Dan Harmon @danharmon

@Benich36 well there's other ones I've found but I'm the guy that makes all the unbelievable stuff you can't believe is so unbelievable, yeah

@UnusualCadence that concept has always been a major point of conflict between the nature of how I like to interact and how social media works. My whole life, I have never said to anyone "hey come look at me," I have always just wanted to stay in a place and do what I do and if you like it you find it and if you don't like it WHY ARE YOU HERE GO AWAY. It's a coward thing but it's also the healthy approach I think

@wremy I made it for my girlfriend becasue she calls me her potato

@wremy oh man cool gif avatar

Also maybe there could be an instance where everyone's allowed to use "like" 50 times per toot

@capn_pancakes right right. Like, the most pressing example being, maybe mastodon.social wants to stay...social...but because most people are in a political fervor, basically everyone is ALSO on mastodon.politics or what-have-you. But it mentally segregates your modes of interaction. In real time. Like, you can carry on a POLITE conversation with strangers and simultaneously be like "fuck Trump he's golfing again" and make it unlisted via mastodon.politics

Like, if we were an Exxon instance, and we were federated with the Mobil instance, we could just talk about oil publically but if we wanted to say just to the Exxon people "what's with these Mobil guys amiright" we could make it unlisted. I think. Also I believe I am dating myself because I'm pretty sure Exxon and Mobil have long since merged with Time Warner

@capn_pancakes oh I got it I got it! So "unlisted" is a hugely important function for when there's a huge constellation of federated instances

@Gargron you're very kind, thanks for being open source

This is "unlisted" which I have to admit I still don't quite grasp

https://mastodon.social/media/zsPgrL0XKGR7qvqAya8

I need to change my pic if I'm going to pontificate this much because the pic is of me pontificating

@UnusualCadence I think what it could represent is the fusion of the "real time" nature of twitter with all the other established "curative" social media like tumblr and the selective "this is what you wanted" nature of chat rooms...so, connect yourself to this instance only if you like my bad poetry or my photos of cute dogs, for instance..?

@UnusualCadence yeah imagine a world where instead of vying to accumulate anonymous followers, narcissists like me were more incentivized to create contained communities...there could be a Russel Crowe instance and a Kanye instance and then instances that aggregated categories of folks like that...everything about rich ability to select, like twitter seemed to originally intend

@UnusualCadence the weird paradox being...how can something be cool and global at the same time...but I do think the answer could be in federated instances

@MikeWard very

I have the foggiest memory of being on twitter in the early days, having 200 followers, most of whom I knew personally, and simply using it to augment my humanity...then at some point I certainly became more Tweet than Man...viewing the world through a 140 character, snark coated, PR whore lens

An interesting thing about healthier Twitter alternatives is that it begs the question, how much health were we going to Twitter for versus how much were we servicing an addiction to the toxicity...software that lets us maintain and filter our own connections ...makes me take a hard look at myself and what I've "wanted" from social media since...2011 or so