Mastodon
The last years I used Twitter very gladly and mainly to stay in contact with my friends from the Java community. Short updates as Tweet, coordination via Direct Message, everything went wonderfully. Then Elon Musk came along and bought Twitter. I didn’t think that was so bad yet, after all Microsoft also bought GitHub and although some took that as a reason to switch to GitLab, I stayed with GitHub. As long as nothing changes and I continue to be satisfied, why would I switch?
With Twitter, things are now a bit different. Although I’m very happy with the service’s offerings, Twitter itself is changing. The announcements made by Elon Musk are stirring up concerns in me about more hate speech and fakenews on the network. The board of directors was completely dismissed by Elon and he made himself the sole director. So a kind of God in the Twitterverse. Half of the employees are to go and the remaining developers get the gun on their chest to always deliver features within a week or be terminated. And now they want to charge for account verification ( to be precise, you will only be able to verify accounts if you sign up for a $19 per month subscription).
The service is still great, but I find the politics behind it repulsive. And it’s not just me. There has been an exodus in my Java Bubble on Twitter, pretty much everyone has switched to Mastodon in the last few days or is in the process of doing so. I’ve been following along. Mastodon is not directly comparable to Twitter, but it has great potential and above all it seems to offer everything I need. Especially the contacts from my bubble, without which it would be quite lonely otherwise. So I switched last weekend as well and you can find me at Mastodon from now on as @McPringle@mastodon.social.
Thanks to Marc R. Hoffmann there is also a great GitHub Repository where all important people from the Java bubble are listed with their Twitter and Mastodon account. The list is getting longer every day. The cool thing is that it generates a CSV file that you can import into your Mastodon account. Cool!
Now I hope that Mastodon respectively the Fediverse will completely replace Twitter in the medium term, at least for me. Towards a decentralized future in which we own our data ourselves! Now no longer tweeted, but tooted and no longer retweeted, but boosted!