Poetic License to Kill.

For those watching the mess that Musk is making of Twitter, you might wonder what some alternatives are. For myself, I've joined Mastodon. It kinda seems like Twitter, but it's not.

First, if you already know Mastodon, I'm at https://fosstodon.org/@ovid (Also: @ovid@fosstodon.org). To "friend" someone on Mastodon, paste one of those in a search box and you will usually see their name pop up. Click on it and then click "follow."

If you don't know Mastodon, it's a Twitter-like social network, but a key difference is that there is no "central" Mastodon. Different groups set up different servers (also known as "instances"). Yes, you can see posts of your friends who are on different servers. There are thousands of Mastodon servers, so it can be overwhelming, but here's a tool to help you choose a server, along with an introductory guide to Mastodon. Here's a follow-up to that guide.

People complain about the "distributed" nature of this social network, but think of it like email: your email server talks to other email servers and you don't even think about it. Mastodon still needs some work to make this seamless, but once you get the hang of it, it's pretty good.

In general, Mastodon servers tend to support content moderation and often actively block any servers which have extreme content. Also, there's not "algorithm." "Toots" (the Mastodon version of "tweets") are shown newest first.  There's no "hey, this has lots of likes, so we'll show it to you."

Also, about "likes" on Mastodon: you will see who has liked your posts. Others will not. "Liking" a toot is just letting the author know. You're not being gamed.

Many years ago, I paid $100US on an LJ promotion which granted me a permanent account. Amongst other perks, I see no ads and people reading this get to skip ads, too. However, I last posted here in 2013. The majority of my newer posts are at https://ovid.github.io/. I wrote my own blogging software for fun and that's where I share information about what I'm doing.

The downside of that is that it's generally not personal. The random fun I had, posting silly things on LJ, is long over. My personal site at github also doubles as a professional site. I'm on Twitter, too, but I still miss the fun times I had here, sharing totally random stuff. I do that on Facebook, too, but it doesn't feel the same. Facebook is a cesspool.

I don't think that 2000's feeling of fun that I had on LJ will ever be back, but nostalgia has me firmly in its grip.