I seriously wasn't expecting to feel this decisive about it, but if Trump is on here I'm not very interested in hanging around. I'm leaving the app installed but am gonna default to Mastodon: @pkgw@mastodon.world. See you there?

The way it's done it looks like you could (ab)use the feature to act as a basic subject line. No sense as to whether that's considered OK or not.

For every, er, toot you can enter some brief text for a content warning. It shows up in the UI with a "show more" prompt to reveal the actual content.

From my brief experience thus far, it looks like Mastodon and Twitter are very similar in features (not counting the whole "federation" model). The one novelty I've noticed is built-in content warning support.

I've been advised by a few people that Tusky is probably the client to use on Android. So, I'll switch to that.

Mastodon note: looks like I should have used fedifinder.glitch.me as a tool to pick up Mastodon handles from my Twitter follows. Works pretty nicely and found a few that I missed!

Yeah, I was ignoring those...

I'd love to read a good discussion of why there seems to be no *for-profit* Twitter competitor that's sprung up. Seems like a no-brainer play in a world that's awash in capital?

Looks like the app doesn't know how to use the phone's camera, so, oh no, I have to post a saved doggie pic instead of a fresh one. Let's see how it embeds in Twitter! mastodon.world/@pkgw/1093657…

(When you're the Innovation Scientist, you can tell yourself that tweeting about Mastodon is service work.)

Three out of five star rating 😬

OK, I should switch to a different form of work at some point today, but last little exploration: Mastodon for Android!

Yeah, there totally are, and I'm sure the folks running the show have a huge list of things they'd like to do! Running an open-source project is all about being told "You should do X!" and being like "Yes I know and I agree but also I don't have 1000 spare hours right now"

(Where "turn around" in this case is changing in a way that I think is very bad! You know what I mean.)

FWIW, I mostly agree with Fake Twitter Nixon. The wheels are falling off the bus here but the Twitter servers are not going to literally explode. And I'm no galaxy-brain but if you spend $44bil on something, you're probably gonna give it more than a few weeks to turn around.

I'm curious about whether "federation of 1,000 users/instance × 1,000 instances" feels the same as "monolithic 1,000,000-user instance"; both social and technical aspects to that. Will be interesting to find out!

.@cosmos4u points out that Mastodon is at the millions-of-users scale. According to this article, it's recently hit hit 1.03 million monthly active users; Twitter is around 240 million. Closer than I'd have guessed! futurism.com/the-byte/graph-…

For this kind of thing I tend to think that the features hardly matter — much more about ease of onboarding, reliability, lack of papercuts. Unfortunately those are things that are hard to do well in the open-source/non-profit mode ...

I generally love open-source/decentralized/grassroots Stuff but I'll admit that there are times when I'm like "Man, it would be nice if the capitalist profit motive lit a fire under your ass to make this easier to use and societally pervasive."

I've got more thoughts about this but also hate to just yammer while there are surely people out there who have thought very carefully about this stuff for much longer.