An interesting evening at a Mastodon meetup. It was a mixture of mainly technical geeks with a couple of social scientists interested in how decentralised microblogging will impact conversations on the internet.
I joined, I am now @dfl1955@masterdon.social.
I shared my difficulties on creating a Mastodon instance, one being a problem with the script I chose (and my Linux superstructure knowledge) and the second being a lack of knowledge in how to build the SMTP interface. I was pointed at some interesting URLs that might help build an instance.
There was some discussion about the business model, and it was noted that mastodon does not charge business users, and its big draw is that it’s federated. I sort of came to the conclusion that it’s not what I want for the use case I was considering.
I decided it can’t hurt to join up on mastodon.social, since any semantic in choosing which instance to join is nullified. So I did!
I didn’t mention my long term stalking of this technology, I started with Laconica and passed through status.update and pump.io.