Rebooting my use of Mastodon
Bryan Alexander 2023-05-09
After another few frustrating months on one Mastodon server, I’m trying the whole experience again with a reboot. I shifted my account to a new instance, which means you can find me at this address? handle? some elephant-ish nickname?
@bryanalexandee@mastodon.education
Not this Mastodon – but I do love the band.
I confess to being of two minds about Mastodon.
On the one hand, I’ve had a poor experience with the thing so far. Each server I’ve used has ranged in badness from administrators hating me to staging a vast, roaring silence in response to my every toot. The onboarding process isn’t great, reminding me of what greets non-geek users of Linux or, back in the day, Second Life. There are many mores and practices to pick up, some of which aren’t readily understood and/or contradict.
On the other, too many people I respect have made a point of committing to Mastodon. And I like the distributed, user-oriented idea of the Fediverse. So I’ll give it a shot.
This does take time. I’ve got to learn this new server’s ways. I have to manually build up my social network there – right now it’s about 1-2% the size of what I enjoy on LinkedIn and Twitter. Thankfully, some folks have been very helpful in the process.
I remain on all of my other platforms. I haven’t exited Twitter. I do owe a blog post about why I persist on Twitter and Facebook (nobody ever complains about LinkedIn), and my explanation is a version of Willie Sutton’s famous answer.
In the meantime, if you’d like to connect with me on the tusk plane, @bryanalexandee@mastodon.education is how to find me, I think. Do share your own contact in comments, if you like.