everything

I love the change that's happening on the web right now, and honestly I probably have Elon Musk to thank for it.

Since Elon bought Twitter, people have been moving to Mastodon. This is great by itself – I have found Mastodon to be a better experience overall than Twitter for several reasons:

• No ads – I decided to kick in $5 a month to my server, but it's not required, so people can use Mastodon completely for free.
• Far less engagement bait – Twitter is full of these idiotic threads about the “top ways to do X” or “How to change you life by Y” and so on. These things gather so much engagement, they begin to dominate your timeline. I spent a lot of time blocking these people on Twitter.
• Far less anger – Twitter, with the algorithm, naturally tends to insert nasty flamewars into your feed. Mastodon has no algorithm, you just see a sequential list of posts from the people you follow. You can still find the high engagement stuff if you look at the #Explore area, but it's totally optional.
• 10x more connection – I have something like 400 followers on Twitter, and when I post, I get on average, probably 0.1 replies or even likes. I've seen this is pretty common too, when I look at people with 500-1000 followers, their content has very little engagement. There is no connection going on. It could be just that it's a new place, but on Mastodon I get engagement on almost every post, with only <100 followers. On top of that, people seem more eager to make actual connections, as human beings, not just as avatars on a social network.

Beyond Mastodon

Mastodon has opened my eyes again to the promise of the web as it existed way back in my college days (2005ish) – the promise of open communities, open sharing of knowledge, connections across divides. Now that the Great Mastodon Migration is happening, the Fediverse feels viable in a way it didn't before.

This blog is a great example of it, using WriteFreely to host my own blog (though you can buy a pretty affordable hosted version at Write.as), which natively syndicates into the Fediverse (so people can follow me on Mastodon or wherever else), publishes an RSS feed, and so on.

I also plan to setup Pixelfed, an Instagram like service. I'm especially excited about this, because I never liked the idea of posting pictures into Instagram, where the content is not really mine, and the format is so restrictive.

Going back to RSS

Today, upon reading that Jason Kottke will start blogging again, it took me back to those old days when I used to use Google Reader to keep up on my favorite blogs.

This was a good time on the web for me – lots of longer form content, consumed at my leisure. A big departure from what I had gotten sucked into in the last year on Twitter, constant soundbites, engagement bait, and anger.

So I went looking around for an RSS reader. I had tried to use Feedly before but the interface just annoys me to no end. I really just want a clean interface like Reader. I found today Stringer, a self hosted RSS reader I can put up on this server (so I can access it on any connected device), which has a super clean interface.

I'm excited to get back to the old web. I hope enough other people are going to do the same.