It has taken quite a while, but I have actually managed to set up an account on the Fediverse. More about that later, but, given the general ridiculousness going on at Twitter/X/Musk world, I decided a while back to look for alternatives. I have created an account in Threads, the Meta newbie in the field, but I was interested to find Mastodon. This is open source and decentralised. That means that it is run on different servers throughout the world, each of which is separate and has its own rules and memberships. However, as a member of one, you can interact with other servers. This means, at least in theory, that you can find your tribe by choosing the server that reflects your interests already. You can also find one where the rules of that server (or “instance” as it is called) match your attitudes to social media.
An additional plus for me is that the Fediverse is much more diverse than other platforms. Mastodon is intended as an alternative to Twitter, but other platforms deal with video, or audio, or images, for example. This is quite a good explanation https://opensource.com/article/23/3/tour-the-fediverse .
There are two big minuses as I see it at the moment. The first is that it is relatively small still. And, as it is decentralised, you might find it difficult to find your “tribe”. I started by signing up for an edtech instance. After a month, I still hadn’t had my application approved, and after doing some research, found that it was actually a closed group only for members of a specific organisation. This wasn’t mentioned when I was signing up! Which leads me to my second point. It is still in a relatively early stage of its development, despite being around since 2008. It still feels like something for, let’s say, enthusiasts and takes a bit of effort to understand, navigate, set up, etc.
That said, having deleted my first application, I decided to go in the other direction and sign up with Mastodon.social, which is the biggest and most general instance. This went very smoothly and I was up and running within 5 minutes. Now I have to start finding people to follow, hashtags to follow, etc. It will be interesting to see how that goes. In the meantime, if you want to take the plunge or already have, feel free to follow me here.