Notices by maegul@calckey.social

@ruud@mastodon.world wait what’s the new name?!

Ok, nice little social media experiment, how does the fediverse fare during an earthquake?

A midnight earthquake just hit my home city, which basically never gets earthquakes. Probably no damage at all from this one, but we all definitely felt it, which is unusual for us! (Prob ~4 on Richter scale)

Where did I go first to check if others felt it? NGL, the place I went last time there was a tremor … Twitter. And to be fair, on the top of my feed were posts from people I follow (who aren’t here) that live in my home city, tweeting about it, including links to official reports. This was very nice, as this time I was scared and thought my apartment building might be in trouble.

I quickly check #mastodon and #calckey. Nothing in timelines. Not surprising, I don’t really follow anyone or many that live in the same city as me.

Searching, mastodon’s hashtag search does ok, and surfaces a bot or two that also confirm the quake (@lastquake@masto.ai). But not many people, I’m not really finding a conversation. Also searching for something by a hashtag you don’t know exists takes a few steps. This is on an instance with ~50k users.

#Calckey’s full text search though (on calckey.social)?

Quicker. Just typed earthquake without worrying about hashtags.

And better results. More people were brought up, which is kinda what you’re after from social media during an event … reassurance. It was also surprising, as calckey has only ~2k users and therefore smaller visibility of the fediverse, but still gave me more connectivity just through search than my bigger mastodon instance.

Which is really an interesting demonstration of how hashtags can be problematic. Plenty of people were reaching out, asking “anyone feel that earthquake?”, they just forgot or didn’t think to use a hashtag, and so couldn’t find me through mastodon. And why would you in a (slightly) nervous situation like that. “Hmmm, is this the best hashtag, do you think people will search for it … I should probably check if it exists first?” … is not a thought goes through your mind.

I basically never visit Twitter since I left, but this was a nostalgic little episode. It was nice to see the fediverse wasn’t really behind big social. Though the lack of discovery facilities on mastodon really did show themselves here.

@atomicpoet @fediversenews@venera.social
Maybe an annoying question ...

but what exactly are these people doing (I've probably missed it in my timeline) ... just kinda curious ... and wondering if there's some etiquette I'm not aware of?

@youronlyone@c.im I agree, but I also think the fediverse deserves this reductionism because it feels very much like it itself struggles to see itself as more than a series of clones with an additional "feature" in non-profit OSS decentralisation.

The whole time there's been scope to really organically create platforms that are very distinct from the latest wave of big-social apps, and that interconnect and interoperate with each other in interesting user-driven ways. But that just hasn't happened (yet?). Instead, all of the platforms are fairly isolated and vertically siloed projects where the servers are the only first-class citizens and the users are left to "manage" all on their own the restrictions and difficulties of being stuck on servers.

And so the "feature" of federated decentralisation isn't necessarily that much to write home about. It's something, for sure, but when all of the platforms are clearly clones and the very dominant platform is an unashamedly hard twitter clone, I'm going to happily continue calling these platforms the clones they are until something new happens.

For instance, #calckey is not a twitter clone. I don't know what it resembles. It's been described as wordpress + twitter, which works. Apart from #friendica, it's the only platform I've seen trying to forge something new and richer.