My dear friends,
TL;DR: I set up a Mastodon server for early and mid-level developers. Go join: https://mastodon.holeyfox.co.
Having spent the better part of a decade on Twitter, I hold some very fond memories about the app overall.
I started my journey as the unfortunately named Mr @Chai_C_Wahala (a handle I was sure was pure genius at the time), shouting into the void with no one shouting back. I don’t quite remember the events around my decision to create an account, except that it was a desperate bid to find clients willing to work with a young university student who had nearly no skill apart from the ability to mash the keys of a keyboard together. I hoped that, along with Twitter, Blogger and Nairaland, I would find some work writing SEO articles.
In the end, while Blogger and Nairaland found me clients, Twitter didn’t: it was too confusing, alien, and everyone ‘spoke’ tersely (such were the limitations of a platform constrained by SMS technology in its infancy).
All this served to excite and alarm me in equal measure. Suddenly,celebrities were right there, on my screen, tweeting absolutely inane things, but what really captivated me was the 24/7 non-stop improv comedy. Everybody was hilarious, spontaneous and even though the cultural contexts around the jokes were often lost on me, I chuckled good-naturedly, unable to resist the gregarious charm of the whole arrangement.
It was like one big chat room, with everybody having the same posting privileges: there was no admin, and people made the rules up as they went. The acronym ‘RT’ (which inspired the quote retweet feature as we know it today) was invented as a way to piggy-back off of someone (and often to ruthlessly roast someone). Twitter was wild. It was messyyyyy. It crashed often (remember the failwhale?). Twitter didn’t always have native support for photos, gifs or videos! You had to click over to external websites to see images hosted by third-party CDNs. Indeed, there were a million third-party apps, each uglier than the last. DMs sometimes became tweets (due, presumably to a buggy privacy setting/tweet scoping rule), then returned to being DMs, much to the chagrin of people having intimate, secret moments.
I’ve said, in the past, that Twitter’s most powerful invention was the retweet feature, which is one half of the concept of a global timeline and a content/event stream. To borrow from the philosophy of Kafka, Twitter allowed us drop a tweet in the global stream (the very act of ‘publishing’, or ‘tweeting’), and it could theoretically be seen by anyone (we were ‘subscribed’ to the global timeline by default, though clever UI design hides the overwhelming ramifications of that from us).
If you stay on Twitter long enough, you get the queasy feeling that the only thing separating you from literally all ~400m users is a thin sheet of paper and a prayer. Regardless of your status in society (be ye president or shoe vendor), you had the opportunity to be a star (on Twitter’s terms), or to be thoroughly shamed until you deleted your account. With each tweet, you were playing Russian Roulette. We felt our hearts thud in our throats and went for a joy-ride.
This planet-scale firehose feature is why Twitter found itself becoming the default headline browsing section of the internet, and thus, the lodestone of politics. With its power of amplification, attention-arresting and priceless influence for cheap, it was almost inevitable, in retrospect, that it would become such a hotly-contested ideological battle-ground.
We’ve become better for it. We’re all the worse for it. Still, it has been what it was.
Elon Musk owns Twitter now (which has grown, over the years, morphed into a more mature, sombre version of its babyself). Now that he’ssigned Twitter’s adoption papers, there are understandably mixed feelings everywhere: “Twitter is too unstable to be in the hands of someone as capricious as he is”. “Elon seems too in love with the idea of appeasing right-wing voices”. “He seems to be shooting too much from the hip! Why the hell would he charge $8 for a checkmark? I’m not paying for that!”
(Honestly, what I found most jarring were the lay-offs. It felt — from my subjective, and emotional point of view — too cold, too clammy-skinned, and rather clumsy.)
All of this is why it’s not much of a surprise to read that people are jettisoning Twitter for Mastodon, which has gained 1M monthly users on the back of public uncertainty and displeasure.
For the curious reader, Mastodon is a decentralized social network protocol that consists of multiple unique servers running instances of the Mastodon code that can talk to other servers on the network.
In a nutshell, it’s a social network of social networks, a way for anyone to create their own social network and be done with all that corporate noise. The Kansas farm of the apocalypse.
I have been curious about Mastodon since I signed up in 2018-ish, where I joined a server called Socelnet (for animators and artists). Mastodon is similar enough to Twitter that it won’t be that difficult to adapt to it. Crucially, Mastodon is many social media ‘companies’ (so to speak) run by individuals (like me, since I now run one), who set the rules.
There’s only one rule when you’re selecting a Mastodon instance: choose one you trust, and have fun.
Join my mastodon server
The turmoil of Twitter and the resurgence of Mastodon chatter re-ignited my curiosity, which led me to spin up my own Mastodon instance. It took me a few hours of work to do so, too!
It didn’t set me back much. I’m running my Mastodon instance on a 1GB memory, 25GB storage virtual machine.
Why have I done this? Simply to see if I could, to be honest, but now I have, so it’s a thing that exists. If you’re interested in joining Craft Overflow’s Mastodon instance, you can sign up here.
You may need a mobile app instead of the web interface. Mastodon itself curates a list of apps for different devices. I personally use Metatext.
When you download your app, search for “mastodon.holeyfox.co”, and you’ll find Craft Overflow’s very own Mastodon instance.
This is all nothing, of course. Or probably something. In the 24 hours since I first published this, we’ve had 3K+ interactions on the server. Still — I don’t plan to spend the rest of my life being a moderator or trying to stick it to Elon Musk. All this is is the outcome of my tinkering on the internet for a couple hours today.
Enjoy the rest of your evening, and keep being intrigued by life and everything it brings.