Tag: Mastodon

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RPG community Tabletop RPGs

Mastodon is the new Google Plus (I hope)

I’ve set Twitter aside and decamped to Mastodon (specifically, the dice.camp instance), where you can find me as @martinralya.

Returning to Twitter during the pandemic made me realize three things:

  1. I miss the social connections and serendipitous path-crossings and discoveries that social media can be good at facilitating.
  2. I miss Google+ a great deal.
  3. As much as I get #1 from Twitter, it brings me angst at least as often as it brings me joy — and it’s never brought me nearly as much joy as Google+ did.

Considering what a Musk-ified Twitter could be like got me thinking about leaving, and reflection on what I wanted out of social media — if anything — made me realize how important #2 on that list was to my calculations.

G+ 2

I want Mastodon to feel as much like G+ as possible. It has some of that feel, more of it than I’ve felt anywhere else, and that makes it worth my time.

There’s curation on my instance, BBS-style, by an admin I trust. I can curate my follower list to ensure that I follow folks who primarily post about gaming stuff.

There are no circles, but the first two points should help there.

If I post gaming stuff, generally off the cuff, and keep my posting reasonably focused, then I’m helping that work out from my end.

That sounds like a good start.

What it ain’t

I’m incorporating something into my usage of Mastodon that I learned from G+ going away: A fair number of my G+ posts should really have been blog posts, so when my Spidey-sense tingles I’m going to listen to it.

Yore is my most permanent home online. It’s been running since 2009 and a blog since 2012, longer than than Treasure Tables and my time on Gnome Stew.

For conversation and rejoicing in our shared hobby: Mastodon. For permanence: here, where it should be.

On smaller audiences

Why leave a huge potential audience on Twitter for a much smaller potential audience on Mastodon? Well, why not? Google+ was always smaller than Twitter, and I was happier on G+. Both are smaller than Facebook, and that place mostly made me miserable.

I left a large readership on Gnome Stew for a much smaller readership here. I left publishing, with 40,000+ sales worldwide, for not publishing, with zero sales worldwide.

There are cons in both cases, like fewer people interacting with my work. But on the pro list is something that’s become increasingly important to me: I just do what I enjoy, and if other folks enjoy it too then that’s awesome.

Out now: The Unlucky Isles

The Unlucky Isles [affiliate link], the first system-neutral guidebook for my Godsbarrow fantasy campaign setting, is now on DriveThruRPG.
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Miscellaneous geekery

Google+ diaspora: RSS feeds

Like a lot of tabletop gamers, I’ve gotten tons of great mileage out of Google+. I started using it in 2012, and for the past six years it’s been my first stop for all things gaming-related. I met my Seattle gaming group through G+. I’ve made friends via the site. I’ve learned about oodles and oodles of cool and weird stuff I never would have heard of otherwise.

When the shutdown was announced, I was optimistic that a reasonably solid replacement would emerge. It hasn’t yet, for me, but today there was a glimmer of hope: RSS feeds.

For context, here’s why I’m not having much luck with the alternatives I’ve tried so far.

Social media thunderdome

MeWe was my first stop — the first G+ exodus destination to gather some critical mass, and it did so within hours of the shutdown announcement. The functionality was great. But when I asked them a simple question about acting against hate groups and hate speech, they gave a bullshit response. Maybe things will change on that front sometime, but for now MeWe is a hard pass.

diaspora* doesn’t have blocking functionality. In 2018. It has an ignore feature, which isn’t the same thing at all.) No thank you.

Facebook was a shady privacy nightmare years ago, the first time I quit the site, but it eventually got better; I came back. Then they got super shady and gross with the whole Cambridge Analytica thing, and I quit again. Also a hard pass.

I’ve never found Twitter workable for RPG discussion, but I do like Mastodon. The problem is that I can’t seem to get my brain to “think in Twitter.” It also has a small user population (at least in the RPG sphere) and doesn’t seem likely to pick up anytime soon, but being a Twitter-alike is the thing that fits worst for me because G+ is not a Twitter-alike in really any way.

Other options I’ve researched but haven’t tried yet seem even smaller and/or less well-developed than the places I have tried (Hubzilla, Friendica, etc.).

Feed me

But over on G+ there was a glimmer of sunshine: Aaron Griffin pointed out RSS feeds and the option of filling part of the void with a good feed reader. He suggested Feedly and Inoreader, and I checked both of them out (as well as a couple others).

Both have a clean interface and an Android app, but Inoreader has fewer features gated behind fees so I went that route. (Notably, if you want more than 100 feeds with Feedly, you have to pay to subscribe.)

I started by grabbing all the blogs from my own blogroll (in the sidebar). Then I visited every blog on Alex Schroeder’s Old School RPG Planet site and added all the ones that looked interesting to me. Ditto for his Indie RPG Planet. That’s pushed me well over 100 blogs in my feed.

I’ve still got the massive OSR Blog Roll & Social Contacts Google Sheet to go through, too!

And so far, so good. I may have tried an RSS reader a decade ago and forgotten about it, but I really don’t remember ever using one before. It seems like an excellent solution for the “I want to read about cool RPG stuff” side of the G+ equation.

I’m still not sure what to do about the social side, but progress is progress.

Out now: The Unlucky Isles

The Unlucky Isles [affiliate link], the first system-neutral guidebook for my Godsbarrow fantasy campaign setting, is now on DriveThruRPG.