From Google Plus to Facebook to Twitter to Mastodon
I just had my Twitter account suspended and I don’t know the reason, but probably because I said “f*ck you Twitter” too many times, or may it is just a bug, and in this case “you suck Twitter” for one more time!!
I’m not a fun of socials and I only started using them after started GNOME blogging. Before that I only had socials for account registrations and Facebook for private chats with friends.
Nevertheless socials are super useful because they spread ideas and news, but most importantly because there is “quality filtering” from people, with comments, arguments, likes and shares.
Anyway, that’s just a short review to my experience on all socials I used but not for “personal” use; Google Plus, Facebook, Twitter and as for today Mastodon.
Google Plus
On theory that was the best social ever created. It had excellent media handling, nice polls with images in every question, no characters limit plus text formatting and editing (that is useful on tech accounts), and of course it had also communities pages, that was simply a dream, specially for open source projects.
On negative side, it had impossible much spam (although they kinda fixed it last year), #hashtag was useless, news stream was WTF, and no usernames was making mentioning people very annoying.
Another issue that made it fail was the comment system. Not only there wasn’t comment threads support, but also not support for a comments public API, so people could use on blogs.
I choose to move away from Google Plus a few months before Google announced they’re shutting it down. The reason was that Google+ was getting like a ghost town, with no users.
So I made a Facebook account, and I asked people to join so I could get a 100+ followers verification.
I completed the task inside a couple of hours, only to find out that Facebook suspended my account, right after my first “Goodbye Google+, Hello Facebook” post!?
I never learned the reason, but I imagine it was because Facebook somehow found out that I had double accounts. My personal, and that newly created for blogging. I tried to un-suspend it, Facebook even asked me ID and a photo, that I send, but no luck.
So my concluding review on Facebook is WHAT THE HELL?!
After my Facebook initiative failed, I stayed to Google+ for a couple of months, and few weeks before Google’s announcement I moved to Twitter.
I really really didn’t want to use Twitter, but it was like the last resort. The reason I didn’t want to use it was the stupid characters limitation, and the reason I actually did use it, was because everyone else does, so I could easily follow the people and projects I’d like to.
Reviewing Twitter as a social platform; Well I really can’t find much of positives but linked-Tweets are nice, hashtag system works, and of course they have huge popularity.
However the worst is their character limitation. It originally begun with 140c similar to phones text, then it became 280c and the claim was that people can say whatever inside those 280c, and brief messages are easier to read.
Well, let me tell you what happens in Twitter. People can’t say a shit inside 280c, so most of Tweets are incomplete thoughts, with wrong meaning, or people link 10 Tweets on a row to say a single thing, that nobody actually reads all the way down, so we again get a false story!
Oh and it gets better! Because Twitter on web-app has invented a comment UI that makes sure that inline comments are completely unreadable. And Android app? ..oh lord
Twitter is only good to link an article from a blog, but comments even in this case won’t really work, so the whole social purpose is gone. Besides there isn’t much of commenting on technical articles in Twitter. In fact people even share and like Tweets without reading the actual posted content.. I can tell because I see broken links to have shares and likes ..and that inside to tech geeks, so imagine what happens to rest communities!
And apart the basics, Twitter is also failing to everything. Media handling is awful, embedded content awful too, polls without images and 25c limit (!?), not to mention their video player that streams in impossible bad quality, without giving an option to change it, even if that would mean that we need to wait a couple of seconds for video to load
In short, Twitter is a wormhole to the misinformation universe.
Mastodon
I created Mastodon, only because they asked me to, and I was using it for cross-posting from Twitter. But now it is actually my only social left :)
Haven’t used Mastodon directly a lot yet, but the idea is very similar to Twitter, but the the Tweets are called Toots, and the character limit is 512c; however there are instances without char limit, or we can deploy ours.
Mastodon is a node distributed network and also open source, and while I’m against to decentralization and in favor of “trusted networks and organizations”, the communication across different nodes seems to work pretty well and we can follows people from any network, while there is one click migration to another node!?
The obvious advantage of Mastodon is that it can’t be controlled or censored, so it will become a big part of “dark web”, but the obvious bad is that there is not much of user-base; one of the reasons I don’t see decentralization working
All Socials Suck!
Don’t get that wrong, and Twitter creators are making billions so who am I to judge, but I just don’t see any social capable for the job. Closest one was Google+, but Google somehow managed to messed it up, while it was the best social idea ever, till today
Oh, and since Medium was created by Twitter CEO, Medium you suck too, and block me you too! I will open my own blog anyway!!
Meanwhile my favorite social was by far YouTube ..till I watched this :/
Time for Cooking!
Today’s meal an ethnic recipe from #Aztec cuisine. it is called #Sacrifice
Ingredients:
1. An #Ubuntu user
2. A knife
Preparation:
We dont eat that; It is a gift to the gods to bless our main plate to succeed because I have to cook today for💘💘💘
