Anyone on Twitter or Mastodon?

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Do people make friends on sites like Twitter?

It seems like you have to know people who are already on there when you sign up, otherwise you'll just be posting tweets that almost no one will read. And you have to read through this huge list of random tweets from strangers because you'd have no one to follow.

I'm on a Twitter-like site. A bunch of random people respond to my posts. It's kind of overwhelming and unpleasant.

I've never been on Twitter. And I've never heard of Mastodon. Is that a new type of social media?

Anyone on Twitter or Mastodon?

Do I look like an idiot?

Mastodon is like Twitter (the whole thing is a bunch of tweets), but it's not one single website controlled by a corporation. Mastodon is split up into "instances," which are like mini-Twitters run by individual people on their own computers.

You could start a private instance for just you and your friends, make up your own rules, and run it however you want. Or you can join a public instance that has thousands of people on it. Some of them have themes (like LGBTQ), some of them are just general instances for anyone to join and post about anything. Here is one for students and teachers for example:

https://mastodon.oeru.org/@sumaiyasaqib ... 4451853344

Each Mastodon instance can "federate" with other instances. That just means you can follow people from other instances and they can follow you. So you could be networked with other people even if they signed up on another instance.

The whole point is that Mastodon is not centralized. Twitter could shut down its website, kick everybody off, and destroy everyone's tweet history. Twitter is also more likely to sell your data. But if one Mastodon instance shuts down, there will still be plenty of other instances, and Mastodon is not a business so you probably won't get your data sold.

I'm on twitter and have about 500 followers.

To be fair I had about 100 followers then my follower started recommending me to a bunch of people.

It built up through the years.

It's great for aspies cos you can talk about your specialist interests a whole bunch & people don't think it's socially inappropriate. In fact, if you follow based on hobbies then they're doing it too.

I don't recommend talking politics unless you padlock your account and happen to only follow people with very similar views. It can be a hivemind.

In fact padlocking your account is just common sense. Be careful which accounts you let follow you.