Act I: Exodus
I was at work late on a windy Oklahoma evening in December 2022. I just needed to design few sports pages for the newspaper, light work, as at the time our deadline was 12:30AM. I was having the time of my life as I had the office to myself. I had music playing loud, I was sipping on a Red Bull, and was in a Discord VC with a close friend. Just a few hours prior, the ElonJet account on Twitter1 had been suspended and we were discussing the uncertain future of the platform.
Just a few months prior Elon Musk had closed his $44 billion acquisition and was slowly but surely turning his “free speech absolutist” façade into nothing more than a joke among his detractors. “Hey, look at what I just sent you,” my friend said as my watch vibrated with a Discord ping. It was a tweet from Musk that read “Twitter will soon require location access to use the app.” I responded with a laugh and a hearty “Fuck that!” This worried the both of us, as Musk’s political beliefs had been shifting further right over the years and both of us belonged to various marginalized communities. The last thing we needed was another far-right led big tech company logging our every move. I promptly uninstalled the app from my phone and iPad. “I guess I’ll just have to use it in incognito mode,” I quipped as I turned my attention back to my work. “Twitter has only gotten worse since he bought it, I should probably b using it less anyways.”
Then Elon came for the journalists, and I left the platform – because free speech was under attack. In an instant I was forced out of the spaceflight obsessed community I had been a part of for years. I lost too many friends because of that, and vowed to never have to do it again.
Act II: A federated future
Earlier in the year I had noticed a link in a mutual’s Twitter bio. “What the fuck is Mastodon, and why does this email address have an ‘at’ symbol at the beginning of it,” I wondered as I opened Wikipedia to look it up. For the uninitiated, as I once was, here’s the excerpt from the wiki: “Mastodon is free and open-source software for running self-hosted social networking services. It has microblogging features similar to Twitter, which are offered by a large number of independently run nodes, known as instances or servers, each with its own code of conduct, terms of service, privacy policy, privacy options, and content moderation policies.”
“…you’re telling me there’s been open-source Twitter full of fossbros and ThinkPad wielding trans girls this whole time?”
After learning this information, I hurriedly sent a message to my home Discord server: “So you’re telling me there’s been open-source Twitter full of fossbros and ThinkPad wielding trans girls this whole time? And nobody told me?????” I set up an account on mastodon.online later that day.
This all went down about six months before the free speech crackdown. As time went on I spent a little less time on Twitter, and a little more on Mastodon. I found the lack of an algorithm made social media an enjoyable experience. At a certain point I would just run out of posts to look at and had to wait for more to spawn. I saw what and who I followed, nothing more and nothing less.
Eight months later I migrated to my current home on fedi2, tech.lgbt.
Act III: The personal web
While fedi is great for short and even medium-form content thanks to some instances – like tech.lgbt – having a gargantuan character limit of 1500 or more, it just isn’t it for long-form content. We call the format microblogging for a reason. That led me to finally create this website.
I have a goal to write a post here every week for the next year. Whether it be a news piece, commentary on the world, research, or updates on what I’m working on and how things are going, I’ll put at least a bit of it here every week. I hope you’ll join me on this journey of retaking my space on the personal web.
Footnotes
1: I do not care what AP says, I will not and will never say “X” or “X, formerly known as Twitter.”
2: Fedi is a slang term for fediverse, the ActivityPub centered concept that Mastodon is a part of.