I Left Mastodon

Why and How I Joined Mastodon

I have been on Mastodon for about 6 years (October 16, 2018), at first, I was in the domain choochoo.space, the domain is down, so I am not going to make that a link. I was introduced to it by Daniel Shiffman, who did a tutorial on Creating fractal tree images and posting them with a Mastodon bot.

I was not really fond of microblogs, and I left choochoo.space after a few weeks. Then I found Fosstodon.org, which was also small and full of like-minded people who care about niche things and mostly FOSS.

The Downfall

Things changed around the time a billionaire bought Twitter (currently known as X), many people migrated to mastodon, things were not niche any more. There were a lot of arguments, trolling, extremist views, well, you got the gist of it.

Instances started locking down and appointing more moderators, which helped calm things down a bit. Fosstodon was one of them.

While there are many nice and good people on Fosstodon, some of them started expressing questionable views about pronouns and transgender people. As an ally, I did not like it. But I continued to stay there because the majority was still supportive of LGBTQ+ people.

Recently, things got out of hand, I do not like pointing fingers and naming people as it discomforts me, but the gist of it is that the moderation hardened against queer hashtags — essentially shadow-banning all queer people and activists — in the name of “free speech” (the irony is lost on me).

Anyway, I was asked by one of the people I follow to migrate to another instance as theirs will probably block Fosstodon sometime soon. That was the last straw for me, so I switched to another instance, but it got me thinking, do I really need another microblog? I already have a blog, and I am still in the Fediverse through my peertube instance, so I do not feel the need to have another account created in someone else’s system.

It is easy to self-host Mastodon, I know. I also know that there are many lightweight alternatives that are compatible with Mastodon and Fediverse. But I am just tired, and I don’t like microblogs in the first place. So I decided to just stop using it.

The Future

Most people I follow have websites, and they also have Atom/RSS/JSON feeds, some of them are on my blogroll page. I can just follow their longer and detailed blogs and articles instead, so that’s what I will be doing.

My website is still not fully IndieWeb compatible, the missing parts are microsub and micropub functionalities. Once those are done, people would be able to follow me from their websites directly, similar to the Fediverse. I just never got the time to sit and work on it, moving from Mastodon gives me a push to do that, so just wait for it, it will be done soonish enough.

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