For those wondering about how to sign up to mastodon and what server to pick:
It's like picking an email server. They all have their differences, but generally they are interoperable. You can read users from anywhere, and follow from anywhere. Better yet, it's fairly easy to move your account from one server to another if you don't like it.
Your best bet is some of the bigger second-tier servers (ones that have thousands but not hundreds of thousands of users) because they aren't as heavily loaded.
I wonder when, if ever, mainstream migration will happen. For example most TV channels were posting World Cup goals on Twitter asap. Same if you follow for example NFL. Easy to follow the games with instant highlights. When will these leave or simply stop posting?
This should cause a significant degree of cognitive dissonance for quite a lot of Hacker News users. fascinating to see two members of the billionaire tech class disagree publicly like this.
This website is heavily left leaning, like most of the internet these days.
Do you live under a rock? This place has always been libertarian, and since Trump has turned into an echo chamber of alt-right grievances in tech. The initial burst of cheering from this forum over Elon initially buying twitter to "destroy wokeness" was deafening.
This is his Mastodon account: https://mas.to/@paulg/with_replies His first toots remind me of his first tweets: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/22300310058 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/22307238459
The most ridiculous problem with Mastodon I think is the fact that even if I visit his profile I can't follow him because we are on two different servers. I have to copy his profile url and paste it in my logged in instance. This then takes me to his profile where I can follow him. That's just too much work!
How does one find a good Mastodon server? On his website it says "Follow me at @paulg@mas.to" -- does that mean that he is on mas.to? What if I want to follow him but also someone on another server? Or do I not understand how it works?
Disclaimer: Novice, who also signed up. I've barely looked into anything, this info is just my experience. So it's mostly like email. Logic that would work for email i think works for Mastodon. Just like with email you can generally email anyone and anyone emails you, the same applies to mastodon in my experience. However, if a server is being too for your server's admins, they may block the entire thing. I don't kno…
> You can always decide to switch later, as you can set your old account to indicate that you moved to a different account.
A small cool detail you didn't add: when you do that, anyone who was following you will automatically and seamlessly follow the new account.
You know how Musk promises one thing and delivers something else? I'm not the biggest Musk fan but I believe he has a very effective process and he is a product person - that is understands what is a good product. He will never deliver a free speech platform, he is a free-speech NIMBY and has an agenda os something that drives him but he can still turn Twitter into something valuable. Then people will come back for w…
> I'm not the biggest Musk fan but I believe he has a very effective process and he is a product person What a weird thing to say after he killed twitter with his "process". Perhaps this dumpster fire is the best view yet into what he really believes, and how he really runs his companies. Elon is a modern day Kissinger
His process as, I understand it, is to re-discover the wheel and see how else it could have been done. It is messy and might not yield good results if his predecessors already did a good job but I think he has a chance and will look like a dumpster fire until he learns and finds a new path. If he fails, it will look like extinguished dumpster fire :)