Foray into Mastodon

A few years ago, I started looking into mastodon as a Twitter alternative. Initially, the barrier to finding a server, or instance, drove me away. The idea of everything being “federated”, connected, but not connected, separated interests or by geography, seemed overwhelming, and I lost interest. (At the time, someone should’ve given me the email analogy - you can use gmail or hotmail or Fastmail, but you can email anyone no matter what provider they use.)

Then, with the Elon-driven implosion of Twitter, I started looking again in interest. I had already deleted all my old tweets, but I did miss having a micro-blog of sorts. At the end of November, I noticed someone had started a Canadian instance of Mastodon, and that’s what I initially joined. “This is good”, I thought. I am a Canadian, this makes sense to me.

Then, a few days later, I read the administrator’s “state of the instance” report. They posted about frequent downtime (hopefully now resolved), and funding issues. They also spoke of the burden of running an ever-growing server, and their dislike of being the one to handle all the moderation and administration. It seems like they’re doing a great job there at dealing with the new influx of users, but all of this got me thinking about how unstable it is to rely on an individual to run an instance. If they ran out of funding or decided they just plain didn’t want to do it any more, all my content would be gone. I didn’t want to invest in starting a new micro-blog to just have all my content disappear at some point.

So, after some thinking, I migrated my account to the larger Mastodon.social, more established and run by the Mastodon non-profit. This comes with its own issues, as the “local” feed became an overwhelming mess of opinions, which were difficult to follow. The explore options are brutal on Mastodon, and it’s hard to discover content to follow without knowing what to search. However, for now, it’s where I’m sitting, because it’s established. I am also back on Tumblr, and it’s possible I might just end up posting all my one-off thoughts there. Particularly if they follow through on their federation integration.

Edit: after more thinking I migrated back to the Canadian instance, for a better “local” experience. Hopefully I don’t regret it. Also hopefully he gets some decent monetary backing from somewhere.