With the latest development of Twitter, I recently joined Mastodon. I didn’t really announced it over Twitter (aka “the birdsite”) because of the drama and blocking happening there, as I still consume content from non-Mastodon personas and companies.
My website is up to date with the link to my profile: @galstar@hachyderm.io. Feel free to reach out to me, DM or mention.
“Let’s think about protocols, not proprietary APIs” is a sentence that my team in IDF used to say a lot. “We want a chat”, “can we use XMPP as the back-end? IRC? Can we leverage open standards?”.
We regularly talked about how “if e-mail was invented today, we would have Google Mail, Microsoft Mail, …”, and none of these programs could connect to each other.
This is why I’m intrigued about stuff like Mastodon, Matrix and ActivityPub. I can’t really convince people to drop Telegram or WhatsApp in favor of Matrix, but I would like to keep it in the back of my mind. Maybe if I ever start a company, we can run a Matrix server as the communication mechanism. Maybe not. Who knows.
For those interested in ActivityPub, the protocol that drives Mastodon and other decentralized & federated social platforms, I found a neat podcast that discusses it. It has a couple of episodes on it and I highly recommend it: Libre Lounge: ActivityPub (Part 1).
That’s also a good opportunity to thanks @nova@hachyderm.io for hosting the instance I’m on. I looked at a couple of instances and then decided to go with Hachyderm as it felt like “the empathy-oriented dev instance”, which I dig.
I also considered babka.social, the Jewish Mastodon instance, but I felt like I’d like to listen to good devs sharing stuff, more than Jewish people. I wonder if in the future someone’s identity can be detached from an instance: so I can have two (or more) homes. This talk by @rolltime discusses about it briefly.
Anywayyyyy…. reach me on Mastodon to let me know what you think and say hi!
(sidenote: I feel, that like most “dramatic changes”, like “moving from GitHub to GitLab” — the “Twitter to Mastodon” movement have big chances to fail. But it’s not written in stone. We can make the difference. Open software and open protocols can work out, and the experience is not bad at all. But only time will tell.)