One Month on Fosstodon

I was looking back the other day and realized that today, February 11, marks one month after me having signed up on fosstodon.org and tooted my first toot.

Yeah it's kinda weird to celebrate something like a social media anniversary. But Mastodon is weird. In the good way. So I guess it's fitting? And I guess that's what I wanted to get at with this post.

DistroTube is actually the one who brought me to Mastodon. I had heard him mention it a few times but really didn't understand it or care to learn about. The thing that piqued my interest was actually his video announcing that he had been banned from mastodon.technology and that he was migrating his account to his own instance. As a little background, this was around the time of Trump's Great Deplatforming from basically every major media platform, so the line between content moderation and censorship was a pretty hot topic. Personally I thought banning Trump was the wrong thing to do, but at the same time I thought these tech platforms were completely within their rights to do so. Their house, their rules.

What immediately made Mastodon seem special to me was that you could choose which 'house' to live in while using the platform. It's as far as I can tell the perfect balance of freedom between moderators and users. Instance owners are free to run things however they want while at the same time users are free to pack up and move elsewhere with little hassle.

So I started shopping around for an instance to call home. I took a peek at mastodon.technology but there were a few things that steered me away from it. I browsed a few instances featured by Mastodon and stumbled upon Fosstodon. I read about the server, poked around on the public feed a bit, and made an account to find out what this was all about.

I found out pretty quick that Fosstodon was weird because you actually come away from it feeling pretty good. It's fun getting to see what projects other people with similar tech-y interests are working on, and those of course give me inspiration on projects for me to start. Gemini's a great example. I would have never have thought to start my own gemini capsule were it not for how hard it trended on Fosstodon. There'll probably be plenty of other projects I start later on because of Fosstodon. I've yet to de-Google for example, and while I don't really feel the need to do so right now, I bet I will in the future and that the folks at Fosstodon will be a great resource for finding alternatives.

Fosstodon is also great as an outlet for just rambling about the things I'm into because I know that pretty much everyone else there has similar interests. It makes social media so much easier because it doesn't feel like I'm just shouting into a void full of people who may or may not care.

The lack of any kind of feed algorithm is incredibly refreshing. I launch the app, see what I want to see, and I'm done.

Also people on Fosstodon are some of the nicest and welcoming bunch on the internet. Seriously, you all deserve a medal.

All in all, 10/10 would sign up on Fosstodon again. I'm looking forward to spending a lot more time there.

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