Birds versus Mammuts

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Twitter

  • @leonieke (Oct 29, 2008 — ✝Nov 19 2022)

I remember being stuck in an elevator with Stephen Fry and a large group of people I did not know. I’ve met other great people in real life through twitter with a #TheaterTweetup, who have now become my very good friends, but as so many have done before me, and as so many will do after me: it is time to say goodbye to twitter. It’s been fun, it’s been blood pressure raising, it’s been interesting. Goodbye.1

Mastodon

Finding People

As you can see when you check my earliest mastodon account, I’ve had an account on an instance for a few years, but I was not active until early November 2022. I have found many new people since then and I’m suddenly more open about my hobbies and interests. It seems my inner nerd, which I never considered to be hidden on Twitter, is now blossoming like never before. I’m following people with a background (professional and amateur) in astronomy, programming, photography, mycology. Best of all? I’m folliwing a hashtag on cross stitching, which has introduced a whole new group to my daily feeds.

So far, about two weeks in? I’m a fan!

I have uploaded my twitter follower list to a variety of mastodon-twitter-user-finder-things, but they are hit and miss. It’s much easier to do an advanced twitter search in the bios of the users you follow there. Just look for “mastodon” and information will pop up.2

Choosing Servers

Back in 2016, I was clueless. I simply jumped on a bandwagon called “mastodon” and I wanted to register an account.3 Now turn to November 2022, I was happy that I had my original (mastodon.social) account, but as I’ve become more and more aware of the price of my data, the idea of hosting my own mastodon server was very appealing. Quickly I registered at masto.host with a unused domain and presto! I was running my own mastodon instance (vitaulium.nl) and I in control of my own data, so to speak.

My own data, yes, and of course the posts of everyone else I was following or boosting or even simply liking. I was taken back by the quick growth of the media storage of my masto.host server, even though the tier I was using could have handled about 20 accounts. So, for now, it’s back to someone else’s mastodon server (mstdn.social). I will get back to hosting my own mastodon instance, but not without thinking it through and setting up a good server space.

I have bigger plans, as drawn on this piece of paper, so who know what will happen next.

“server plans”

(Top image source: “1903.Un mammut estratto dal ghiaccio Siberiano e tassidermizzato, esposto al museo di San Pietroburgo (foto: Hulton Collection/Getty Images)” https://www.wired.it/scienza/biotech/2016/02/12/bufala-bistecca-mammut/)

  1. I am not deleting my account, I have deleted most of my tweets and DMs. One of the things that makes Mastodon such a lovely environment is the lack of instant news and journalists, but I still want to follow them, especially the journalists reporting from Ukraine. Update 2023-01-05: I have deactivated my account at Twitter. If I do not log in again, it will be deleted automatically. ↩︎

  2. It’s best to extend your search to include also the names of some of the larger other instances, which do not have “mastodon” in its domain. ↩︎

  3. With a fairly unusual firstname, I can often register easily without having to resort to using nicknames or extended versions of my name. Except on Instagram, where I stupidly in a feat of anger deleted my account (@leonieke) when they were sold to Facebook. Then when I wanted to use their service after all, I could not get my original account name back. Typical! ↩︎

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