You can find me on Mastodon and follow me there, if you want. It’s 100% optional (at least until the GOP 2018 tax bill is in effect).
I’ll give it a few weeks, but I’m not sure it really solves my issues with social media. I guess it depends on how many people use it. Not enough and it’s boring and pointless. Too many and it’s Twitter all over again.
I do think Maston has a huge “on boarding” problem. It’s very confusing and the idea of separate instances just makes it worse. My name (grumpygamer) is only unique on my server, anyone else can create that username on any number of servers and there is no way for you to know.
I think this is a recipe for disaster. It would have been nice if they had created some kind of repository for usernames. I know this goes against the “distributed” nature of the service, but to all but the technically elite, it’s confusing. Mastodon even recommends using keybase to verify your identity, that’s a nice idea, but why isn’t it built into the service? How many people even know what keybase is?
How do I find people? Is there a central place to search for users? If there is, I can’t (easily) find it. I wasn’t even sure the url for link to my account, I just guessed. This should be on my account page. Discovery is going to be a issues.