The Fediverse Is Boring

2023-01-09

Yup.

5 years ago, for me it was exciting.

Yeah there were a few trolls, but whatever. We were fine. Instances went down, reset, and everyone signed back up... (mastodon.rocks anybody?) but by and large we were all enthusiastic about this new platform. The normies didnt even know about it, I heard when someone from G+ posted "oh I am over here now, come join me" and most of us knew the writing was on the wall for G+ by that point. Which is sort of a shame... it was a great platform, even if run by one of the more evil corporations of this age. At the time they were only just starting to show that though.

So we moved to Mastodon. Which we soon discovered was more than just Mastodon. It was the *Fediverse*, encompasing a bunch of different platforms all using a couple of protocols, with most moving to ActivityPub eventaully. At the time, I was really getting into Linux and getting my head around things, so this group of like minded people were awesome!

And now... scroll on a few years, and life is busy, social media feels like a drag, normies have invades my geeky social network, and I'm not even doing as much nerdy stuff any more. It all feels a bit *meh*.

Running my own instance

Well, thats one way to do nerdy stuff again I suppose. Sink a bunch of time into working out how to set up Pleroma, and the hard fork of that Akkoma, on a VPS. All while justifying to the wife the expense (minimal but it is still basically unnecessary) that I am going to move blog hosting to the VPS to save paying for it elsewhere. Which renews in 2 months, so I better get a wriggle on...

So Hugo comes into the mix. And I spend some time wrapping my peanut around that. Not too bad, and now I can create stuff and sftp it up to the vps. Oh, and working out nginx and certbot - yup, all fun times. But I learned a lot in a relatively short time, around family and job. So yeah, I feel pretty good about it all really.

But now it is all set up... and the normies that invaded the Fediverse from the latest twitter migration still piss me of. I would say they bring noise, but it's not even that; it's that they bring the expectation that everything is a push for their brand, that they have to fight to get seen, push their agenda...

Just... No.

Fuck off, honestly. We don't care about your "brand" or whatever. Just post cool shit, if people like it, they might buy something. Not an extreme concept.

And Politics. OMFG. This noise can bugger right off. Even more so than the previous point, perhaps. For the most part, ranting about politics achieves nothing on social media other than creating arguments where there were none, and letting everyone organise into little political tribes to yell about stuff and still get nothing achieved. I miss the absense of this from the Fediverse. Yes it previously happened a little... but now the normies have invaded from birdsite, it is somewhat overwhelming.

Maybe I just need to share more stuff to a blog and post less on social media. Or maybe I need to curate my follows a bit more again. Hmmm.