Like many people, I’ve made the decision to migrate my sparce social media presence from Twitter to Mastodon. I am a big advocate of open source. I think the fediverse, as the open-source Mastodon ecosystem has been referred to, is a flexible and very useful system for a well-curated social media presence. It is a little more involved to get started, so here are some tips.

The first thing you need to do is decide on a server. Mastodon servers are where your profile will live and will act as your local population. However, like email, mastodon users can interact with and follow peolpe from any other server. Mastodon makes it relatively easy to migrate your account if you want to move to a new server so don’t get locked up with indecision at this point. Just spend a few minutes and jump right in. I chose the Fosstodon server, a free and open source (FOSS) interest server because I think this crowd will match a lot of my interests. After you’ve chosen a server, everything else seems pretty self-explanatory, so I won’t bore you. Take some time to look through the server list and dive right in. Over the last couple of weeks a lot of people have spoken about the minor barrier to entry as if it were insurmountable. Trust me, you got this.

There are a few things you should know about setting up your profile. First, unlike Twitter, you don’t need to go through any official verification process. You can link you own personal website to your profile and it will give you a green validation checkmark if you link to your own website. This means everyone can self-verify using their own web presence. I think this is fantastic not only for celebrity personalities, but also for researchers and experts in fields that can link to their own work and verify their social media presence. If you go to my profile, you’ll see my green checkmark simply from linking my account to this website. The next thing to know about using Mastodon is that it has a focus on discussing community interests. You will not, in the current climate, be boosted to 15 minutes of fame by posting inflammatory political remarks or hate speech. Since the servers are privately owned and operated, the likelihood is that you will almost immediately be removed by a moderator for breaking the server rules. This has meant, in my experience, that the Mastodon servers, like Fosstodon, remain very friendly places where people mostly discuss shared interests. Since servers are privately funded from donations, there are no advertisements. I think we could all do with fewer advertisements.

Finally, what about your content? Once I followed many interesting accounts from community recommendations, I posted an introduction and just went right to work posting a couple times a day about my interests. I linked my website so community members could find my web presence and learn more about me and my work. And since I have been interested in Stable Diffusion and Dalle2 lately, I have posted 1-2 interesting images each day produced with a prompt. The community I have found across FOSS, big data science, and mathematics seem to connect with my content and my follower list is growing which means more interesting people to talk to. By all means, if you are reading here please use my Mastodon link, follow me, and reach out. I am very much enjoying Mastodon so far and look forward to growing my community.

What’s going on right now

What I’m building right now:

🚧 Setting up a new linux phone and developing some progressive web app ideas.
🚧 Writing an article on big data methods for solving compliance problems. More to follow.

What I’m drinking right now:

🍺 VooDoo Ranger Juicy Haze IPA

What I’m reading right now:

📚 The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien

What I’m watching right now:

📺 It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia

What I’m playing right now:

🎮 Minecraft Dungeons

What I’m Learning right now:

🎓 🎸 Memorizing all my power chords.
🎓 neovim
🎓 GoLang
🎓 AWS Certified Solution Architect Certification