Mastodon Monday

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.

@jtonline@mastodon.me.uk

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!

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My first social media policy

Despite seriously considering deleting my Facebook profile in the past, I haven’t managed it, yet. The downsides are still just about outweighed by the way I use Facebook, i.e. very little. That’s my choice though and after a conversation in the canteen recently, I started wondering whether it was right to effectively start building up a social media profile for someone before they’ve even been born!

Despite Google’s unhelpful profile name policy, Eric Schmidt apparently commented that young people may need to disassociate themselves from a trail of embarrassment online by changing their names. I can see his point, but wouldn’t it be worse if your dad had created a Facebook profile for you?! You’d need to change your name at least twice!

So, given it’s not possible to control information on Facebook, we’ve decided to try and avoid putting anything there on behalf of the bump. Not that we’re picking on Facebook- we’ll be avoiding posting anything on the other social networking sites too. This is a bit of an experiment at the moment, along with the whole (very wide) parental minefield, so the bump’s social media policy may evolve over time. For a start it needs a better codename!

We do still want to annoy at least a few people with news and photos when bump’s big day finally arrives though, so we’ll be sending out announcements via ‘old fashioned’ electronic mail and Short Message Service. (And there will definitely not be any live blogging!)