Since Elon Musk is continuing to tweet the longest corporate suicide note in history, we decided to try something new. We have set up a Mastodon presence.
Mastodon is a decentralised open-source Twitter alternative whose annoyances are mostly technical rather than visceral. It’s quite unfriendly for newbies. The essential thing to know is that on creating an account you’ll have three ways to view our markets-and-macro-focused universe: a timeline of your followed accounts, a local view of everything happening on the server, and a federated view that mixes up all the local timelines.
Our server, alphaville.club, is set to private while we figure out how everything works. Nevertheless, Alphaville readers wanting to join the experiment can jump the barrier and sign-up via this link , or, if you want to stick to your existing server, just follow us there at @FTAV@alphaville.club .
If you have a smart idea about how we could use our newfound moderation liability platform, please let us know. Clunkiness makes Mastodon an imperfect replacement for Markets Live or The Long Room , though it might still be useful if a few of the same users get involved. Perhaps Mastodon will simply remain our bunker in New Zealand in case of the thermonuclear Muskopalypse, or perhaps it will become something completely new. We just don’t know yet, but we’re open to suggestions.
And finally, please keep in mind this is Alphaville’s unofficial skunkworks thing. If it falls apart or goes wrong somehow then blame us, not the FT.