Welp, I’ve only been on Mastodon for 2 days, and it didn’t take long to have my home server (or “instance”) to stall and crash a while. I’m neither surprised nor terribly upset, given the recent stampede of Twitter users to the platform.
As I said in my initial post there (I refuse to use the Mastodon term “toot”), I really don’t need another social media platform. But I liked the idea of a larger alternative online community.
As much as I’ve appreciated Micro.blog over the years—and I have no intention of leaving it—I never felt I clicked much with the community or truly found a tribe there. It’s a friendly bunch, for the most part, but (a) I never quite found enough commonality to click deeply with others, and (b) even for all its self-satisfied sense of civility, I still ran into some judginess (my speculation about my own neurodivergent state comes to mind) and twee political correctness that increasingly annoyed me. Plus it still hasn’t widened much beyond the primarily affluent White middle-aged Apple fanboy male demographic it started with, which—literally and otherwise—can get kind of old after a while. (That group butted heads with the equally outspoken PC users at the forefront of the whole pronouns-and-social-consciousness-on-your-sleeve thing, and the civility dwindled down to hurt feelings and stomping away.) So, I only post very occasionally to the timeline there.
Twitter, of course, wasn’t that great with social connections beyond the people I knew in real life, either. But I came to expect that, even at its most cordial during its early years.
So far, Mastodon beats M.b in sheer numbers and potential for genial conversation and sharing of common interests. I’m holding out hope that I can connect with even a small handful of fellow travelers, if not an outright tribe.
My only other hope, shared by many Masto users I’ve found, is that the influx of Twitter exiles doesn’t turn the place into the festering hellhole of shitposting and screaming that we all are leaving behind.