Fun Friday Resources

Before the HVAC repair guy gets here to repair the little air conditioner in my attic study, and before I have to try to repair my drill press by aiming my camera/phone at the problem and letting my burner tentmate Zeff try to talk me through it…

Join me on Mastodon!

You may have noticed on my front page that I left Twitter a while back and decamped to Mastodon, part of the “Fediverse,” a loose federation of servers with a variety of software. There is no algorithm to show you what the corporate masters want you to see — you only see people/accounts you follow on your thread. (You can also just lurk in the stream of your instance (server) and watch it all, um, stream past.)

It can be a bit scary to make that leap, so here are a few links that might help.

The first and biggest problem you have to tackle is Which instance/server should I join?

The bad news is that there are tons of these independently owned and operated servers all over the place. They vary in their size, their user agreements, their moderation, and their focus. Some let Nazis or advertisers join. Others are good guys.

The good news is that it doesn’t really matter. All instances can link to all other instances — although the good guys will usually “fediblock” the Nazis. If you find that the instance is not to your liking, you can pick up and move your entire account, including your follows and followers, to another instance that is more amenable.

For a big overview of the whole shebang — the Fediverse is not just Mastodon; there are substitutes not only for Twitter but YouTube, etc. — check out Join the Fediverse, a wiki that attempts to organize the wild west of the place.

Two other sites that will help point you in the right direction are Mastodon Instances, which asks you a few (very basic) questions about your expectations before giving you a list; and Join Mastodon, a much cleaner and complete approach to the problem.

Once you join, you’ll learn all about hashtags and lists and all the other little quirks that mean you have to do stuff to get the most out of it.

And as the connoisseurs will begin to remind you, the Fediverse is way more than just Mastodon. For an overview of other projects you can join, check out fediverse.info, which lists and explains them. And then when you’re ready to go full native — remember, all of these things are individually hosted, so don’t say I didn’t warn you when you find yourself setting up your own PeerTube instance — Explore Fediverse Software is the deep end.

While I kind of miss the “good old days” on Twitter, most of my favorite people there have migrated to Mastodon anyway, so that’s good. And I have some amazing new relationships that would never have happened over on Twitter. There are no ads, no flooding my feeed with “recommendations” or “sponsored posts.” Mastodon is a phenomenal improvement over the other social media sinkholes, and I say jump in.

Follow me at @Lichtenbergian@mastodon.sdf.org!