All in on the Fediverse and trying to leave corporate social media
There’s been many good posts about this already by others but just throwing my two cents in to say that trying to ditch corporate social media as best I can has been liberating.
I was going to say that this began for me in 2022 when I deleted my Twitter account but in truth it happened earlier when I deactivated my Facebook account. I only deleted that recently though when I remembered that it was only deactivated and that I hadn’t actually deleted it fully. I immediately went back and fixed this.
After deleting my Twitter account I opened an account on Mastodon (on the metalhead.club instance) and also got an early invitation to Bluesky. A few years on and that Mastodon account is my main social media that I use all the time, the Bluesky account has also been deleted. I didn’t like it much, nor the corporate VC route they were taking, so when they asked for age verification it was an easy decision to delete that account. I also recently deleted my Discord account which was sad to leave a community behind but it felt necessary for me to do that.
On the contrary though I absolutely love using my Mastodon account, I have about half the followers on there that I did on Twitter, but it’s not about numbers. It’s about the interactions and the experience which is so much better than I could have hoped for. It’s also pretty easy to get set up with. It’s slow at first because there’s no algorithm and no ads but when you get going you have a fine tuned timeline that’s all stuff you want to see.
There’s been loads of articles saying how hard it is to set it up but I don’t understand that. I’m not very tech minded at all, although being on Mastodon is changing that, and I figured it out pretty easy. If anyone is interested in giving it a go and wants a hand though please email me or check out these sites:
Fedi Tips - a good guide to the Fediverse and how to use it
Fedi Garden - tips for getting started and picking a server
Fedi Directory - list of some people to follow by topic
There’s also a good guide to the Fediverse as a whole in video format here
Being on Mastodon also convinced me to set up this blog. I’ve always wanted to but I never really got round to it but I’m glad I did and it’s been so rewarding having a digital space of my own.
Speaking of digital spaces of my own, I also briefly ran my own single user server on the Fediverse. Rather than Mastodon I chose to use a different software called GoToSocial. I loved it and it felt so cool running this. I recently shut it down because I wasn’t using it much so felt silly paying for the domain (hosting and running the actual instance was cheap) but I’d love to do it again in the future.
Anyway, I’m off work today so I’m going for a walk and maybe to a bakery.
Hails!
Email me at hailsandales@gmail.com to reply/chat :)