Mastodon

I listen to several Relay FM podcasts, which keeps me engaged in a sphere of technology personalities. They kept me up-to-date on the exodus from Twitter that this region of internet culture experienced, and their settlement into Mastodon.

I’ve never been a big Twitter user. Comical Start has/had an account where I tried to remember to post each week’s episode, but that’s mainly for the practice. Nobody cared that I did that, and I slowly turned that account into more of a personal account that followed the internet folks that I enjoy. I never tweeted at them because it was a show account, so I simply read things when I thought of it and that was that.

The movement to Mastodon offered me an opportunity to engage in this community in a way I was hesitant to while they were on Twitter. Its “closed off” nature—due mostly to the technical hurdles of signing up compared to traditional social media—was appealing. I could formulate a specific experience that I controlled, without algorithms interfering. I joined the Mathstodon instance¹ because it felt the most relevant and kept me out of the large sea of the general mastodon.social instance.

It’s been hugely enjoyable so far. I follow a small number of people who don’t generate too much content. I see a mix of technology, math, and baseball without anything else cluttering up my feed. It’s a linear timeline, and I feel I can actually interact with these podcast personalities without being totally lost in a mass of voices that they’d just as likely ignore. Now that it’s at least less toxic over there, I can tell that these interactions are actually visible and that keeps me engaged.

It’s a small part of my day. I spend maybe 5-10 minutes on Mastodon² each day catching up on a handful of posts and the occasional silly conversation between some folks, and that’s it. I get a bit of enjoyment, some online interaction, and it’s everything I’d hoped it would be.