TL:DR – A few thoughts on Mastodon written just after the second big migration from the bird place.
If you’re active on social media and even just vaguely interested in tech stuff, then you will almost certainly have heard about the changes at twitter and how a lot of users of that platform have switched allegiance to another, Mastodon. I’ve written a Mastodon FAQ by way of introduction to the platform.
Mastodon was originally launched in 2016 and I seem to have a record of a login from August that year, but I joined “Mastodon.Social” properly in November 2019. I must admit I didn’t use it much until April 2022, and then again in late October 2022 after which I have been a lot more active there than on Twitter. You can find me on Mastodon here:
Anyway, one of the things that people new to Mastodon often struggle with is how to take action on an update on one server/instance when they’re signed up with another. I’ve put together a Top 20 of popular servers/instances used by Sciencebase readers and others here.
Some features work between servers, but favouriting and boosting and other functions don’t. At least they didn’t until programmer Jared Zimmerman came up with Graze for Mastodon. This is an extension for the Chrome desktop browser that makes inter-server actions, like favouriting or boosting an update on a different server transparent. A Firefox version of Graze is on the way, apparently. Zimmerman is also looking at other features to make the desktop Mastodon experience even better.
I’m on Mastodon.Social as I said, but I like to visit the more sciencey servers and the photography ones and the music ones and a load of others…Graze makes it much simpler to engage with those.
Incidentally, Mastodons were megafauna in the family Mammutidae, but unlike the perhaps slightly better-known Mammoths, Mastodons were probably not woolly nor were they grazers, more likely browsers.