Just been locked out of my Twitter account - it seems to have flagged me under the age verification issue which hit a significant number of users a few years back so not sure why it’s happened to me now!
I’m hoping Elon hasn’t dismissed the whole team in charge of the ID verification!!
He hasn’t. I was doxed a few years back, and I’m forever having to put in claims to get things taken down, and each time I have to provide my passport to prove I’m the subject of tweet I’m asking them to remove. Just had one done yesterday.
Personally your first name and photo is sufficient for me
(with back end verification) but the fact is right now I cannot be fully “not anon” purely because you require a nickname here and usually names are taken up quite quickly.
I’m not suggesting your Twitter username has to be your name. It couldn’t possibly be so.
I have my photo and real name on here. By all means if Monzo wanted me to verify that I would and could. I have to have a username though and chances are my name would be taken up on a global platform. It’s not anonymous in the way you’re suggesting.
Also I don’t think you’ve understood me. I’m not saying there isn’t a place for anonymous accounts. By all means be as anonymous as you like online. I don’t care. I just want an environment on mass social media where I can choose not to see or be interacted with anonymous accounts.
You said you went anonymous on Twitter due to abuse - well a lot of the time that abuse just wouldn’t happen if everyone had to have their actual profile showing. So you may not have been forced to be anonymous in the first place.
Good points. Unfortunately apart from online abuse I think scammers would see a person’s real name and use and abuse information that they harvest to carry out their criminality.
Does your identity need to be exposed though? If the social network could trace abusers and criminals, it doesn’t need to be on show for everyone.
I think you can be Revels or N26Throwaway or Coffeemadman in an outward facing sense, but if you start abusing people, then Twitter (or whoever) pass on your verified details to the Police.
You can still be anon to a degree. You can still post about your love of Devil Wears Prada or talk about your favourite Pokemon and nobody knows it’s you, but if you want to post hateful things, be racist, or whatever else, then you’re going to be held to account.
Well I finally managed to sign up to Mastodon and this is exactly how I feel:
(Funny how we’re linking a tweet when talking about Mastodon, eh?)
It’s just too techy for me (and probably most average people). Most of the toots are just as techy talking about Mastodon infrastructure and tech and yet another something-verse. I just can’t (yet) see the appeal for an average person.
I don’t think it has curation like Twitter, does it? So it makes discovery of people to follow more difficult. All this on top of the concerns around decentralisation and I can see why it’s simply not the future of anything
This was exactly how Twitter was in the early days. Then common people join and start talking about TOWIE ha
At any rate, given the severe lack of moderation on Mastadon I don’t see how it provides a good alternative to the problems expected at Twitter.
I think that’s part of the point. It’s decentralised, which makes it truly free, and people aren’t expecting Elon’s claims for free speech to be the true sort of free speech.
Each Mastodon server is supposed to have its own rules, and its own moderation, and it can blacklist whole other servers in accordance with those. I believe you can also do the same as a user too. You pick a server that best represents you and block out the ones you don’t like (like Donald Trump’s server if he had one), and go from there. For most newbies, mastodon.social is probably the best place to start.
I really do believe it’s only complex in theory, not practice, as decentralised things usually are, like torrenting. People just need to stop thinking about it, because they tend to overthink it, and overcomplicate it. You don’t need to know how it works to join the conversation. Just make an account and start tooting as you would tweet.
Yes, but will it? 
. Moderation is very expensive and time consuming, there’s no money for that on these hosted servers.
For now it’s okay because it’s small, add in another 10 million users and pretty sure it will become a Reddit style cesspit.
Usually. It’s why I suggest mastodon.social! If you sign up there it sends you to a curated selection of servers. The servers there have all committed to this stuff:
So it should make for a decent and safe experience, which is actively moderated.
Indeed. When Twitter started you couldn’t even @ anybody. That idea was thought up and started by a normal user. Same with hashtags, and retweets.
I remember all that happening organically. Was one of the first 100,000 users.
Back when it was possible and even feasible to read every tweet from every user as they were posted on the front page.
Registration closed 
Ooof. Must have had a significant influx then.
Mastadon is up to 6.1 million users now, the more popular servers are somewhat swamped.
In theory it doesn’t matter which server you’re on (I have my own with 1 user on it) but it’s obviously easier if you can look at the sit on a busy server and pick interesting people/hashtags to follow, rather than having to go and look.
(I note mstdn.social is on 4.0rc1… that’s brave for such a popular server…).
Exactly my issue with this open source techy stuff. This means f-all to me and I have no idea if it’s good or bad or if I should be concerned about it. Your comment suggests that I should, but again, I don’t know.
Having a central authority who’s responsible for ensuring all runs smoothly and reliably; and who is responsible for content moderation and platform security is such a huge benefit. With decentralised we don’t know if our server will still be live tomorrow, who and why moderates, or even if it’s a dodgy server stealing my data.
Yes, open source means that if I have the know how I can verify it myself but most people won’t know how
Well, it’s not breaking so it was probably the right decision - 4.0 brings some nice improvements.
I’m just wary of anything with ‘rc’ in it.
btw. one of the reasons so many people left twitter is because it doesn’t have effective content moderation… it’s a cesspit.