Innovation Scientist of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, and the American Astronomical Society. Mastodon test: @pkgw@mastodon.world. He/him.
Cambridge, MA
Joined November 2009
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I seriously wasn't expecting to feel this decisive about it, but if Trump is on here I'm not very interested in hanging around. I'm leaving the app installed but am gonna default to Mastodon: @pkgw@mastodon.world. See you there?
From my brief experience thus far, it looks like Mastodon and Twitter are very similar in features (not counting the whole "federation" model). The one novelty I've noticed is built-in content warning support.
For every, er, toot you can enter some brief text for a content warning. It shows up in the UI with a "show more" prompt to reveal the actual content.
OK, today I am going to give Mastodon a spin! I'll post some notes and commentary for my astro-folks as I go.
Looks like the app doesn't know how to use the phone's camera, so, oh no, I have to post a saved doggie pic instead of a fresh one. Let's see how it embeds in Twitter!
mastodon.world/@pkgw/1093657…
Mastodon note: looks like I should have used fedifinder.glitch.me as a tool to pick up Mastodon handles from my Twitter follows. Works pretty nicely and found a few that I missed!
I'd love to read a good discussion of why there seems to be no *for-profit* Twitter competitor that's sprung up. Seems like a no-brainer play in a world that's awash in capital?
(When you're the Innovation Scientist, you can tell yourself that tweeting about Mastodon is service work.)
FWIW, I mostly agree with Fake Twitter Nixon. The wheels are falling off the bus here but the Twitter servers are not going to literally explode. And I'm no galaxy-brain but if you spend $44bil on something, you're probably gonna give it more than a few weeks to turn around.
