UPDATE: There is another exodus from Twitter happening right now (November 2022) following the controversial buyout of the microblogging site by billionaire Leon Umsk [anag. 4,4]. I left my account relatively dormant in May this year but have updated a little in the last couple of weeks and connected with a few more people.
If you’ve joined you can search for me with the following handle
@[email protected]
You may have heard mention of the various “new” alternatives to Twitter and other such social media sites, Counter.Socia, Tribel, Cohost! None of them is actually new, but changes and issues with the old-school social media has brought them to the attention of the masses in the last week or two…basically in April 2022, Musk offered to buy Twitter.
One of them is part of the so-called Fediverse and is called Mastodon. I’ll leave it to you to search those terms and decide whether you’re in or not. It turns out I’d joined in since November 2019 having signed up to “Mastodon.Social” back then on a whim and probably a recommendation, but probably because it was the big, generic one and there was no decent niche alternative for a science writing, photographing, singer-songwriter.
There are pros and cons although I’ve not really seen any cons other than that having been used to my tens of thousands of Twitter followers, I am not looking at a couple of dozen followers on Mastodon at the time of writing, hopefully, that will grow in the coming weeks.
So, if you’re so inclined sign up for an instance, and follow me [email protected]. Incidentally, you don’t have to be a member of Mastodon.Social to follow me you can be on any instance, they all communicate with each other by virtue of shared software and protocols and what have you.
The bottom line: Where twitter was once friendly watercooler chit-chat and is now a hate-filled cesspit of trolls and ugly-on-the-inside celebrities, Mastodon is a much friendlier place where people share their creative output and have civilised discussions.