With all of the craziness over at Twitter, I decided to migrate myself off of that platform. Mastodon has been there, quietly, in the background and obviously this has pushed quite a few people to explore it more seriously. And from what I’ve seen, it’s been an excellent alternative! I already dropped Facebook years ago when they couldn’t (or really wouldn’t) get their racism under control. Twitter at least felt like it was making an effort. But it definitely is not anymore. So I created an account over at mstdn.party (@tierran@mstdn.party) to learn a bit more about the Fediverse.
It’s definitely a totally different vibe. I think the fact that it’s very easy to exclude bad actors (and entire servers) from federated community really helps with that. And as I’ve discovered, it’s not just Mastodon that is part of this federated community! There is federated video, live streaming, and much more. Anything that can implement the open protocol called ActivityPub can join the Fediverse. Such as this blog!
I see this movement as potentially taking back and re-democratizing the Internet. It really has a feel of what it used to be like. These distributed networks have the advantages of still allowing you to find and follow people you know or just are interested in while still owning your personality. I don’t have to give my data to anyone to run this. No one is making money through my existence so there is less incentive for bad behavior.
And of course, this is all running on Open Source Software and Open Standards which is a huge win. I’ll definitely be taking time to continue learning how to best utilize this technology but I’m actually excited to see where this goes.