I used to use twitter quite a bit, but now it’s run by a hard-right weirdo who wants to defeat the “woke mind virus” and pays awful people including Andrew Tate large amounts of money to use the platform now known as X, it’s untenable. If you’re part of an organisation that still uses X as a primary mouthpiece, please do something about that – it’s a terrible reflection on you. You’re forcing people to log in to a toxic website just to stay up-to-date with your news or access your customer service. A lot of big and small organisations, including the EU Commmission, the BBC, and of course Then Try This are building a mastodon presence, which is great.
Anyway, I’ve been really enjoying Mastodon/fediverse for a while now and my experience has been really great, and getting better all the time. For sure there are downsides, but the federated (i.e., kind of e-mail-like) model is like a return to the old-style Internet and feels like home. You can find me at: post.lurk.org/@yaxu.
If you don’t already have a mastodon account, just like with choosing an e-mail host, there are a lot of servers to choose from. The post.lurk.org server I’m on is not accepting new users currently, but you can follow me from just about any other server. It’s can be nice to join a smaller, well maintained server with a local community that you can immediately engage with (you can usually see a timeline of posts local to the server separately from the people you’re following). Here’s a few servers which some of the people I follow use:
- assemblag.es – “for people interested in thinking creatively and critically about technology, in the broadest sense”
- sonomu.club – “for musicians, sound-artists, producers of any kind of aural noise, songwriters, bedroom producers, sonic manglers and algorave livecoders”
- ravenation.club – “instance for all the ravers in the universe. Anyone who listens to electronic music (or not) is welcome.”
- fosstodon.org – “open to anyone who is interested in technology; particularly free & open source software”
- hci.social – “for Human-computer Interaction researchers and practitioners”
- hachyderm.io – “a safe space, LGBTQIA+ and BLM, primarily comprised of tech industry professionals world wide”
- mastodon.art – “all things creative, all on a platform that is community-owned and ad-free. NO AI OR NFTs ALLOWED.”
- tldr.nettime.org – “an instance for artists, researchers, and activists interested in exploring the intersections of technology, culture, and politics”
You can also join one of the really big instances like https://mastodon.social/
If you join one, but decide to move to another, you can take your followers etc with you, so it’s not a decision for life. Be sure to introduce yourself with a post adding an #introduction tag.
