It’s been a year since I did take a shot at this Mastodon thing. The idea of something that works like Twitter but isn’t Twitter always sounded quite appealing, and around this time last year it was looking like a lot of people would be leaving Twitter and go to Mastodon instead. And it actually happened.
I have my account on dice.camp and the growth that happened there in the early months of this year has been huge. I don’t know anything about user numbers, but you could really see the amount of RPG related chatter go up every week for months, and it’s been staying there ever since. The dice.camp instance is currently at a scale and activity level that you can just browse the entire local feed and browse through everything that has been posted in the last day in 10-15 minutes if you want to. But you can also follow hashtags in addition to users to make yourself a customized home feed. You can ban people if you feel you have to, but if it’s just accounts that keep babbling about stuff you just don’t care for but are otherwise inoffensive, you can simple mute them. This doesn’t do anything but hide their posts from your feeds. Or you can filter out words or hashtags as well.
I’ve filtered out “Kickstarter”, “Patreon”, and “itch.io”, and muted a good 40 accounts of youtube and podcast shows that only post new episode announcements. This has turned the dice.camp home feed and the #ttrpg hashtag into really fun places where people share around interesting and/or random thoughts about RPGs and occasional links.
I absolutely recommend giving it a look. I think it’s particularly well suited for people with small private RPG sites like this to share new posts with a wider audience. While overall there seems to be an impression that this kind of sites has fallen out of fashion, I’ve been seeing more responses to my posts in the last year than I ever did before.