Since some of the censorship issues arose in Twitter and Reddit, there has been a leaning towards a more decentralised social network where people were planning to possibly go.
Previously I have looked at Nostr, which has been growing fast and occupied by mostly Bitcoiners at the moment. They have a similar userbase as Hive and also you can reward content creators with the lightning network.
Today, I take a look another network that has been hyped called Mastadon which is maybe a cross between Twitter and Reddit when looking at it and as I understand it, it is not truly decentralised like Hive or Nostr, but it does have a step in that direction.
Mastadon now has local servers and if you produce content not liked by the admins of those servers, you can be censored or blocked from the server. However, you then have the option to join other servers, so are not completely blocked from the network like twitter or reddit. This is how the theory so works.
Consdering spam and other malicious content creators do need to be blocked somehow, I think some sort of control over these malicious actors are needed. Is the Mastadon way a good way?
When searching for Bitcoin content, there isn't much to find on Mastadon. Pretty much no groups or users are here and actively using it. In fact, I struggled to find pretty much any active real users despite supposedly high numbers.
This is pretty much confirmed when you start looking for content via hashtags or users to follow.
What there is plenty to find on Mastadon is many mainstream media newsarticle links spamming feeds as being talked about or for people to read the news. Why you would want this on a social network I am not sure.
When looking for local posts, there was also pretty much nothing to see or read. Most of the content is also looking like spam and not feeling worthy of your attention.
The actual usage of the App is quite nice and simple though and runs smoothly enough. There just isn't any content or users there to want you to use it as far as I could find.
Alot of the content seems either spam or generic google search results pasted as content and there seems no reason to use or join. It seems communities and community related content are really missing that might connect people. But it also shows that creating a twitter like app is no good without users and communities who want to share content with each other.
Have you used Mastadon? What do you think about it?
Thanks for reading.
Credits:
Title image created by AI in DALL-E with mastodon, blue and m logo prompts.
Screenshots taken from my Mastadon account https://mastodon.social/
Let's connect : mypathtofire