Twitter has had some eventful few weeks. It’s been taken over by a Billionaire who doesn’t even understand what he overpaid for. Elon is constantly going back on things he says because he’s learning as he’s going. It’s kinda funny to watch but it’s also amazing that he did not think any of this through and paid 44 Billion dollars. With the “water cooler” of the Apple community in disarray people are looking towards alternatives.

Now there are many people joining Mastodon and even Tumblr seems to be getting lots of new users. But there isn’t really anything quite like Twitter.

At first I was feeling like Elon buying Twitter was the worst thing for the community I follow. And it definitely is.

But I also think this will give us something better when the dust settles. Now I am not sure Mastodon is the answer to that and I think its to be seen where people go. Twitter took time to become the defacto place for the Apple community. It is largely a text based medium and most other social networks focus on video and photos. I go there because it’s where lots of people I follow post apps/things they’re working on, make jokes, and maybe talk about things they are angry about.

The Apple community is a small subset of Twitter’s users. It seems like most people use it to follow journalists, comedians, and again shout angry things…

This definitely doesn’t sound like a nice place and lots of times it can be bad. But there is still parts of it that are really nice and you can meet new people with shared interests. There really isn’t another social network that you can so easily message a person a short message and have them write back to you.

But the writing seems to be on the wall. Slowly it seems like more and more of my timeline are posting what their profile is over on Mastodon. Will it be the place we end up in or just a temporary spot? Its to early to tell, but this kinda feels like a great reset. A chance to start over.

Mastodon is very confusing at first and I was having trouble understanding it. Now using it right now reminds me of Tumblr back in the days when you could only use it for short periods of time before it was crashing. The official app and some third party clients are slow at times. I don’t think they are prepared for the traffic they’re getting.

When you make an account for yourself you pick an instance to join. This instance is tied to a server and you can even see where that is located and what their local time is. The bigger instances have waitlists and smaller ones let you set up an account easily. But like before when creating a few accounts for myself I was waiting a really long time for confirmation emails to set up my account. For the main account I use now it took till the next morning for them to email me back.

Once you set up your account you have your username and can edit your profile. Lots of it will remind you of Twitter but there are some key differences. There is a glorious chronological timeline with no algorithm. You can’t search “toots” for words they need to have a hashtag #example. You can “boost” or retweet posts. DM’s are available and are unencrypted like Twitter’s.

Okay back to the instances, Mastodon as a whole has users connected. But when you’re logged in and you go to a users profile if you click on their follower or followed list. What you will sometimes see is nothing, one or two results, or hundreds. This is because if you’re on the same instance as that user they will show up but if you’re not they won’t be visible. So at the moment and by design Mastodon makes it a little hard to find people you know. Someone you may follow on Twitter who is following 200 people may be of interest to you. But you won’t be able to see all the people they are following. I think even if temporary they should remove this limitation.

Right now people are trying to find people to follow and who’s on the platform. So Mastodon needs to make this an easier process. Because if you search for a user no matter their instance you can find their account. But all this aside were heading toward a post Twitter world. At least for the corner of the internet I care most about. The Apple platform developers, podcasters, and indie developers. Just like lots of other transitions going on in the community: Apple Silicon, SwiftUI, and now the hang out spot (Twitter). There is another thing that is going to shake up the community. Hopefully in the end it lets us be more connected and is a better place than we had before.

So if like me you created an account and want to follow me here is my profile.