I am now over a month in to my Facebook hiatus, and it is going well.  I have logged in on a few occasions in order to moderate pages I manage, and to help promote our Vermont Craft Tours business. Otherwise, I have not looked at the feed, wall, or whatever they are called.

I have been less successful, somewhat, with my Twitter break.  After about 3 weeks, I logged in because I like to have Twitter open whilst I watch my beloved Arsenal play. Admittedly, I am still opening Twitter on a regular basis, but I do not have a Twitter client on my phone, and that is important.

At work I manage their Twitter account and even though we are following people and groups in the fiber industry, we also follow local news sources. So I am still exposed to many of the trials and tribulations of the the Twittersphere, much to my chagrin. And I still find that even that level of interaction is stressful. Luckily, there is not much call for us to have more of a Twitter presence. If so, I would likely see if someone else at the office was keen.

Instead, I have been playing about with Mastodon, which is like Twitter, but not run by an asshole like Jack Dorsey — who continues to show by his actions and inaction that he ranks making money on the hateful words of trolls, racists, misogynists, and other low-life scumbags over fostering a place to share great ideas.

Anyway, Mastodon.  Here’s how they briefly describe themselves:

Mastodon is a social network based on open web protocols and free, open-source software. It is decentralized like e-mail.

That means, that I can choose which Instance to join based on the rules of that specific group. And there is a tool to help you find the right instance for you.

“Mastodon isn’t one place and one set of rules: it’s thousands of unique, interconnected communities to choose from, filled with different people, interests, languages, and needs. Don’t like the rules? You’re free to join any community you like, or better yet: you can host your own, on your own terms!”

I am currently a member of mastodon.social, and its rules are published very prominently. I must admit I didn’t give it much thought when I first signed up, but if I decide I want to go to another instance, I can. Or, if I really want to have my own rules, I can start my own instance. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that!

But I can either view the local timeline, which is only members of my own instance, or I can view the federated timeline.  The latter sometimes feels like what I expect a member of the Borg would feel.  It moves so quickly, one can’t really read it.  Add that to that fact that it is international, and much of the timeline is in other languages, and whoosh!

I won’t go into too much detail here, but there are some nice features that other social products should really look into; specifically Content Warnings, which allows one to state a reason for the alert (spoiler alert, live sports, NSFW content, etc).  If you want to view that content, you must click to reveal it.

I’m still learning my way around, but please do follow me or at least say hello should you create an account.

Very soon I plan to write about my wish list of Mastodon and WordPress integration, because much of the reason I am not using Masto more is the lack of tools being built around it. Many of these wish list items are the same reasons I haven’t adopted Ello either.