Taking a look at Mastodon

Mastodon is interesting. On the surface it might just seem like a Twitter clone, but it's based on a federated protocol called ActivityPub'. What this means in practice is that there's no central server. There's many instances. Each of these instances is managed by different people, and many of them focus on specific interests.

With email, it doesn't matter which provider you go with Thanks to universal SMTP standards that every server uses, you can exchange messages with everyone else. This is the same with Mastodon. You're not siloed into a single instance, and you can follow people from any other instance. Unlike email, it appears that with Mastodon you can actually migrate to different instances if you don't like your current one.

I've left Twitter behind, too, and am having a much better time on Mastodon ever since. I plan on setting up a proper OSNews account on Mastodon as well, but that requires some coordination with Adam (our admin) and David (OSNews' owner) that I haven't gotten round to yet. You can follow me here if you so desire.