# 02 Mar 2023 - And Then Twitter Died & Mastodon Thrived
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It's been 2.5 years since I last wrote here, but I'm actually still
here on SDF. I kept checking in on Gopher occasionally. I still love
the idea of a simple system accessible from every computing device,
no matter how underpowered. But it isn't possible for me to exist only
on Gopher, I just can't find answers and information here that I need.
I'm still using the web, though at least I've switched entirely to
Brave Search away from Google.
But then, November 2022 happened. Elon Musk bought Twitter, destroyed
third party client access, sacked most of the staff & destroyed the
platform's reliability, demonstrated that he doesn't actually know
what he's talking about, made several highly questionable political
statements... and everyone fled to Mastodon.
And SDF already had a Mastodon instance, and people were actually
participating there. And I started seeing glimpses of that late 90's
internet culture & wonder again. They stayed open during the various
migration waves, unlike many other Mastodon instances, so we got lots
of people here and it felt like a vibrant place. I even discovered
some new Gopher holes via posts on Mastodon.
Mastodon isn't perfect - lots of the new people brought their "hot
take" and "political outrage" culture with them. The privacy culture
of Mastodon's developers makes it really hard to search for people or
topics (the same kind of discovery problems that Gopher has). I don't
like that I can't point my own domain name to a Mastodon instance to
have a more permanent handle/address, the way my email address can
survive changes between MX servers by changing DNS records. And I
still dislike that the TLS requirements make it very difficult for
retro machines like C64 or Apple IIGS to connect, the same criticism
I have about Gemini. Surely blasting 500 characters of text to a
Mastodon API endpoint should be a new Hello World for all kinds of
tiny & retro machines? Does anyone remember that you could actually
tweet from a Commodore 64 to Twitter, back when their API still
allowed HTTP access?
But despite all that, Mastodon has kept my interest the last 4 months.
The ecosystem of tools & clients is growing, with all my favorite
Twitter developers (Tapbots, Matteo Villa, The Iconfactory) all making
Mastodon clients now. There's some nice interesting people here too,
though it has needed over 100 keyword filters to get to the point
where I mostly enjoy it on Mastodon. Maybe sometime I should publish
my list of 25+ keywords for filtering out games from the timeline?
I should get around to posting my Mastodon #Introduction, too. I
didn't want to post one until I felt confident I'd be sticking around,
but it's probably time. Though I still wonder if I should make an
instance of my own hosted on my own domain, so I have that permanent
Mastodon / ActivityPub handle that I want. But I don't think I want
the time & monetary expense of managing my own Mastodon server, and
Masto.Host keeps suffering from DDoS attacks. Plus Masto.Host runs on
OVH, who seem terrible at keeping hackers and threat actors out of
their systems and are often used to launch attacks on systems across
the world... but that's a story for another day.
But for now, that's my log entry to say that I'm still here. And, I'm
now an ARPA member of SDF too. The Mastodon instance motivated me to
finally send more money SDF's way.
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- SyneRyder / Kohan Ikin
http://www.kohanikin.com/
http://www.namesuppressed.com/
@
[email protected]
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