Maybe This Twitter Thread was More Prescient Than I Thought

I wrote this thread on Twitter. I copied it to here to keep as a record. Edited for clarity and readability on Medium.

I deleted my Twitter account but use the Twitter search function to keep up with some people still using it. In those posts I see a lot of people downplaying Mastodon. It’ll never work, the interface is clunky, I don’t want to learn something new etc. etc.

And it hit me. We’re doing this all again. We’ve been here before.

Back at the turn of the century I joined the blogging community. And built up a large group of mutual friends on Blogger. We would read each other’s posts, comment back and forth and had a good time. And then this new Social Media platform came out. It had a 40-character post limit. You couldn’t easily link to each other’s posts, it had performance and reliability issues, and generally was a completely alien experience to blogging.

All of us hated it. All of us thought it was dumb. It made no sense. It was hard to figure out, who would use such a thing? The mocking was harsh and dismissive. But then everyone eventually tried it out and then gave up blogging because they valued the new experience. In the end, I was the last blogger standing. And it was awfully lonesome over there. I turned out the Blogger lights and joined Twitter.

I learned how to Follow, RT, QT and all the other manual tricks of the trade. I figured out how to pre-compose tweet threads in Excel. But I missed blogging, a lot, because that is better for longer, more nuanced thoughts. But no one reads blogs anymore. Even if you link to it from Twitter. (Irony Alert)

The lesson I learned was, the online community is what is important. I reminisce about blogging. I miss blogging. (I started blogging on Medium, I missed it so much.) But the community I valued didn’t. The blogging community was gone and I had to let go.

Don’t make the mistake I made. If you value your community of friends on here, be open minded about the new platform they are choosing. And a lot of us are choosing Mastodon. Don’t be the stubborn person sitting on the couch in the living room because that’s more comfortable than standing in the kitchen, even though that’s where the party is.

So what is this Mastodon thing that everyone is talking about? Mastodon is a distributed network of servers run by independents. It’s open-source software that anyone can access to start up their own servers. I could spin up a server. You could spin up a server. I’m actually considering it just to play around with it. It’s mind-blowing pondering the possibilities compared to the walled garden corporate instances of Twitter and Facebook.

To join Mastodon you pick a server to create an account on. And then you find people to follow. Very similar to Twitter. When you first joined Twitter, your feed was quite dull, because you didn’t follow anyone yet. Same over there. You do not have to choose the same server as other people. You can follow each other across servers because it’s all one network. You build your community to your liking and preference. You can see the current timeline of posts from people you follow, the people on the same server as you or the posts happening across the “Fediverse” the global connection of servers.

If you don’t like a server, you can migrate. I just migrated from server https://mastodon.online to a Canadian server https://mstdn.ca/@Catelli. The software that runs Mastodon, just like Twitter did, has some issues to work out. But it is being constantly updated. My server just updated to the latest release of Mastodon and it is a vast improvement over the last version. Whatever impressions you formed about Mastodon if you tried it before is based on an old experience. It is constantly being updated and refreshed. Bugs fixed, features added, just like any other platform.

The Muskification of Twitter has prompted many of your community to find a new place to hang-out online. Don’t dismiss it because you hate change. It’s already lively over there. I’ve found old friends, am making new friends and I’m having fun.

Get off the couch and join the party in the kitchen.

If you don’t, make sure you turn-out the lights if you’re the last one still on Twitter.