Fumbling About With Mastodon
Consider me intrigued.
What Mastodon offers, as of this nascent – and potentially naive – moment in its existence and in my usage is all that pre-algorithmic-OrangeMalignancy–and-his-sycophants-IPO Twitter offered, Fail Whales and all, an opportunity for a social media reboot reliant not upon rebooting within the Frankenstein monster of self-branded broadcast, perceived obligation, and ubiquitous anxiety that devolved from a tool originally for connection and becoming throughout my mid-twenties, but on the explorative potential of an uncharted wild unearthed in my late thirties, a new middle ground for an approximation of the digital genuine lodged between this space for talking to myself in public and the newsletter (itself a social liferaft from Twitter and Facebook); a means of exploring the question of if I were to just start using social media today, how would I make use of it?
But, as with anything in any stage of existence, Mastodon is not without its downsides and the inevitable growing pains: that same uncharted status means that I have no clue what I’m doing (though maybe that’s a good thing); the lingo and foundational principles of Instances, etc. are, much like the blockchain, headscratching; I don’t know anyone (also maybe a good thing) nor do I have a grasp of the inchoate societal canon; the timelines, (Federated and Local or whatever parlance they use, see above) intended as a tool for finding new people, are an overwhelming hodgepodge-flurry of rapids and eddies in lightning succession; and I can’t discount the omnipresent question of whether I want to devote mental energy to starting over yet again on yet another platform that is not my own.
For now, though, intrigue and fascination overshadow any uncertainty and compel me to navigate its pervasive idiosyncracies and unknowns; the existence of this site and the newsletter for (more or less) complete thoughts negate the question of content ownership – all content exorcism requiring more than 500 characters will live here or in the dispatches.
Should you decide to give Mastodon a go, you can join me and my three whole followers (more freeing than it sounds) there at @tylerweaver. I’m on the main mastodon.social Instance for now (I have no idea if that particular Instance is open for new sign-ups; the WIRED article that spurred me into the forest said it wasn’t, but I was able to sign-up there after reading the article), though I may start my own Instance if it allows greater integration with this site and the newsletter and I learn more about what, precisely, an Instance entails (for instance, can I transfer my handle over or do I have to get a new one? is Instance capitalized? (for instance)). While I’m not sure that I’m ready to go down that particular path, I won’t state anything with any certainty: I didn’t think I’d find myself intrigued by another social network nor can I deny the possibility that the initial exuberant verbosity on display here might fizzle out tomorrow, rendering this rambling little more than an encapsulation of a faded moment of naiveté in my ongoing connective becoming… or vanishing.
(TW)
