Next are the “ground rules.” Aside from feeling like he was being told off by a teacher, Cockburn found said rules frustratingly vague. “Stay tasteful and legal,” “be nice to everybody always” and “use content warnings for sensitive topics.” Content warning: what a load of BS.
Next there’s the “toots” rather than “tweets.” Not a big deal, but so incredibly twee. On the plus side, users have almost twice as many characters, 500, to write a post.
But as much as Musk-skeptic celebs try to convince us that Mastodon is the new hip thing, the truth will always out. A few days ago New York Times columnist Paul Krugman announced that he was opening a Mastodon account “as a precaution against the possible Muskocalypse on this site.” Within a few hours Krugman posted an update, saying: “so far things are not going well on Mastodon. After the initial post, nothing I try to post is showing up. And despite setting it *not* to send an email every time someone follows me, it’s sending them. I hope these are just teething problems.”
What Krugman is saying is that not even his young, tech-savvy interns can figure out how to work Mastondon, since it’s very unlikely he’d even know how to login: “By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”