Mastodon Test Post 2023-08-29

Mastodon is kind of like Twitter, or X, or whatever they want to call it this week... without the corporate stooge silo problem. You can find "buddies" and add them to your pals list, and see what they are posting. You can reply to posts, make your own posts, and occasionally participate in polls. Often, in order to find buddies, you need to look at posts made by "everyone on your local server" or even "everyone". You'll probably see posts of people in animal costumes or dressed up like sci-fi pop culture characters. You'll probably see posts in languages you don't understand. You'll probably see posts about what kinds of genitals people have, what kinds of genitals they wish they had, and what kind of genitals they want to rub their genitals on. With a little training (just block what you don't want to see) you'll have a pretty clean "feed" of posts that you can enjoy (and rub one out to if that is your thing). However, Mastodon should also be thought of as a place for you to share your own content. And you should control that content.

I think people should have an online place where they store and present their own content. Years ago, this used to be called a blog... now, it doesn't exist half as much as it should. Anyways, I think users should simply LINK to their self-controlled content, rather than upload it all and make their social media account the storage location of their content. Perhaps a subtle distinction, but a service like Mastodon (or other ActivityPub frameworks) probably can't store your crap forever, and likely will not provide a way to organize your own stuff. Yeah, yeah... I know, nobody cares what I think.

People are probably not going to do it this way because it is effort. And people don't have effort. They're all out of effort. And it doesn't help that Mastodon preview images suck. Take the image below for example:

Ahhh.

It looks great here, and I'm sure you can appreciate what you're looking at. But when I like to it on Mastodon, it looks like garbage, a crappy little square. That sucks. If Mastodon had image previews for links that are the same size as the image previews for uploaded media, then it wouldn't be encouraging me to upload images instead of hosting them myself! :-( Boy, that's a lot of gassing on about Mastodon just to test how an image preview should look. Yeah well, I'll do shit my way, you do it yours.