Let’s try Mastodon

I’ve been thinking of giving Mastodon a try and created an account for myself. 

As Twitter continues to self-destruct, I’ll move over more and more to Mastodon. And here is how:

Mastodon has a distributed server model and anyone can setup their own server and then add it into the “federated” environment. I decided against building my own at this time — I spend enough time maintaining my blog! So, I wanted to use a server hosted by someone else and there are a whole bunch to pick from. I didn’t put a whole bunch of thought into it, over and above finding some level of amusement in the lol in Mastodon.lol, noticing it was aimed at LGBTQIA peeps and thinking “oh yeah, that sounds good”.

I searched for people I follow on Twitter who have mentioned a Mastodon account in the recent posts using FediFinder — worked well!

I’ll send my posts across platforms, initially using Twitter as the source and transferring slowly over to using Mastodon as the source, using the excellent Crossposter by Renato Lond Cerqueira. 

If Mastodon offers OpenID auth, and it does use oAuth which is half the battle, then I’ll even add a “sign in with Mastodon” to this blog, too.

I don’t know whether my presence on Twitter will remain the same as now or decrease over time. Some of that decision will be in other people’s hands in San Francisco, it seems. going to be a wild ride, I fear.