More than that, it leaves no traces on the outside and I want to go against this type of closed-off Internet where the history of a fandom is wiped off once a major Twitter of that fandom account deactivates.
Absolutely, 100 times this. Having said that, even forums can vanish without a trace - I was part of a Pirates of the Caribbean forum back in the mid 00s, Hide the Rum, that vanished (beneath the waves) because the original owner didn't renew the domain. Sadly, most of it is not archived on the Wayback Machine. There was also a second one that someone else started up afterwards and I don't think that one was archived at all. But at least they can *be* archived, unlike Discord servers. The amount of fandom history, discussion, knowledge and activity that just vanishes into the Discord ether is horrifying when you stop to think about it. I've had at least one debate with someone on Discord who didn't understand why anyone would want things to be easily findable and non-ephemeral. 😔 I think if that's your baseline for how the internet has always been, then anything else does seem strange.
Mastodon's user interface resembles Twitter in most ways that matter (it has a 500 character limit instead of 280), but the servers give it a bit more of a "closed" vibe, depending on the size of your server and how well it's moderated. I feel I got lucky with fandom.ink, which is very much run with the ethos of older-school LJ fandom in mind; if not for that server, I probably wouldn't have stuck with Mastodon. But it reminds me of forums in the sense that it's a closed-but-open community (anyone can join and read, but you also feel like you're addressing a dedicated audience of people who like the same thing) and it feels less like talking into the void than other social media, because people will actually read your posts and talk back. I also like the granular post visibility controls, so like, you can set one post to be visible to your followers only while another is public. But it is also designed to be ephemeral (and Mastodon is unsearchable by design, which I agree with while also wishing I could retrieve things more easily). So in that sense its drawbacks are the same as Twitter. I want to use Dreamwidth as a bit of an archive for my Mastodon posts and threads that I'd like to go back to.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2023-01-26 10:24 am (UTC)Absolutely, 100 times this. Having said that, even forums can vanish without a trace - I was part of a Pirates of the Caribbean forum back in the mid 00s, Hide the Rum, that vanished (beneath the waves) because the original owner didn't renew the domain. Sadly, most of it is not archived on the Wayback Machine. There was also a second one that someone else started up afterwards and I don't think that one was archived at all. But at least they can *be* archived, unlike Discord servers. The amount of fandom history, discussion, knowledge and activity that just vanishes into the Discord ether is horrifying when you stop to think about it. I've had at least one debate with someone on Discord who didn't understand why anyone would want things to be easily findable and non-ephemeral. 😔 I think if that's your baseline for how the internet has always been, then anything else does seem strange.
Mastodon's user interface resembles Twitter in most ways that matter (it has a 500 character limit instead of 280), but the servers give it a bit more of a "closed" vibe, depending on the size of your server and how well it's moderated. I feel I got lucky with fandom.ink, which is very much run with the ethos of older-school LJ fandom in mind; if not for that server, I probably wouldn't have stuck with Mastodon. But it reminds me of forums in the sense that it's a closed-but-open community (anyone can join and read, but you also feel like you're addressing a dedicated audience of people who like the same thing) and it feels less like talking into the void than other social media, because people will actually read your posts and talk back. I also like the granular post visibility controls, so like, you can set one post to be visible to your followers only while another is public. But it is also designed to be ephemeral (and Mastodon is unsearchable by design, which I agree with while also wishing I could retrieve things more easily). So in that sense its drawbacks are the same as Twitter. I want to use Dreamwidth as a bit of an archive for my Mastodon posts and threads that I'd like to go back to.