Ok, nice little social media experiment, how does the fediverse fare during an earthquake?
A midnight earthquake just hit my home city, which basically never gets earthquakes. Probably no damage at all from this one, but we all definitely felt it, which is unusual for us! (Prob ~4 on Richter scale)
Where did I go first to check if others felt it? NGL, the place I went last time there was a tremor … Twitter. And to be fair, on the top of my feed were posts from people I follow (who aren’t here) that live in my home city, tweeting about it, including links to official reports. This was very nice, as this time I was scared and thought my apartment building might be in trouble.
I quickly check #mastodon and #calckey. Nothing in timelines. Not surprising, I don’t really follow anyone or many that live in the same city as me.
Searching, mastodon’s hashtag search does ok, and surfaces a bot or two that also confirm the quake (@lastquake). But not many people, I’m not really finding a conversation. This is on an instance with ~50k users.
#Calckey’s full text search though (on calckey.social)?
Quicker. Just typed earthquake without worrying about hashtags.
And better results. More people were brought up, which is kinda what you’re after from social media during an event … reassurance. It was also surprising, as calckey has only ~2k users and therefore smaller visibility of the fediverse, but still gave me more connectivity just through search than my bigger mastodon instance.
Which is really an interesting demonstration of how hashtags can be problematic. Plenty of people were reaching out, asking “anyone feel that earthquake?”, they just forgot or didn’t think to use a hashtag, and so couldn’t find me through mastodon. And why would you in a (slightly) nervous situation like that. “Hmmm, is this the best hashtag, do you think people will search for it … I should probably check if it exists first?” … is not a thought goes through your mind.
I basically never visit Twitter since I left, but this was a nostalgic little episode. It was nice to see the fediverse wasn’t really behind big social. Though the lack of discovery facilities on mastodon really did show themselves here.
@maegul@lastquake this is a perfect demonstration of why I not only want to be able to follow hashtags in lists, but also keywords. People just don’t use hashtags consistently enough for them to be the only method of discovery. Nor should people be expected to; you can’t be expected to hashtag #every#single#word#in#a#post on the off chance someone might be interested.
@Brendanjones@lastquake so if you haven’t heard calckey and other *key platforms (eg misskey) have what are called antennas, which are custom feeds defined by keyword filters which include AND, OR and NOT logic. Apparently they take regex too. Essentially a proper full text search saved as a feed of all hits as they hit the global feed. It’s the (probably) most appreciated feature over here on calckey (on top of having a general search as well).
alternatively, just use a server that's full-text searchable.
anyhow the last earthquake in los angeles, i didn't see a single post about it. then again, i didn't post about it until about five hours after it happened so
@pinkyfloyd@maegul@lastquake that’s definitely not me (Calckey and Bonfire look great, for example), but I’m not going to move around until I know everything in my profile is transferable there and back again.
I just set up antenna for disasters including earthquakes and floods. I'm not 100% sure how much of the d-fediverse the antenna covers, but I already see several earthquake-related posts.
@randulo@maegul@lastquake okay.. so is "antenna" the same as following a hashtag or is there a whole chunk of functionality that is hidden in Tusky app or that I just haven't found yet
@randulo@dannotdaniel@lastquake would you mind sharing the details of the antenna … might be useful for others to set up too. Or even have a conversation about it.
@maegul@dannotdaniel@lastquake I'm very new at this. The antenna is just a list of words (with a possible logical AND). I put things like eruption, volcano, earthquake and their plurals. Should add tremor, hurricane, tornado etc. I call the list Disasters.
@mike Melbourne, and epicentre technically within the Greater Melbourne area, not rural. In fact 5km from any significant population - about 100 houses within 2km.
One person injured - fixing a cupboard & leapt up when building shook. Hit head hard on shelf above - 20 stitches.
@maegul@lastquake The power of search and social discovery. It was stuff like this that also made me stay on twitter as long as I did. Everything something weird or intense was happening in a city I was in I would find people who were talking about it there days before I saw any news elsewhere. I can't say the same about the fediverse even though I have been on this place pretty much daily for many years now.
@maegul@lastquake This is the best argument for instances being regional if not by city.
I see that you're doing what I do, boosting your posts from calckey to mastodon 😁
@wjmaggos@maegul@lastquake
I'm not sure I was clear. It would be cool if there were local or regional instances, just as you can follow the guy at WXYZ Podunk County on Mastodon for regional or local things. There are clients like @elk that can do multiple instances.
When I was a kid, school closings were announced an AM radio, and morning edition of the newspaper. Today, they're probably on Twitter or Facebook. I hate when the city does a live video on FB.
if a news org has a website, it should have an instance imo. but I also think we should have lots of local instances for regular people as default options when they decide to check out the #fediverse#socialweb.
@wjmaggos@maegul@lastquake That would be optimal, and NPR and Axios do have bots on here. As long as they tweet about earthquakes and the bot reposts it all is good. Post News wants as many news agencies, papers, etc to join. So far I'm not sure they're attracting the numbers they'd like, but The Onion is there! 😂
@wjmaggos@randulo@maegul@lastquake They also can pose a significant risk depending on where you live and political climate (which can change retroactively and unpredictably).
So they still cannot in any safe manner serve as primary instances for anyone.
@randulo@lastquake generally I’m not cross posting at all. This post was basically from both my accounts and addressed to both platforms so it made sense.
@FeralRobots@randulo@lastquake I generally have different followers on both my accounts, and generally treat this one, the author of the post, as my alternate. In principle, I don’t think we should have alternate accounts just for being on different platforms, but I can’t do anything about that.
@maegul@FeralRobots@lastquake I have alternate accounts to see which will cover all my needs. It's taken a lot of time to make calckey readable for me, but I'm getting there. It has some nice features, but server power is limited and some bugs prevail. If I stay, I'll be happy to donate monthly.
@randulo
When you say 'server power is limited', are you talking about features or about resource usage? (both are important but as I'm thinking about self-hosting, resource usage is fairly important to me.) @maegul@lastquake
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