We need easy cross posting and responding tools, to post on twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, gab, Parler, mastodon etc all in one.

Something like hootsuite but compatible with more alt socials. Anyone know of a tool or building this?

@stephanlivera I actually think that'll dilute things. Better to pick a platform and stick to it.

@pete fair point. Though perhaps what 'works' for a podcaster like me is different than for most - I have to get my shows out in front of a large enough audience.

Bitcoin Mastodon isn't big enough right now, so I kind of have to work across multi platforms IMO

@stephanlivera Absolutely. Sounds like you're using Twitter for something closer to one-way-ish advertisement to a wide audience than two way discussion with a narrower audience. I totally agree strategy may be different there.

Also, there's a difference between what's good for you and everyone. :)

@pete right, at the end of the day, I think it just has to 'organically' happen that enough people go over to alt platforms.

Dunno if there's much you or I can do to drive/force the issue of getting everyone over here.

@stephanlivera "organically" is short hand for "lots of people forcing the issue" :)

@stephanlivera I've been wanting to move to something like Mastodon for a long time. This feels like an special moment where there's a chance of getting the network effect for it to actually work.

@pete "This time is different!" Unlike those other two times we tried lol 😂

Tbh I don't think this time is it. There wasn't any coordinated shift from Bitcoin Reddit to Bitcoin Twitter, and unless a bunch of influential Bitcoin Twitter accounts get cancelled/shutdown, I think most will stay there.

I'd love to be wrong about that though...

@stephanlivera Things don't work until they do. :)

I think re: reddit →twitter, the nature of the discussion changing was a big part of it. Notably, that happened around the block size debate, towards the end of it.

Also, that was going from a smaller social network to a bigger one (in the sense that subreddits are their own social networks).

@stephanlivera also, software maturity matters. Looks like Mastodon is more polished than before. It took me all of 20 minutes to setup a self hosted instance!

...and gifs!

@pete @stephanlivera can I pick your brain on this? You using docker or the instructions on the mastodon docs? You hosting from home or using a VPS?

@k3tan @stephanlivera I used this: https://marketplace.digitalocean.com/apps/mastodon

Basically log in to digital ocean and just click the "Create Mastodon Droplet" button on that page. Setup dns records, and then SSH in as root.

@pete @k3tan @stephanlivera Until DO start following AWS' lead in taking down things like Parler

@michaelfolkson @pete @k3tan @stephanlivera If things get bad, you can run a Mastodon server from home over Tor. I think @orionwl has that setup for his instance (I'm lame; I haven't tried that yet for my instance).

@harding @michaelfolkson @pete @k3tan @stephanlivera
it's possible to run an instance completely behind Tor but it'll have limited federation, because other instances usually don't federate to hidden services (as this is an extra setup step)

what many people do that run an instance at home, for privacy, is to use e.g. wireguard to a tiny VPS to give it a public IPv4

FWIW, mine is reachable as a Tor onion service for its users, but it doesn't federate over Tor

@orionwl @harding @michaelfolkson @k3tan @stephanlivera I looked at that too and it wasn't clear to me how federation would even work. IIUC the identifiers rely on DNS names, so if a DNS name isn't reachable, things simply don't work. So if you had to move to Tor, after some censorship, you'd wind up having to restart the identity from scratch.

Scuttlebutt is better suited to that, being crypto based.