flora

@neen

it/its
twitter.com/flaplette

exhausted and disabled traumaqueer

flora @neen3/27/2023, 3:45 PM

i think i finally figured out (at least part of) why here and tumblr are so difficult to post on and why twitter worked so well for me.

i'm the sort of person who cannot form a complete thought in one shot anymore. it's an iterative process. i don't have the working memory available anymore to keep everything inside til it's ready, and drafting out text beyond two or three sentences like this is horrendously anxiety-inducing (probably due to a strong association with school, work, and other business matters that continue to make life difficult and miserable). this pre-dates twitter, it started shifting that way sometime in my teens. i've been a short-message chatter for nearly my entire online life.

even outside of the Culture (which is absolutely inscrutable to me, and that's a tangential subject) the way posting works here and tumblr, where it puts everything inline and quotes the entire previous post/thread, makes trying to communicate in the way my brain works range from stressful to impossible. i can't quickly "one more thing" without taking up a huge block of space and feeling like i'm being annoying.

even as i hover over the "post now" button i'm terrified that i'll think of something else to add that's too short to warrant a quote-and-add, and it'll take too long to hit me for an edit to feel appropriate.

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Calyo Delphi @dragon-architect3/27/2023, 9:07 PM

I know that this is probably not going to be very helpful because I know it has been suggested before and you have undoubtedly at least made an attempt to investigate it, but... Mastodon definitely has more of a Twittery feel to it, but the overall culture there is a whole lot less abrasive compared to Twitter. I've been loving it there and it feels a whole lot less... disconnected compared to here.

I have a lot to write here, so uh....... copypasta it into a text editor and take it one paragraph at a time. ^^;

The slightly-more-than-double character count gives you more than enough space to whittle together a complete thought worth a few good sentences, and you can just reply-thread as you do on Twitter to add more thoughts.

The one big downside is that you have to use #hashtags like it's 2012 again and @reply people who're on other servers and actively engage if you want to be discoverable, but a lot of folks really prefer that Mastodon can't support full-text search as that drastically reduces exposure to shitheads just trying to search people out by keyword to antagonize. But blocking and muting are extremely easy to do, and you can even block & mute whole instance domains.

More popular (and populous) servers that are bound to have more bumpin' local timelines you can watch include mastodon.social and meow.social.

Smaller servers with tamer local timelines that are easier to keep up with include woof.group, furries.club, dragonchat.org, rubber.social (the one I'm on btw~), pawb.fun, vulpine.club, and yiff.life.

There's also furry.engineer as well if that's more your fancy, and my friend Ceralor runs blimps.xyz.

Tbh the most overwhelming task that anyone has to deal with is going through to read each prospective server's rules to find out which one is going to be the best fit for you and how you want to be able to toot.

There's now some really good Android & iOS apps that at least support Mastodon, some of which plan to also incorporate support for other ActivityPub applications like PeerTube and PixelFed. On Android, the recommend is Tusky. And on iOS, the top recommends are Toot! from Dag Agren and Ivory from Tapbots (the same devs behind TweetBot).

At this point, the only time I ever post stuff on Cohost now is when I have a long-form thing to say and I don't want to flood my Mastodon timeline with a massive thread. I just write a post here then crosslink it there.

flora @neen3/28/2023, 4:10 AM

i'm very well aware of how mastodon works, and unfortunately there's a few deliberate things about how it works that are totally unacceptable to me. i don't like the extremely real potential of upset admins being able to sink or cut me off from huge chunks of a community, i don't like how impossible it is to find people without putting a ton of effort into re-networking due to the fragmentation, and i extremely don't like the behavior of returning a 404 when trying to view an account page belonging to someone who has you/your instance blocked/not whitelisted (meanwhile, having to see conversations with said account happening on your timeline with no way to prevent them from showing there). i deleted both accounts i'd actually used sometime last year, and only have one left as a parked name in case of twitter actually dying.

JQ!@JQ-Dogginz3/27/2023, 11:41 PM

I totally get that. I always felt that tweets were juuuust too short to convey a lot of things but it definitely helped to download information into my brain via short chunks. I'm still getting used to Cohost but I prefer it to Twitter immensely based on the effects both sites have on my brain when I use them. I just need to follow more artists on here....