Anyone else on Mastodon Social Servers?

[Munroe]

I don't know if anyone on here is using Mastodon, but I created a Mastodon profile on dice.camp so I'm now @[e-mail] on there.

dice.camp/@munroe

[Marriah]

What do you think of it so far? I am curious. I dumped Tweeter.

[Munroe]

Nov 8, 2022 8:21:07 GMT -5 Marriah said:

What do you think of it so far? I am curious. I dumped Tweeter.

I like it so far. I just joined on the 6th. I initially joined mastodon.online because it didn't require join approval. It was slammed with people joining at the time though, so some of the feeds weren't populating. I checked just now and they're still not populating. Basically, each server has a local feed list and a federated feed list with posts from profiles on other servers that local members have followed.

But I was searching for TTRPG-related users/profiles and a lot of those users were on tabletop.social and dice.camp. It was a bit annoying to search and add profiles on those servers when they weren't showing up locally. So I decided to switch to one of them. tabletop.social was more generally game-related but it was not accepting new members at that time anyway, except by invitation from an existing user. (I just checked, they are still not accepting new members except by invitation of an existing user.) dice.camp specifically says it is focused on TTRPG, but it's invite-only, so I had to send a request for an invitation, confirm my email address, and explain why I wanted to join dice.camp in a brief message. I basically said I play RPGs and the general server was less convenient for finding RPG people. Got my invitation in a couple hours.

I'm really loving dice.camp so far. I open my local feed and it's just full of TTRPG content from people I'm not even following. I've followed 34 people already (admittedly including my original account from mastodon.online) and 10 have followed me, just because dice.camp is a bunch of ttrpg nerds. I can follow people from other servers as well, it's just a couple more clicks if their posts aren't already showing up on the local server.

I think it's easy, and I like it, but I definitely think it's more likely to foster smaller communities. I've played NWN for 20 years instead of an MMO, so I would say I like that. Instead of being on one Twitter with a billion(?) users, I'm on one Mastodon server with roughly 3k users, and I'm more likely to see posts from those 3k users, but I can follow users on other Mastodon servers if I want, and see their posts too.

Boosting ("Boosting" is their version of "re-tweeting") becomes much more important when people on your server may not see a post (called a "toot" on Mastodon) because it's on another server. When you boost a post, you're basically echoing it to your local server, increasing visibility for the original poster, and increasing the likelihood of cross-server follows.

Servers are independently operated so there's always the risk that you get on a "bad" server, or that a server may have to shut down, but they've also built tools into the settings for you export your follower list, following list, block list, and I think even your posts, so they can be migrated to another Mastodon server. Because I started on mastodon.online and moved to dice.camp, I already migrated my list of people I followed, since I followed s a few people while I was on the first server.

I don't know. I'm digging it so far.

Did you check out my profile?

[Munroe]

I only actually started posting on dice.camp about six hours ago. I thought I had posted already but I'd only posted on the other server I joined before that.

Another thing is that Mastodon basically has built in Content Warning tags, where you are expected to specify if your content could upset someone and tag it. It basically works like spoiler tags, but you can declare what's behind the tag.

Like I went to vote today, so I put my message that I as going to vote behind a Content Warning tag for Politics.

Also, the servers I've looked at have posted a list of other Mastodon servers that they block, and why. So like I said, some of the Mastodon servers can be worse than others. So like, reasons given for some of the server-blocks were "spam" "inappropriate content" "racism" "duplicating accounts" and so on.

[Munroe]

Looks like tabletop.social is even going to close off accepting new members by invitation from an existing member.
From their admin, posted about an hour ago:

Tabletop Social announcement

We will likely close the invite registration at some point in the next 6-8 hours.

We are now over 3k people, and that has changed the dynamic a fair bit.

To ensure we can moderate and retain some of the culture we have had for the last 4 years, we need a quick break of new joiner.

We also need to think about capacity planning both in the sense of getting more moderators in to deal with reports, maybe increase the server size to deal with the increased activity.

[Munroe]

Anyway, anybody else?

[Munroe]

Hey, I was looking at some of my own posts and saw this one.

I figure it's been more than a year. Is anyone else around here on Mastodon? I'm still @[e-mail] if there are any other Mastodon users around here.