I have been thinking recently about trying out federated social media site Mastodon. I’m interested in non-algorithmic microblogging and solutions that don’t actively attempt to antagonize me. Cherie Baker recently joined Mastodon and has some good things to say about her experience.
To my surprise, I like it! Mastodon + blog feels like a comfortable setup. In truth, shoehorning Twitter-like activity into a blog format always felt awkward to me. I’m not going to “live tweet” a movie on my blog, there are no silly gifs conversations here, and my blog has no good options for ephemerality other than lots of manual deletions.
I can relate to it feeling awkward tweet-size posts into a main blog. It makes some sense to keep short updates separate. I also learned about features that I didn’t know existed in Mastodon from Baker’s post — such as the ability to set posts to auto delete unless you mark them for retention. That pairs well with the transient nature of many microblog posts.
I’m just not sure that I need a service that is such a direct Twitter replacement, though, so I’ll think before I leap into another pond.
