Moving From Twitter to Mastodon on the Fediverse

Today, on 2022-11-11,¹ I finally signed up for the fediverse. After weeks of hemming and hawing I finally chose a Mastodon instance: layer8.space. Iʼm quite excited.

layer8.space

The instances describes itself as:

>Welcome to the 8th Layer of Madness. Most topics are related to Linux, Anime, Music, Software and maaaany more.

Iʼm not sure, but sometimes the 8th layer refers to the OSI model, which only has seven layers. The 8th might cheekily refer to the user, who uses the layers.

OSI model

Iʼm reachable at @mnordmeyer@layer8.space, but most likely I will create accounts on different, somewhat mono-thematic instances. I will write in a future post in detail about the reasons, but the short version is, that a general feed for everything, which makes up a person, will inevitably lead to oversharing and Twitter-like altercations.

@mnordmeyer@layer8.space

Reminiscing a bit, on 2007-10-03 I finally, after a couple of weeks of procrastination, signed up for Twitter. Especially the first years until 2010 were awesome. I knew most of the people I followed personally, even if they were in the hundreds. We even had real-life meetings with those, we only knew from Twitter. Good times.

But 15 years and 15,000 tweets later, the recent turn of events not only accelerated this switch to the fediverse, it made it mandatory.

Although I didnʼt use Twitter at all in the last couple of years – the performative nature this site has gained is quite annoying – I will keep my Twitter account up, because itʼs actually quite helpful to connect to individuals and companies to either point something out to them about their website, podcast, etc., or to get technical support.

I plan to use the fediverse much more. Maybe I can get back something akin to the experience of early Twitter.

I donʼt know how many of my 950 followers will follow to the fediverse, but judging from the decline of 1,100 in the last couple of years, and the low interaction rate I see on great tweets from accounts which I know personally and having much higher follower ships, the personal community aspect seems to have died out anyway. There might be a few tweets going viral every once in a while, but maybe this is exactly whatʼs choking Twitter to death.

Update 2023-12-15

I moved instances to @mnordmeyer@indieweb.social.

@mnordmeyer@indieweb.social

¹ I have no shame to admit, that the date somewhat motivated me to finally do it. But the daily shit show of a certain billionaire was even more motivating. Billionaires should not exist.