IRC was (is?) the last truly great distributed platform. I'm hoping Mastodon can achieve what it did.
The xkcd forums and spinoff communities made me trans and I'll be forever thankful.
I came in on the tail end of the era of finding a cool forum full of interesting people and be able to post there technically publicly but without much risk of being discovered by "the public".
I'm really hoping that Masto's federation can give us the oldschool niche-community pseodoanonymity/obscurity that the last decade of internet development and centralization has slowly displaced.
Really instead of relying on users to put gifs behind a CW for people who are sensitive to them, gifs should just display as tap-to-play across the board. It's an easy way to head off the issue.
Call me out like one of your tweet girls
Hopefully stock implementation of CWs should make that problem a lot easier?
Picking a site based on moderation policies: "Find something that's just restrictive enough to exclude anything you don't want to be exposed to, but just permissive enough to not boot you for anything you're likely to post."
A hard balance.
I also worry about moderation scaleability with single-admin instances. Hopefully the ability to unilaterally close signups will help with that. Moderation is still a hard, labor-intensive problem.
It worries me to join an instance without knowing what their moderation and longevity will look like in practice. Octodon looked promising. I hope it remains viable longterm.
My account on Bird Website has been private literally forever. Keyword search bots and namesearch clowns are frightening and disgusting. I don't know if Masto will avoid that, but I'll be optimistic in the short term?
I'm gonna try posting publicly some and hope it's not a disaster. This platform looks like it has a lot of potential and I am eager to get off private, centralized services, but there's always the networking effect problem.
Am I the only one who sometimes autocompletes this site's name to "octodong"? Does this make me terrible?
