XTwitter has always been a mess, but increasingly so. So time to find something else that will work for my microblogging needs.

The requirements are for something that can live on my phone, is easy to post a quick few lines to and can provide an updated feed into the website without having to rebuild and reload this site. As X has clamped down on access beyond thier app that last point has become broken. And it’s a cess pit. In the process of transfering I saw what X offers out-the-box. It’s a spew of right-wing consipiracy feeds and shill anxiety inducing ‘celebrities’. My normal interaction with X was always limited and heavily filtered and to see it’s raw form only confirmed the need to move.

So Mastodon then. Unlike the singular company of X, Mastodon is a collection of operators running their own servers with a common protocol enabling the sharing of posts. And the source code is open, so no mysterious hidden recommendation algorithms. Also the setup uses a protocol called ActivityPub that allows the transfer of posts between different systems such as Pleroma and microblog.pub. So if one system isn’t to your taste you can move elsewhere. Instead of social media being in a closed private system such as X, it is federated, distributed and interchangeable.

Hindsight is wonderful but there is a certain inevitability to all this. The internet once had isolated systems such as BBS which with the development of technologies such HTTP and HTML were replaced with far more open and accessible websites. That infrastructure also initially leaned heavily toward restricted, proprietary systems such as AOL, but was eventually replaced by the current world wide web where running your own website is trivial.
So social media starts with closed monopolies and information silos but inevitably becomes another open ecosystem. Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter (and its subsequent crash in valuation) is looking increasingly foolish. And I can’t see why this wouldn’t continue to disrupt other proprietry systems such as tiktok and youtube.

After I’ve got to grips with a new app on the phone and the # and @ referencing, I’ll replace the broken live twitter feed with an ActivityPub feed and do something about the connections between some website articles and twitter posts eg Pint of Science

Posts on Mastodon are called toots, and I toot my own horn at @kevinm@mastodonapp.uk