Drustvar Complete, Mastodon – Blaugust 21
627 words.
So we meet again, blank page. Stop yelling at me, now-a-total-of-150-draft-posts-I-can’t-use, you know what you did.
World of Warcraft
In Battle for Azeroth yesterday, I got to the end of the Drustvar zone, which actually isn’t the end because there are still some side quests and missing pieces for the zone completion achievement, but it’s the end of the main story for the zone, and of course I excitedly ran after the NPCs to go into the final dramatic confrontation to complete it … until I saw I was running into a Dungeon Portal. Cue massive disappointment. So the joy of finishing a zone in WoW is, in fact, massive disappointment. I did the zone-ending dungeons in Legion but I’m in no mood for that foolishness now.
I didn’t run into a dungeon at the end of Tiragarde Sound though. Ever since I went to Drustvar I’ve wondered if I did Tiragarde wrong. The story didn’t really seem to “end.” It just stopped after the big chase, and I couldn’t locate any further exclamation points. No word on Jaina whatsoever. My character abandoned Jaina completely, even though we both arrived in Kul Tiras together, supposedly a team. Eventually I wandered back to the Big Map On The Wall and took a rowboat to Drustvar. But sure, the story in World of Warcraft is strong, I guess, is what we’re meant to say.
My character is level 114 now I think. I’ve finally figured out the Survival Hunter class enough that I don’t run out of focus every 5 seconds. Still fun to slash everyone with a spear in melee range.
I’ve noticed that most every other person I run into in the game is either a Hunter, a Demon Hunter, or a Mage. Other classes are quite rare.
Mastodon
I noticed a whole bunch of people talking about Mastodon on the Twitters lately. Belghast posted about it. Armagon Live also posted about it.
There was a time when I jumped on every new Internet thing like everyone else, when I thought, “Hey this new thing sounds really innovative, so surely it will rise above the rest, because humanity has a history of adopting the highest quality products based solely on their engineering merit, and I better secure my unique name now before this thing takes off!”
Yeah, I don’t think that anymore.
Remember Diaspora? That federated social network to replace Facebook? Raised a lot of money? It really took off, didn’t it? I just learned one of the Diaspora founders came to a tragic end at age 22. Very sad.
Anyway Mastodon sounds functionally identical to Discord, except with even less legal liability for the operators of the servers. A haven for Internet crime, in other words. The perfect breeding ground for all the people you’re trying to avoid on Twitter.
No thanks. When I start seeing Mastodon addresses in car commercials, maybe I’ll reconsider. Or perhaps when the U.S. officially and inevitably moves to take over Facebook and Twitter. Otherwise, Mastodon will be dead in a month. No need to put any more of my information on strange servers.
There’s also a certain anti-socialness to it, you know? It’s the online equivalent of withdrawing from the public to form private clubs, which is the exact opposite of the Internet Utopia of the 90s. It’s re-creating high school all over again. Here’s the server for gamers, for tabletop roleplayers, for writers. God forbid anyone should ever come into contact with people outside your clique.
Archived Comments
Bhagpuss 2018-08-21T16:04:07Z
Do people actually read posts on RSS feeds (as opposed to using RSS feeds to alert them of posts, which thery then visit the websites to read) ? Why would anyone do that?
I also thought Mastodon sounded almost identical to Discord. Discord seems to have established itself very successfully. I’m not sure there’s either space or need for another version.
UltrViolet 2018-08-21T17:41:55Z “Do people actually read posts on RSS feeds” … … … is … that a joke? I always, always, always read posts in my RSS reader, and I assume everyone reads my blog exactly like that too. For like the past 10 years I have assumed it’s the primary way people interact with blogs hehe.
Nogamara 2018-08-22T16:58:37Z
I do remember Diaspora, and I think they made some mistakes and were also too early in their time.
I can absolutely not agree on the private club thing, that would be it if it was a single thing like twitter and you could only join via invitation - but no, I think it has more in common with email - you own your identity (for now it’s not as easy as have your own domain in there, but you can already pay like 5 bucks a month to do that, e.g at https://masto.host - it is really open in fact. (Yes, you need some technical chops to join, but as I said, not unlike email). It’s also been around for a while, and I don’t know why the last 2 months had such a hype phase, we had one of those a while ago (early 2017 maybe?) - but I think it’s getting better. I’m absolutely not trying to sell it it to you - I don’t even know if and how much I’ll use it a few months from now on - I just wish it would get enough traction to replace the benefits I get from Twitter, because I prefer to live on the open web - where people run servers, not corporations - and if it has only 5% of reach, I am fine. I think I followed 2 celebrities (ymmv for the definiton) on Twitter, it’s mostly people with shared interests, or people I met through said interests. A word about Discord: I love it and I’m not even using the voice chat. But again, it’s not open - it’s only free and right now, accessible - but it’s driven by a company that will at some point want to make money. This is fine, but I prefer grassroots movements :)
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