some Twitter-related links

[cellio]

If you are using your Twitter account to sign in to other sites ("the "sign in with Google/Facebook/Twitter/etc" system), you should stop doing that now. Also, if you are using SMS for two-factor authentication with Twitter, that same article has advice for you. Some parts of their 2FA setup have stopped working, and apparently SMS validation is now unreliable.

There is an outstanding thread -- on Twitter, natch -- about the kinds of things that SREs (site reliability engineers, the people who keep large systems running) worry about. Parts of large systems fail all the time; in a healthy setup you'll barely notice. Twitter is, um, not healthy.

Debirdify is a tool for finding your Twitter friends on the Fediverse (Mastodon), for those who've shared that info. It looks for links in pinned tweets and Twitter profile ("about") blurbs.

I'm at https://indieweb.social/@cellio, for anyone else who's there. I'm relatively new there, like lots of other folks, but so far the vibe takes me back to the earlier days of the Internet -- people are friendly, help each other, presume good intent, and have actual conversations. It is not Twitter; some intentional design choices appear to encourage constructive use and hinder toxicity. I hope to write more about Mastodon later.

Comments

[hudebnik]

I'd be curious to hear how "some intentional design choices appear to encourage constructive use and hinder toxicity." If you can explain it to somebody who's never had a Twitter account.

[cellio]

The biggest one is how the sites choose what content to show you. Twitter creates, and Google+ after the early days created, a "feed" for you, curated by an algorithm. I don't know how G+'s worked; on Twitter, a post (tweet) is more likely to show up in your feed if it's posted by someone with a lot of reach (the reach get reacher), or if it has a lot of likes (encourages socks, bots, and echo chambers), or if it's somehow connected to someone you follow. That last seems to be the least important, anecdotally. I almost never use my Twitter feed because it's full of stuff I don't care about. In Musk's Twitter, rumor has it that paid members also get substantial priority.

Mastodon gives you multiple feeds (I'll get back to that), and the "algorithm" is "reverse chronological", like it is here on DW and probably on every blogging site you've ever used. You see stuff as it was posted, not something yanked out of its context from three days ago and pushed at you now, and not yanked out of its context of all the other conversation happening around it. Nothing has priority; you get what you asked for, in order. I've found the things I read and interact with here on DW to be much more thoughtful, nuanced, and civil than what I see on Twitter (granted post length is a factor too), and so far that's what I'm seeing on Mastodon too. (BTW, posts on Mastodon are by default 500 characters, larger than Twitter, and it's a server setting.)

(Side nit I've been made aware of: Mastodon is the software; the federated network of sites using it is part of a larger "Fediverse" that includes other software platforms. I'm saying "on Mastodon" but I think I sometimes mean "on the Fediverse". But I don't know enough about those abstraction layers yet.)

Mastodon also gives you multiple feed options, so you can choose the size of your fire hose. You can see just posts from (or boosted) by the people you follow, or just posts from your local server (regardless of who you follow), or a "federated" view that reaches out to other servers and does, um, something based on the people you follow and their connections. I haven't explored that one much yet. It's big. But it's still reverse chronological, no prioritization, no buying your way into top position.

I think that local feed will end up being pretty important. There are lots of Mastodon servers (instances), more every day. Some are huge and general, and some are small and organized around special interests. If you choose a server that aligns with some of your interests, then that "local" view can connect you with people who share those interests. Because people are multi-faceted and the instance is a home, not a topic restriction, you'll still see those "whole people". It's not like Usenet newsgroups or Stack Exchange communities where you can only talk about this thing here and not that thing, but there's a rough sort based on some shared interest, if you want to use that. There are also huge general-interest servers where the set of users will be much more random. You get to choose what you want. (And you can move to a different server later if you see something you like better.)

I'm being an armchair sociologist here with too few observations and no data, but I think this "local community of full people" aspect will act somewhat like physical neighborhoods (back when we socialized with our neighbors, but maybe your barony or guild is a model too) or like the more social Usenet groups (I'm thinking of alt.callahans in particular, and to an extent the Rialto). Because these neighborhoods aren't bounded by geography or (probably) by culture, the people I see on that local feed are more heterogeneous, more diverse, more "like me in some ways, very unlike me in others". I hope easy interaction with that community will help build connections and resist polarization. I'm game to try the experiment, at least. On Twitter, only the loudest (and probably most extreme) "people not like me" would make it to the feed, the feed that was overrun with topics I don't care about from people I don't know so I never looked at it anyway -- but if I did look, I wouldn't find the "regular people", only the people with big fan followings.

There's another design choice that I learned about the first time I bumped into what I thought was a missing feature (or rather, one I hadn't found out how to use). On Twitter you can "retweet" something and add your own commentary in just a few keystrokes. This is sometimes used constructively ("hey everybody, read this important stuff about Covid / data breaches / deadlines / Sandman premiere / etc"), but often is used negatively ("look at this bozo") -- and in that latter case, the discussion about that retweeted content is now connected to the retweet, not to the original post. Conversations get fragmented all the time on all platforms and that's normal, but the "retweet" feature makes it really easy to fragment instead of joining the original conversation, and easier to be non-constructive, and Twitter prioritizes the loudest voices in showing you subsets... On Mastodon, you can "boost" a post -- show this in feeds where I show up, just like my own posts -- and of course you can always manually construct something like a retweet (quote + your comment), but you can't just click "retweet", have the other post be embedded in yours, and type your comments; you have to do more work. I'm waiting to see how this one plays out; it seems to encourage you to join the original conversation instead, but that's not always constructive either. Maybe it will cut down on the drive-by "what a bozo" comments entirely -- can't do it easily, don't want to do it constructively as a reply, might as well move on. We'll see.

Aside on firehose management: I see that Mastodon, like Dreamwith, has the ability to add people to reading lists, so I could create a list of all the SCA people I follow and check specifically those posts if I want to. I haven't used this feature yet, but I probably will as a way to partition my reading. You're partitioning by person not by topic, same as here on DW, but it might still be helpful. Also, Mastodon, like DW and Twitter, has tags, and on Mastodon you can follow a tag, I'm told. Haven't gotten that far yet.

[siderea]

Re whole people: some people have multiple accounts, same as here and on Twitter. I'm noticing my friends who are power users all have at least two accounts. The whole people model tends to be terrible because of context collapse, and how mingled signal becomes noise.

Re retweeting: it is counterintuitive to me, at least, that trying to prevent discussion fragmenting would be a social good. It thwarts completionism, but it allows critical conversation to happen separately. The boost model actually drives critical readers back to the source to confront them.

On Twitter, if a friend retweets something that's, say, a Nazi dog whistle they didn't recognize as such, one can @ them right back, "hey, that's a Nazi dog whistle" and they and their other readers will see it.

On Mastodon, if a friend boosts a Nazi dog whistle, your reply to that toot doesn't go to them. If you hit reply and type, "hey that's a Nazi dog whistle" you just said that to the Nazi, not your friends. You just started a fight with a stranger (and all the stranger's friends).

If a friend retweets something you think is mistaken or wrongheaded, you can start a discussion with your friend by replying to the tweet. If a friend boosts something you think is mistaken or wrongheaded, you can argue with the person who originally said it.

This seems an engine for randos showing up to argue with people, instead of groups of friends discussing things amongst themselves.

[cellio]

People don't have to be "whole people", of course; separating personal and professional accounts is common across the Internet, and people sometimes isolate other interest areas (like an SCA-specific account). I meant that "off topic" isn't really a thing the way it is in other places, so if you want to talk about all the things you're interested in, you can.

Those are good points about retweeting. I'm not sure how I feel about the Mastodon approach yet. One thing it does is to make linking to Mastodon posts exactly as easy or hard as linking to things elseweb, so if I want to use someone's Mastodon message as a starting point for my own conversation, that's the same as using a blog post or a CDC page or a Reddit thread or a news article in that way. Whether that's good, bad, or neutral, I don't know yet.

[hudebnik]

Interesting! All choices that a UX designer could have made either way, depending on what the company wanted to optimize for.

[cellio]

With a large dose of "you can change it if you're sufficiently motivated". The Mastodon code is open-source and federated servers communicate through a common API, so if you wanted your server to behave differently but in a way that's still compatible, and you wanted to spend the time coding, you could do that.

While looking for Twitter alternatives I came across another site that clearly started with Mastodon code, but it's not Mastodon. It's not federated, so it's not playing in the larger fediverse. I assume that was an intentional choice -- not sure why, since it seems to be "big tent" rather than some specialized closed community, but I didn't dig.