When Twitter Meets Facebook: How to Create a Social Network with Respect to Your Mastodon Account and How to Follow It (How to Find Your Followers)
Better laws might be able to help to revive competition, strengthen American democracy and even realize the potential of social media to do so. The question of ownership of social media sites doesn’t matter as much as policymakers would like.
The director of UCLA’s Center For Critical Internet Inquiry began to use Mastodon after Musk took over the social media platform. (She had created another account years ago, she said, but didn’t really get into it until recently because of the popularity of Twitter among people in academia.)
Some of the new sign-ups include actors and comedians who have big followings, like Kathy Grimm who joined early November, and journalist Molly Jong-Fast, who joined in October.
The network is set up differently. Because Mastodon users’ accounts are hosted on a slew of different servers, the costs of hosting users is spread among many different people and groups. But that also means users are spread out all over the place, and people you know can be hard to find — Rochko likened this setup to having different email providers, like Gmail and Hotmail.
On Mastodon, you have to join a specific server to sign up, some of which are open to everyone and some of which need an invitation. There is a server operated by the nonprofit behind Mastodon, Mastodon.social, but it’s not accepting more users; I’m currently using one called Mstdn.social, which is also where I can sign in to access Mastodon on the web.
And while you can follow any other Mastodon user, no matter which server they’ve signed up with, you can only see the lists of who follows your Mastodon friends, or who your Mastodon friends follow, if the followers happen to belong to the same server you’re signed up with (I realized this while trying to track down more people I know who recently signed up).
From Twitter to Mastodon: How I Got There, How Do I Become A Millionaire in a Single Week? The Anatomy of a Newcomer
It felt as if I was starting from the beginning, as a complete newcomer to social media. It’s similar toTwitter in terms of look and features, and is easy to use on anios.
Roberts, too, hasn’t yet decided if she will close her Twitter account, but she was surprised by how quickly her following grew on Mastodon. Within a week of signing up and alerting her nearly 23,000 Twitter followers, she has amassed over 1,000 Mastodon followers.
“I thought, ‘What’s it going to be like to start over again?’” she asked. It is interesting that person is here. Here is so-and-so. I’m so happy that they’re here to be with us.
The open-source platform has added half a million users in a single week, but should scientists do the same? We examine the pros and cons.
How the Mastodon Platform Defines and Disturbs Professors’ View of Scientific Collaboration and the Status of a Non-Profit-Governing Organization
Individuals or organizations can set up a server with host users on it. Those servers often represent geographical locations or areas of interest. Users can join a server and chat with others on that server, or post in the federated universe. Mastodon can read messages that are posted to the server unless a user chooses not to do so.
Unlike Twitter, where missives are limited to 280 characters, you can post up to 11,000 characters in a single Mastodon message — known as a toot. The way users encounter content is different. No one can see the algorithmic recommendations on Mastodon. Who you follow and what they share dictates what you see.
Mastodon is like going for drinks after a conference according to Flick. People who understand academics are the ones you get to talk to. She thinks it’s pretty similar to twttr, where everyone is listening in and the world is watching. Ian Brown thinks that a lot of Mastodon users are academics.
DiResta says that the idea of a great democrat doesn’t always match reality. She says that accounts with a large, established following have greater reach than average science experts on the platform.
There are other issues that might give users pause. Mastodon categorizes conversations around hashtags much more frequently than Twitter, partly because of its lack of algorithmic recommendations. The way the platform works makes it hard to corral conversations about a particular academic paper using a DOI reference as a #. (A user has reported the issue and has asked for the functionality to be introduced.)
Rochko began developing Mastodon shortly after leaving university in 2016. He was a fan of Twitter but wanted to create a platform not controlled by any single company or person, reasoning that online communication is too important to be at the whim of commercial interests or CEOs. He believed that the lack of profit motive and canny design could discourage harassment and abuse, and provide users more control.
The Mastodon founder spoke for the first time since the link ban and he used the opportunity to highlight how much of a CEO Musk is.
I would rather be watching than hearing people say that it’s been great and that they’re proud of it. There is more work, there are more fires to put out. It’s difficult to deal with. I’m pulling 14-hour workdays and sleeping very little.
The whole story coincides with the process of releasing a new version of the Mastodon software. You have to put a lot of focus into that. It’s suddenly that you have to deal with responding to press inquiries and also run social media accounts to take advantage of the opportunity.
Yeah, it was good and gratifying at an objective level. I would love to just lean back and just enjoy the fact that so many new people are using Mastodon, like Stephen Fry. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to lean back and enjoy that. There has been an increase in funds due to new donations over the last 10 days.
Twitter and Musk’s ban on jet-tracing: a fresh look at his Twitter bans after his campaign against his resignation as a billionaire
More than half of 17.5 million users who responded to a poll that asked whether billionaire Elon Musk should step down as head of Twitter voted yes when the poll closed on Monday.
In addition to affecting Mastodon, the new policy had also covered links to Facebook, Instagram and Truth Social, and said users may be suspended for displaying their handles for any of those platforms in their Twitter profiles.
After the decision to change policy generated a lot of immediate criticism, Musk promised not to make any more policy changes without a survey of users.
The action to block competitors was Musk’s latest attempt to crack down on certain speech after he shut down a Twitter account last week that was tracking the flights of his private jet.
Mainstream websites such as Facebook and Instagram were banned along with upstart rivals Mastodon and Tribel. Twitter gave no explanation for why the blacklist included those seven websites but not others such as Parler, TikTok or LinkedIn.
Musk said that once the account’s purpose is promotion of competitors, it won’t be suspended.
On Wednesday Musk banned the account and changed the rules on the social networking website to prohibit the sharing of another person’s location without their consent. The jet-tracing account can still be found on other social media sites, but he accused the journalists who were writing about it of broadcasting “basically assassination coordinates.”
He used that to justify Twitter’s moves last week to suspend the accounts of numerous journalists who cover the social media platform and Musk, among them reporters working for The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, Voice of America and other publications. Many of those accounts were restored following an online poll.
Then, over the weekend, The Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz became the latest journalist to be temporarily banned. She said she was suspended after she asked for an interview on her micro-blogging site, which she tagged Musk.
Musk said he never intended to be CEO of Tesla, and that he didn’t want to be chief executive of any other companies either, preferring to see himself as an engineer instead. Musk also said he expected an organizational restructuring of Twitter to be completed in the next week or so. It has been more than a month since he said that.
In public banter with Twitter followers Sunday, Musk expressed pessimism about the prospects for a new CEO, saying that person “must like pain a lot” to run a company that “has been in the fast lane to bankruptcy.”
As a wave of users have announced their plans to switch services, the growth figure comes as there is erratic leadership of the new owner of the service.
A reminder that centralized platforms can impose arbitrary and unfair limits on what you can and cannot say while holding your social graph hostage.
On 11 December, Musk said his pronouns were “prosecute/fahici” to mock the transgender and gender-non conforming rights movements and to malign the departing director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony Fauci.
The #BlackIAscientistBecause campaign against COVID-19: how science has changed in the 21st century
Oded Rechavi is an assistant professor at Tel Aviv University and he says that he wouldn’t be able to know many scientists if he didn’t have it. Democracy in science is increased because of it and you get more opportunities no matter where you are.
It has also given an influential voice to people who might otherwise be excluded, and has helped to broker support networks for those who don’t see people like them in their own departments, says Sigourney Bonner, co-founder of the #BlackinCancer community and a PhD student at Cancer Research UK’s Cambridge Institute. She didn’t meet a black woman with a PhD until she started her own. There are many movements united by # IAmAScientistBecause that have often seen#BlackInTheIvory as a basis for discussing issues such as racism, sexism and harassment.
The researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge studied the spread of false news on the platform and found that it moved much faster than true news stories. The false news also tended to arouse emotions such as fear, disgust and surprise.
And in a 2018 study of hate speech on Twitter, Manoel Horta Ribeiro, now a PhD student at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne, and his colleagues found that users whose tweets contained hate speech tweeted more often than those who didn’t use such language, and were retweeted more frequently than their less-incendiary counterparts7.
Twitter has always struggled to cope with how to moderate such rapid shifts in online conversation. It’s a problem that seems likely to worsen now that Musk has made cuts to the company’s staff and its safety systems.
The death threats that were shown in a 2021 Nature survey were of prominent COVID-19 researchers and they were often brought up on social media. Some researchers on the site shared oversimplified information, and posted alarmist analyses, Bergstrom says. Oliver Johnson is an information scientist at the University of Bristol, UK, and says that despite the reputation of a public town square, users don’t follow mostly those who share the same views. The people who believed in COVID-19 would follow everyone else who agreed, while the people who believed in zero COVID approach would follow only those who agreed.
“I don’t think we’ve done a good job of talking in school science classes about the process of doing science, and explaining to people how the social process of science operates,” he says. It looks different when it’s in the making.
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04506-6
What Will Mastodon do when the Right-Wing Troll Locks His Twitter Account and Says: What Has Happened to the Science World?” a Reflection of Bergstrom
Days after Bergstrom spoke to Nature, however, he locked his own account after Musk’s mocking tweet about Fauci. He wrote on Mastodon that it is not possible to have meaningful and productive scientific collaboration when a right-wing troll is running the platform and he is only allowed to hear his audience cheer.
“We’ve been having conversations about if Twitter is now a safe place for our organization to exist, because of the way it’s changing,” says Bonner. At this point, I don’t know.
Researchers leaving the platform will probably try to find a social-media replacement. He says that the place for scientists to be will be replaced by something else if it ceases to be the place for them. “I just can’t imagine going back to being disconnected from the rest of the science world.”
“There’s definitely momentum behind it,” MacLeary says. “Whether that momentum has pushed it over the tipping point, I don’t know. It reminds me of my experience in early Twitter, which was very positive. You were familiar with everyone there.
Volunteer administrators, whose hobbies running server have become second jobs, face more responsibility with the growing number of users.
In the US alone, there’s the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which makes social platforms liable for copyrighted material posted there if they don’t register to protect themselves and work to take it down (registering takes just a few minutes and costs $6). There’s also the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule, which dictates how platforms handle children’s data. If admins learn of child exploitation materials, they must report them to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Europe has the General Data Protection Regulation, a privacy and human rights law. Europe’s new Digital Service Act could apply to Mastodon servers too, if they become large enough. And administrators must comply with not only their local laws, but laws that exist anywhere their server is accessible. That is daunting, experts say, but not impossible.