Hi Everyone!
Social media is a mixed blessing for many reasons. One of the biggest problems we have as erotic artists is that any large corporate platform can ban adult material at any time (as has already happened on many previous occasions- Google AdWords, Paypal, etc.).
At the moment, Twitter is the most supportive platform, but we’re only one CEO decision away from losing our complete social media presence. As things like forums and interest-specific groups have fallen into disuse we are left at the mercy of large companies.
What would be ideal would be to have a semi-private platform which we control, a bit like the RE forum was back in the day, but which can talk to all the other semi-private platforms so people can still talk to each and discover each other’s work.
There’s an imperfect but promising solution to this called federation, and the most interesting platform for this at the moment is something called Mastodon. It works very much like Twitter, except that you sign up to a specific “instance”, a server which talks to other instances but which remains under the control of the admins who run it.
As an experiment I’d like to invite Restrained Elegance and Silk Soles members to join us on our new chat platform while we try it out. You can sign up here (it’s free): https://www.kinkyelephant.com.
There’s a GOTCHA – I think once you’ve signed up and verified your email, you need to sign in with your email address, NOT your chosen username.
OR: you can sign up via any other Mastodon instance, for example the big one run by the founder of the system at https://mastodon.social. Then you can just follow me: @RestrainedElegance@kinkyelephant.com.
At the moment what you’ll see is largely similar to my twitter timeline (because that is the easiest way to get some content on there to test it out). If the tests prove positive, I’ll be posting lots of teasers and tasters on there, and also promise to keep politics out of it! (Once it is up and running and no longer echoing my twitter feed anyway).
If this works, I’m planning to invite other models, photographers, fetish producers and fans to join us on https://KinkyElephant.com and build a kinky community that isn’t at the mercy of big business. I’ve no idea if it will work. I’d love to have you join in and help me find out.
Hywel
Hi Hywel,
Greetings from New Jersey. I read through your article and also read some things on the mastodon site. I am not into the whole social media thing for the most part. I think it is due, in part, to working in the IT field for so lone and dealing with an average of about 100 emails a day as well as around two dozen IM’s it seems too much like work. Also working for one of the major US phone carriers, I can’t say I trust just how private the whole thing really is.
That said perhaps the mastodon idea might be a good middle point between twitter and the old RE forums. However, I’m not thrilled with using my home email address as the main login each time. Do you know, off the top of your head, how well mastodon works with some of the semi-anonymous email services like yahoo mail or hot mail and also how well does it work with some of the fully anonymous email systems or over a private VPN. Any inputs? Thanks.
Cheers,
Jeff
Hi Jeff,
I believe it is just using your email address as a login username, and once on signup for verification. You should be able to choose a single-use email address created especially for the purpose- Hotmail doesn’t seem all that reliable (their spam filters have caused some issues with switter.at verification emails not getting through) but Yahoo, or better yet protonmail, should would just fine.
As long as you can read and verify the initial email, that should be all it needs.
And it works fine for me over a VPN.
Cheers, Hywel
P.S. in terms of privacy, I can’t make any cast-iron guarantees as it is just me running a little instance for our little community, via a hosting company. I’ve not done a full security audit or anything like it- that would be without the scope of my competence in any case.
For my part I promise not to snoop on anyone or share anyone’s data (any more than I have done in 17 years of running RE with, I hope, great discretion). And the privacy policy of the hosting company is pretty solid-sounding.
The main reason for wanting to do it via this route is that we are the customers. I’m paying for the service, funded by RE membership fees, on all our behalf. It’s currently a grand total of 10 Euros a month, so it is like a couple of cents each, tops.
But it means that the hosting company are making their money directly from the service they are providing to us. Their commercial interests are more closely aligned with ours than any other social media network, who HAVE to sell their users to their actual customers (the advertisers) in order to make their money. I’d rather pay a couple of cents a month in order to be the customer rather than the product!