Moving to Fosstodon
Goodbye mastodon.social, and hello Fosstodon.
Mastodon is an alternative form of social media that is linked to the Fediverse. It can be most likened to an alternative form of Twitter, a micro-blogging platform.
mastodon.social is the flagship instance of Mastodon, run by the developers themselves. For a while now, I have had an account on the site, but recently I felt the urge to move to Fosstodon.
One cool feature of Mastodon is something called a local timeline. A local timeline is where you can see any post from someone on your Mastodon instance. This is in contrast to the federated timeline, where you can see posts from anyone on any instance that your instance federates with.
The thing about mastodon.social is that it is a firehose of content, most of which you will never interact with, so the local timeline is really quite pointless, at least for me and apparently to the developers of Mastodon themselves1. Fosstodon on the other hand is a Mastodon instance completely geared for people with a vested interest in free and open source software like myself.
The decision was easy for me, so the other day I finally made the switch after being approved by the Fosstodon admins. Mastodon makes moving profiles very simple through their tooling exposed on your profile page.
I am extremely happy with my decision to move. Please, if you see me on Fosstodon, don’t be afraid to say hi.