no matter how you feel about The Donald, I think many of us can agree that today's events constitute a gross abuse of power by Twitter Inc, and are a microcosm of the broader problems of centralized media. many of us have expressed a desire to migrate, but it is unclear where to.
Mastodon is an open-source project based on the ActivityPub protocol; the interface is very similar to Twitter, the primary difference being that rather than a single company controlling the system, it is outside of any one person's control. on Mastodon, you know what to expect
even if you register on my server, you're free to move your account to another Mastodon server anytime! since the servers all federate (talk) to each other, there's nothing stopping you from finding a home with values that match yours. if one server bans you, there are others!
some servers ban "nazis"; they're at liberty to make their own rules. other servers do not. the beauty of the fediverse (federated universe) is that communities are free to choose their own destiny, and block servers they do not want to interact with. Gab is just another server!
this is not a private server, as all toots (Mastodon tweets) are public; if you're not comfortable with trusting your data to me, feel free to join another server, or start your own! we'll still be able to interact as if we were on Twitter.
this transition does not have to be one-way, either; for example, I am cross-posting between this account and pee_zombie@schelling.pt using https://moa.party
my hope is that once enough of us switch over to the fediverse, we won't really be missing much from Twitter
there's no commitment necessary, and its free to you; if you've ever been interested in decentralization and don't trust Twitter Inc, this is your chance to experiment. all are welcome!
under this tweet i'll be collecting a few examples of people dissatisfied with the Twitter status quo
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RT @micsolana
an absolutely terrifying precedent https://twitter.com/TwitterSafety/status/1347684877634838528
https://twitter.com/micsolana/status/1347686367334182912
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RT @0x49fa98
No matter what happens, it's been great, friends, and I hope that our time continues together, here or somewhere else
https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1347696330270007299
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RT @Suhail
Decentralize.
https://twitter.com/Suhail/status/1347698924681785344
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RT @Plinz
I know everyone is happy that Trump is suspended, but you should also be concerned that a social media company has more power than our highest democratically elected official
https://twitter.com/Plinz/status/1347752188123115526
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RT @chaosprime
follower count really taking a beating today
had no idea i was followed by so many of Trump's alts
https://twitter.com/chaosprime/status/1347747468084183040
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RT @Aella_Girl
Holy shit, google play removed Parler from the app store. We just shoved our dick into a hornets nest
https://twitter.com/Aella_Girl/status/1347749724401541126
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RT @orthonormalist
Going to follow my own advice to get a lot more comfortable with distributed, uncensorable, and federated systems of communication this year.
https://twitter.com/orthonormalist/status/1347614007398551552
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RT @EricRWeinstein
This will not end here. @jack knows that this ends elsewhere. You will have a distributed database that lives nowhere in particular behind an elliptic curve. Or on a rival platform that Trump owns in the Cayman Islands. Etc.
Keep our friends close, and enemies on platform Sam. https://twitter.com/samharrisorg/status/1347700391874420736
https://twitter.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1347763941796057089
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RT @LindseyGrahamSC
Twitter may ban me for this but I willingly accept that fate: Your decision to permanently ban President Trump is a serious mistake.
The Ayatollah can tweet, but Trump can’t. Says a lot about the people who run Twitter.
https://twitter.com/LindseyGrahamSC/status/1347713459874627588
this invite will expire in 24 hours; if you are interested in joining us after it does, feel free to DM me!
@pee_zombie You wouldn't happen to know if it's possible to import my twitter threads? I wanna run my own server and use something like that moa thing, but I need to have my tweets back-dated so I can keep building my exobrian.
@ultimape that's a great question, one I'd love an answer to as well. I haven't see any such tool, but I imagine it should be simple enough to write one. masto supposedly will allow migration of toots across servers in the future, that same tool could be used
@pee_zombie The hard part is I need proper threading import and not simply injest random tweets.
I was trying to make one, then twitter changed their export format.
as one solution, I invite all of you to join me on my new Mastodon server, http://schelling.pt. here you will be outside the reach of corporate media & part of a decentralized network of independent Twitter-like servers, free to move between them
https://schelling.pt/invite/LtApnNDs