying) niche communities. But it had two-factor and so I kept my account.
A good while ago I read a fantastic article about a tool that some European cities are using (Barcelona and Rome were mentioned) to have people participate in local politicsā¦ the other day I talked to my colleague about this and searched for the article. I know where I read about it(I think) but I cannot remember the name of the person championing the thing nor could I find the article.
A friend of mine in Arizona wants to have a forum for āpeople who are interested in hearing and talking about concerts in this cityā. There are various decent technical answers to this, but the huge bar is still āhow do you get the Facebookers to look at anything that isnāt Facebookā.
And one more thing. There is actually a social network here where you can join your local neighborhood ā https://nebenan.de/ I think I still have an account but it was very much people looking for stuff and exchanging baby clothing. For me it was too local. I would very much prefer something for my whole city.
PS: some cities now have mastodon instances Munich for example.
Yeah, my HOA runs a message board which covers the neighborhood; and at our old house we were on Nextdoor, which allowed for the general area to ask each other:
why are fireworks?
whose dog is this?
has anyone seen my dog?
I sell <MLM du jour> so let me know if you are interested!
I called the cops on the mailman because he broke into our house, ate our dogās food, and then denied the entire thing when he came to bring our mail 6 hours later
Something a little less hyper-local and a bit more regional would probably be what Iām looking for.
And yet it needs to be easy enough to discover that everyone can easily join in.
I wish my city had a mastodon instance. There is one under karlsruhe.social but last time I checked this was a private endeavour that was running in testmode.
My nextdoor consists entirely of posts that start out āmy animal is missing ā or āI need a guy to fix my whateverā and turn into two people yelling right wing hate.
Actually, thatās not quite right, lots of it starts out as racism, before the right wing hate.
Itās a cesspit, and I donāt know why anyone bothers.
Yeah, my wife does the NextDooring here. Seems to be mostly ādoes anyone know whatās happening about this buildingā (itās being allowed to become derelict so that they can pull it down and put up horrible little flats), āscary black men just stole things and threatened meā (I suppose itās possible but Iāve never seen them even when it was reported in the road where I live at a time when I was outside*) and āI didnāt read the notice and got a parking ticket, do I have to pay itā (probably).
* for the avoidance of doubt: nobody would mistake me for a scary black man even at a distance.
No wonder, the biggest update they had on that website in a decade was changing the ālikeā icon from stars to heartsā¦ oh, and increasing the limit of characters per postā¦
A large proportion of the people I follow on Twitter are posting links to their accounts on other platforms. Wondered what had changed overnight. Turns out EM has locked all the Twitter employees out of their offices.
And Tweets containing āmastodonā seemingly being blocked?
It seems to be dumber than that. Lots of the current staff did not sign up for āworking extremely hardcoreā and preferred three months of severance pay. The lockout is to āprevent them sabotaging Twitterā under the assumption that this could only be done from within the office. While almost all the staff were working remotely until very recently ā¦
Iām looking at signing up to Mastodon currently, but not sure which server to join. The servers that my Twitter follows are on are not accepting sign-ups.
Iād suggest looking into the policies of a particular server. If youāre unlucky you might pick one that gets blocked by others because it allows hate speech etc.
Apparently (a word doing a lot of work in the hard to confirm maelstrom of Twitter news) the person in charge of security pass operations is one of those sacked, then asked to return. People may be locked out because Musk has done it deliberately, or it may be because their passes arenāt working and heās trying to style it out as a power move.
