Now that Twitter is owned by someone who is clearly not a fit and proper person to be running a social media company, I’ve been thinking about what to do.
The most common alternative I’ve seen mentioned is Mastodon, where I already had a dormant account, so this week I thought I’d try a whole day there instead of on Twitter.
The last time I’d tried Mastodon was in 2017 and, well, I didn’t have high hopes. This time was a completely different experience.
Partly that was luck- back in 2017 I had picked a server run by James Smith and it’s still going strong, so there was already a community and people I recognised, and I didn’t have to think about where to create an account.
I think it was also partly the kind of people I follow on Twitter- a lot of them had recently created Mastodon accounts I could find and follow. Although it was also great to find people I haven’t seen on Twitter before, having some familiar faces was nice.
Overall it really did remind me of when I first joined Twitter. Back then I tried to keep the number of people I followed to a nice manageable 80… which I appear to have reached already on Mastodon! Oh well!
I’ll definitely be back for another Mastodon Monday so please say hi if you’re trying it out as well!
Notes from a small field 