Just to wrap up on a less than perfect start to the year, I have no idea if my appeal on my suspension from Mastodon was even read, but the 30-days came and went, just like my Mastodon ID. Gone.
I’ve been back on twitter since the suspension, although I never really left. My original article on my Mastodon suspension was called out by commenter “Why?” who said he/she/they couldn’t take the article seriously “after you made the claim that Twitter “collapsed”. Rightly so and I updated the introduction.
Twitter is increasingly looking stagnant though. In the days before the #MuskTwitter as an ex-pat following a lot of UK/British accounts, I’d wake-up 6-hours behind, and have breakfast and coffee scrolling through my twitter timeline on the android app. I’d often run out of time before running out of tweets. Today using only the “Following” tab in the app rather than the “For You” tab and I was finished by the time I’d eaten my breakfast before I’d started my coffee.
Of course it’s an anecdotal and not like for like comparison, it’s also a single day comparison. In my email was Charles Arthur‘s always thoughtful “Overspill“. In todays issue it included an extract and link to Wired Magazine article on Mastodon. The article entitled “The Mastodon bump is now a slump” is worth reading, even if the headline is misleading. I’d say it’s likely past it’s initial peak or in Gartner Group “hype cycle” terms, it’s passed the “peak of inflated expectations.”

Image courtesy of Sue Keay, Australian Centre for Robotic Vision 2016
As I said in my prior post on Mastodon, I’ll no doubt create another userid, but only when I can easily create my own instance in a hosted server. Amanda Hoover’s Wired article makes it clear that the lot of the instance administrator isn’t for the feint hearted.
Thank you, Mark, for such an enlightening article. I truly appreciate how you keep us all abreast of the machinations of the tech world. This is something I never would have thought there should be any area of concern. It makes sense these situations will develop when money and ego have no limits.
Of course, it’s always interesting to look back on these topics and see how they worked out. From time to time I still look back at Livejournal. I hope you are well!