Some time ago there was a social network called Google+ which was a great social media platform for writing. Intellectuals frequented allowing one to pose in-depth questions on specific topics followed by what one could call civil conversation. Facebook has never really provided a great environment for this sort of conversation as that has not been there target. People complained that none of their friends used Google+ which may say more about their friends than Google+. Google decided in a very Borg way that having 350 million subscribers was... insufficient and shuttered it abruptly.
Twitter which was useful if only for news and short quips is in a transition which got me thinking about trust thermoclines, so I closed my account after having it for 1/3 of my life. It's hard to give up what is part of your identity, it's your name and your corner of the Internet that belongs to you. A week or so ago I created a mastodon account. Only a million people use it and it's not a direct replacement for Twitter but maybe it has a chance of avoiding passage through the trust thermocline.
Thermoclines in oceanography are transition layers between deep and surface water. It has become fashionable to apply the word for layers of transition between other disparate objects often not tangible, in this case trust. The term trust thermocline can be applied to that transition layer between Trust and Distrust. One moment a company promises "to do no evil" and next they send you advertisements for subjects overheard on the radio while picking up bread at the supermarket in an Uber. Users of Evernote and Huawei passed through the trust thermocline and in the former case it killed them. The latter seems to have survived but not unscathed. Google is working overtime at keeping people from entering the trust thermocline but the laws of nature are hard to break. Humans are at the top of the local planetary food chain because we have an insatiable appetite. Humans will always be humans and as such, will always desire more.
A lot of Twitter users are in the trust thermocline as we speak. Some, such as I have passed and others are busy weighing their principals on the scales of convenience and influence, unaware that ultimately decisions are made in the amygdala and efforts to stimulate the cerebrum may result in elevated levels of dopamine followed by serotonin but ultimately not the decision itself.
Users of Mastodon may avoid passing through the trust thermocline due to the design of the system itself. Unlike the very monolithic and commercial structure of other social networking sites, Mastodon is distributed. The term for such a system is federated, which I've chosen to avoid due to my own logmisia, the source of which I do not know but perhaps related to my feelings of other similar words. Federated sounds...so brutal and authoritarian of which Mastodon is neither.
Mastodon is essentially email for social networking. Users can acquire an email account wherever the service is offered - their Internet Service Provider, a web mail company or a giant search engine intent on devouring all secrets of humanity and reselling them to the highest bidder. The act of choosing an identity has little affect on the utility of the network. Anyone with an email account can communicate with any other user independent of their respective domains.
A prospective user of Mastodon would create an account on any Mastodon server and proceed to communicate with other users immediately. There is no Mark Zuckerbergs, Elon Musks, or Joseph Stalins of Mastodon.
I am @This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. , I look forward discussing the finer points of the maillard reaction, transpute vs compute interactive and non-interactive tasks, the use of voiced vs non-voiced bilabial-labiodental fricatives in Spanish, whether using a refractometer is a valid method of evaluating colloidal suspensions and whether it results in better flavored coffee as well as whatever else happens to be on my mind this week.
