Mastodon
A few months ago I joined the nascent social network called Mastodon and specifically an instance for Android Devs called androiddev.social. You can find me here: @mez@androiddev.social.
Mastodon is most easily described as a federated Twitter where users can join a multitude of instances and follow users from within there own instance as well as specific users from other instances. Perhaps a better analogy is email directly where you can message anyone where your email is hosted (Gmail / your ISP) but, of course, you can email anyone that has an email address hosted anywhere else. The emails are shared - or federated - between different email instances and there is no central place to get emails (even though some providers may be more popular than others). Mastodon is the same.
There is an instance for Kiwis, an instance for general users, a local instance for local people, and an instance that is also a photo sharing platform. You can even create your own instance if you are into that sorta thing. When I first joined Mastodon I briefly joined the general users instance however due to the mass Twitter exodus at the time this instance became impossible to use so I started looking for an alternative. Luckily enough a few Android devs from the community decided to set one up and starting taking invites so I joined AndroidDev.social instead.
Whilst I did move over during the Twitter migration I have not yet completely abandoned the bird site. A lot of people I look up to and admired in the Android community were disgustingly let go when Twitter changed hands. Whilst this didn’t directly affect me it didn’t feel right. These were some great engineers and this was no way to run a company. I have stopped using Twitter but my account is still active. I have tried to find the users that I used to follow on Twitter over on Mastodon. For this there is a really neat tool called Movetodon that allows you to find users on Twitter that you follow that have referenced a Mastodon account in their profile. It is not 100% fool proof as it requires that these users have added some text into their Twitter profile - but it is a good start.
I generally have the following groups on Twitter:
- Friends and family.
- Android community.
- Local Bristol community.
- News organisations.
- Spanish community.
- Formula 1 community.
- Randoms.
At the time of posting only the Android community seem to be fully on Mastodon - probably for very similar reasons to me. However a lot of my friends and family are not, neither are the local Bristol community, neither are the News organisations (keep in mind I am talking about the UK ones here), neither is the Spanish Twitter accounts I follow, neither is the Formula 1 community. The randoms that I have accrued over the past decade or more on Twitter I am honestly not worried about. At the moment this still leaves me with a “need” for Twitter although I find I am logging in less and less at the moment.
In a fully federated future the answer would be that each of the other groups that are not yet on Mastodon would join their own dedicated instance and then I could find and follow them again. I think that would be a really cool thing for the groups that are effectively marketing channels like the News and F1 communities. That would be big if they abandoned Twitter as I think it would accelerate Twitter’s decline.
So…. I am looking forward to how this evolves and whether I will completely come off Twitter in 2023. If I can replicate most of what I had then I would be happy. Let’s see.