Over the past week, while being on autumn leave, the resent events over at Twitter and the reaction to this by people I follow in the Java/Kotlin/JVM space have sparked a new interest in social media for me. I've been on Twitter since late 2010 but never tweeted much. Most of the time I've been there to keep up-to-date with new versions of software I'm using at work or at home and to find links to published conference talks recommended by people I follow. For long periods I haven't been logged in at all, just because it hasn't been interesting enough, I suppose. I also suppose it is partly on me since I haven't engaged enough, but I also think the advertisements and the algorithm deciding what tweets to push have made me feel not really at home. In addition, whenever going even slightly outside the Java/Kotlin/JVM bubble into tweets on the climate crisis or local politics, I immediately end up in the middle of the dumbening, anger and hate filled threads that social media in general seems to be full of today.
Last week I started to see tweets about people setting up accounts on something called "Mastodon". "Just in case", they said, with no more explanations. However, the starting point for me this week was Martin Fowler's writing on his own explorations into "Mastodon" and the "Fediverse". I'm not going to reiterate his writing here, instead I urge you to go for a read yourself. It sparked my interest and gave me some useful information going forward with my own discovery.
Another good source of information I found is Per Axbom's "A Brief Mastodon Guide for Social Media Worriers" and other posts linked from this one. It really opened up the previously hidden "Fediverse" to me, not hidden because it is in any way secret, just because I didn't have a clue about its existence. It turns out a network of community driven, connected (federated) servers running open-source software offering decentralized social media, including micro-blogging, live streaming, video and photo sharing, have been growing since about 2016 (as far is I understand). All using the ActivityPub protocol to exchange data as per their users needs, much like e-mail servers have been doing since Internet was born.
Even though the fediverse is large and diverse with many different types of social media as (surely not exhaustively) mentioned above I have myself so far only explored Mastodon for micro-blogging. At the beginning of the week it was a network of about 3,100 community run servers hosting about 500,000 users. Less than a week later, as I write this, it has grown with another 200 servers and 180,000 users. It seems there was an upsurge in usage also in April when Elon Musk's buying of Twitter first became official and then now once again when his takeover is a fact. All this puts great pressure on both servers and administrators having to cope with more traffic and more moderating duties. Remember most of them are just volunteers hosting and moderating in their spare time. Some of the servers are really big and seem to attract most of the new users. However, since they are all federated together you can follow anyone in the whole fediverse regardless of which server you are at (That is not entirely true since server admins tend to exclude federation with servers known for spamming or other non ethical content. However, I consider that a good thing!). We should hope for more servers being started by communities, organisations and corporations wanting to be part of the larger community. It seems it would be better for everyone if the load is spread horizontally.
For us as new users it boils down to finding a server matching our interests and values and then set up an account or ask for an invite. I used the official moderated server list at joinmastodon.org/servers to find a suitable one. But I'm sure there might be other ways to do it. My interest in programming and open-source led me to Fosstodon.org which seems to have a really great set of server rules. When I had my first look at the server it was open to registration of new users, but about a day later when I felt ready to dip my toe and join in it had changed to "Request an invite". A bit disappointed but nevertheless determined to give it a try I filled in the form, including answering the question on why I wanted to join the server. To my surprise and happiness it was only about 30 minutes before I got my invite and could join the server for real. It turns out switching to "invite-mode" is a way for server admins to keep spam accounts created by bots from sneaking in with the stream of new people currently joining Mastodon.
Now I have filled my profile and thereby set up my new digital home at fosstodon.org/@se_thinking and started to find people I want to follow, both on Fosstodon itself and on other servers. One really nice thing about Mastodon is that in addition to curating your own home feed with people you follow and filters of things you don't want to see you can also follow and interact with the local stream of all "toots" (messages) from all users on your local server. With a themed server like Fosstodon where most users share a common interest this seems to give you two interesting streams. You can also follow the federated stream of toots from all servers followed by any user on your server. On Fosstodon, which has almost 30,000 users, there is a good chance we collectively are following at least one user on a great number of other servers which makes the federated stream massive. I haven't quite figured out how to use it or if I like it yet.
So, am I to quit Twitter now? For the moment I haven't cut anything, I've just added Mastodon to my collection of social media, but I'm pretty sure I'll spend more time on Mastodon and less in any of the others. Perhaps a close down of my Twitter account might happen in the future if I see it not adding any value.
Another interesting side effect of my activities this week is that I've rediscovered my old blog. And here I am, writing a new blog post for the first time in almost ten years. Is this a one time wonder? I don't know, but my newly found ambition is to take up blogging again. I think it would be fun to blog about what I'm currently doing at work, such as Software Architecture Visualizations using Simon Browns C4 model and Structurizr, Consumer Contract Testing with PACT and growing Development Efficiency within our IT-organization, among other things. Only time can tell if I will succeed but if you are interested in finding out follow me on Mastodon (or on Twitter).
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