Re: Shame about Mastodon
I opened a Mastodon account in 2019 but rarely used it because it was mainly occupied by nerds. Nothing against nerds, I'm one myself, but I do have other topics of interest besides Python, or protocols, or filesystems.
I started using it again early in 2022, not long before Musk starting making sounds about wishing to get on the Twitter board, and found it to be a much broader place. It finally felt like a full spectrum social network, not just techies. Mid 2022 I stopped using Twitter and noticed the mass exodus from Twitter on a daily basis. People I missed because I used to follow them on Twitter had moved to Mastodon, servers started creaking under the insane influx of new users (I believe there was a month where Mastodon gained as many users in a month as it had done in the six years prior) and Twitter refugees who had dipped their toes into Masto or hedged their bets between both now decided to stay.
What was interesting to see was the massive exodus of scientists from Twitter to Mastodon, entire disciplines moved over. Or the InfoSec community. Or the Twitter economists community. That there is now serious momentum that wasn't there prior to 2022 can be seen by the German government, the EU, the Dutch government, and recently the Swiss government all hosting their own Mastodon accounts on their own Mastodon servers. With Twitter now behind a login, and soon perhaps even a paywall, Twitter is no longer the useful comms platform it used to be for them.
Apart from some very interesting people what strikes me most is how different a platform can be if monetisation is not the most important aspect. The whole platform is built for users instead of shareholders. So, yes you can export all your data if your want to, nobody's trying to keep you in the network. You can read everything without needing an account or behind a paywall, you can even follow posts by people and businesses using RSS. There are no enragement inducing algorithms that are set up to force feed content that will make you angry. There's no self-censorship because a single wrong word will cause an angry Twitter-style pile-on.
Anyway, here's some recommended follows: Marcus Hutchins, Ian Betteridge, Glyn Moody, Dare Obasanjo, and Baldur Bjarnason.