Joiiiiiiiin ussssssssssss
Hey! So it's been about a year since I last shamelessly promoted my Mastodon instance, and now I'm BACK ya'll to cajole you again into checking it out.
I call my instance Straylight and you can find it here:
https://straylight.expectnomore.net
If you aren't familiar with the concept of Mastodon (or the "fediverse"), there's a really great summary video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPSbNdBmWKE (just 2:16). Basically I made an instance back in late 2017 on my own server, and since then the greater Mastodon network has exploded in size. Most recently, with Tumblr's decision to ban NSFW content, there's been a huge influx of users abandoning that ship for self-hosted communities. But generally, any time there's a big controversy from the major social networks, it's been a trend to see a lot of new sign-ups within the fediverse from people looking to get away from the BS of having big corporations make opaque decisions that directly affect your online life.
Already I've either recruited or discovered a handful of EoFFers, all of whom I've been keeping in regular contact with via my Mastodon instance. And actually some of my experiences there show of why it's a really cool network to be a part of!
- Using the Mastodon Twitter Bridge, I was able to find that rubah had already registered a Mastodon account on mastodon.social, and now we follow one another.
- I had reached out to Dr Unne via Twitter to ask him to join my instance, and both he and his spouse pancaek did. When he decided to run his own instance, they both migrated their accounts from my instance to theirs; and then when he decided he no longer wanted to admin an instance, they were able to migrate to another instance. The software kept track of them at each hop, and I'm still able to interact with them, even with all the intermediate migrations.
- Krissy had already made a Mastodon account on mastodon.cloud when I invited him to my instance, but he made a Straylight account anyways. Now he uses his mastodon.cloud account more to promote his music projects on Bandcamp, and uses the account on my instance to shoot the trout with other EoFFers. Multiple profiles are really well-supported overall.
- Mastodon has a pretty sweet "lists" feature, which means I've been able to take all of the EoFFers that I follow and have their posts appear in a single feed, which works across all of the devices I use to access Mastodon!
So even if you don't want to join my instance specifically, I encourage you to check Mastodon out! There's a great tool for finding instances on their site:
https://joinmastodon.org/
The main reason to join mine is because you can yell at me! Berate me! Take me to task! Some of you may still even have my cell number if you want to call and tell me the site is broken at 3AM. But mostly because this is a total labor of love for me, and I see it as the next evolution for online communities. I'd love to have you folks join me there and experience this awesome new technology as it continues to evolve.
