Elon’s takeover of Twitter has left the bird app fragmented, wounded, and a shell of what it once was. He’s chased off people who were dedicated to making it a better experience, fucked over developers who made their living building clients, and are now taking on the spambots in the most ham-fisted manner possible.
Speaking personally, the death of Tweetbot has made using Twitter almost unbearable. Instead of having a client running in the background, I now have to manually think about opening my browser, typing in twitter dot com, and making sure my feed is in Following mode. It’s stupid. It’s too much work. There’s enough friction now that it makes me mindful of what a waste of time it is.
There’s been a lot of whinging about Twitter lately, and it would be redundant to add my voice to that chorus at this point. It’s time to look towards what the future has in store. Which… means looking at a service named after an extinct animal. That seems odd.
Anyway, Mastodon is the future of social media; and it’s pretty bright. This feels like the merger between the younger, more decentralized, more democratic early internet and the modern high-availability, rich interaction web applications of today. It’s not perfect, and there are growing pains to work through, but it’s progress. It’s something. And it’s not controlled by one billionaire asshole.
Okay, but what IS Mastodon, you’re conveniently asking yourself. I’m glad you asked. Here’s a great explainer you can read, written by https://elekk.xyz/@noelle. This is a really great high-level overview of the “Fediverse” (🙄), and I don’t have much to add. Except that if you’re looking to migrate from Kinky Twitter™, you should look at:
There’s probably plenty of other good instances out there too. Browse around! See what you can find! The world is your oyster! Fuck billionaires! Take back the web! And if you, like me, prefer to browse with an app, I recommend Ivory or Ice Cubes (AND GIVE THEM YOUR MONEY. SUPPORT INDEPENDENT DEVELOPERS. AND YOUR MASTODON SERVER HOSTS).
Twitter will probably survive, but I’m going to try and make an effort to wean myself off it.
We’ve become complacent with giving massive corporations unparalleled control over what we see, say, and do. Anything that we can do to stop or reverse that trend is something worth doing.