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[–]SoCo 6 insightful - 2 fun6 insightful - 1 fun7 insightful - 2 fun -  (3 children)

Mastodon seems great to me, but it's focus is on Twitter like post feeds. Maybe it's just me, but the Twitter style isn't very conductive to conversation, IMO. Seems many manage to do so though.

I've gave it a try, but not really gotten into it. I started off with the server https://mas.to which seems great to me.

Mastodon is federated, so there are many servers. You pick one to be your home. They each can have their own different rules and are unique communities. Then, each can decide to expand interconnect with other servers; the federation part.

This gives you your local home community and then the federated community, which feels like everyone. You can pop over to the federated tab and find fresh new things to follow for instance. Other decentralized social medias frequently have a similar concept of a closed community, that also has a watering-hole or pub, where you can expand your social network.

Each server provides their own web interface, as do Mastodon apps. Most I've seen provide searching with #hashtag and @user features and usually you can view any users' profile, see their avatar, banner image, bio and set of links, as well as any public posts, comments and media posts.

The server/app's interfaces vary, but they can provide an interface for grabbing the direct link for sharing or not. Also, if the content you try to direct link to is frequently on a whole different Mastodon server and their direct linking and posts' visibility (ie globally public or not) can affect that as well.

Here's a direct link to a random post:

https://social.lansky.name/@hn50/108447911600746137

[–]raven9[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Yeah twitter is a mess. I dont like it much at all. I didnt join mastodon yet because it appeared to be closed to the rest of the web. I didn't see the web fronts you mentioned or the means to link to posts but I'll have another look at it. I am in the process of trying out Bastion. Did you try Bastion? Its also very decentralised.

[–]SoCo 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

(a little long winded, but I'm hopefully other's might find this info helpful too)

The Mastodon server list is here. All the public ones seem to have a "Browse Directory" link. Without joining or signing in, this lets you "explore" the various Mastodon servers. It seems to let you browse their users' public profiles. From their you can click on a user and see their profile and a feed of their public posts. So it's all accessible on the public web.

No, I'm not familiar with Bastion. At a quick glance, there seems to be several things with similar names. A bit different spelling, Bastyon is a social media based on the Pocketcoin blockchain, which seems more like what I expected to find. The Bastion spelling seemed at a glance just to be DeFi lending.

I've tried Friendica and Diaspora a while back. They both are federated Facebook-like social medias. You can host your own "pod" server, or join someone else's, then the servers de-centrally interconnect.

Hive / Steem seemed really promising, I tried each for a couple years. They are a blockchain social media. It is somewhat like more of a blog than Facebook, but with following users, categories, and every upvote is a tip of the cryptocurrency and some people can make good loot posting stuff. Every post/comment requires a small crypto fee, so signing up is a little funky. There are free options, but a couple bucks worth of their coin helps get going faster. There are a ton of website and app interfaces to them, that look very different and change it from being youtube, to blog, to facebook mode in away. The upvote-tip strategy boosts posts (as does buying a boost on your own post), but that seems to push a viral new posts are king feel, that made > week old posts seem dead. Also, large files (images/video) aren't on the chain.

Memo Cash is cool. I've tried it a bit. It's a similar strategy to Hive/Steem, but feels closer to Twitter.

I've briefly tried ScuttleButt, a non-blockchian p2p social media. You are completely alone and you have to manually link of with people, unless you go to a "Pub Server" to meet and connect to people. Seems cool for messaging, but maybe more chat and socializing works out too.

Retroshare is an older heavily encrypted P2P social media. It seems cool for messaging and file sharing, but is has a ton of features like broadcast video, voice chat, e-mail-like message, chat lobby, forum, etc. It's totally a closed darknet and you pretty much have to exchange PGP keys with someone to talk to them.

[–]raven9[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Yoy are right about Bastyon I missspelled it.

I actually joined mastodon.social. I posted a few posts but did not receive any responses to them. There seems to be a lot of people posting but not much interactivity between users.