Hello fellow Kos community,
The collapse of Twitter is accelerating, the pranking and public protests has been often hilarious, but some of the leading voices in the infosec community are now warning that the chaos has reached the point of being actively dangerous to Twitter users.
social.blogsofwar.com/…
Now is the time to archive your data off of Twitter and delete the phone app.
Where to next? I personally made the decision to make the jump to Mastodon last weekend, and am now learning to adapt to the far more relaxed pace and civilized norms of discourse of the Fediverse (the collection of all independent communities/server instances using Mastodon and the underlying open source protocols).
A number of good guides to getting set up on Mastodon now exist, e.g.,
mastodon.online/…
… and don’t get hung up on which server to join. Any of the big ones is a good point of arrival, federation makes exploration easy, and the technology supports relatively easy relocation within the Fediverse if you find a server/community that you strongly prefer.
The Fediverse is a lot less America-centric than Twitter, and the pre-existing rich, diverse community on that site is now going through some angst/conflict as the Twitter refugees arrive and rapidly recreate their networks and conversations. But this isn’t like invaders taking over a monolithic community. The Fediverse has enormous potential for peaceful experimentation. New users are creating servers that allow communities to form subject to their own rules and able to make decisions about which other communities to connect with, set within a broad consensus of the need for open but moderated, reality-based, tolerant, and respectful discourse.
Best of all, there are no insidious algorithms stuffing your timeline full of content designed to grab your attention and tempt you to engage by any means possible, which usually meant resorting to the basest/strongest emotions — hate, lust, greed, envy.
It’s a new world with tremendous potential, and I hope to see many of you there. You can find me on there at @stevenpbrumby@fosstodon.org
Update: Twitter’s data archive tool is not great. Better open source tools exist:
mathstodon.xyz/...
github.com/…