It’s November 2022 and Elon Musk’s deal to buy Twitter just completed a week or so ago. In the time since, Twitter has become a worse place and Mastodon has skyrocketed in popularity. Just in the past week, 400 thousand people signed up; 100x more people than in weeks previous.

I’ve had a Mastodon account since 2019, and I’ve posted to it about as much as I’ve posted to Twitter (which is not often, as you could probably surmise from the amount of blog posts I’ve written over the years!), but just this week I’ve had infinitely more interactions on Mastodon than before.

I’m hoping it keeps going; Federation/decentralization is what the web was made for (in my opinion), and it’s what makes the web thrive. A common sentiment is that Mastodon/the Federation seems closer to the web from the 90s-early 00s, and it’s absolutely accurate. Just people being people, not being fed to algorithms in order to make a profit.

It’s nice, really.

In the spirit of learning and trying to set up a safe place for me and my family to keep in touch (I don’t like Meta or their products), I set up a Friendica server. Basically Facebook that can connect to the other Fediverse instances if you so desire (I don’t).

I’ll be posting a guide in the near future as it was a bit of a learning experience to set up, but it’s up, it’s working, and it’s a decent system. It needs a little TLC (some UX decisions are… interesting), but it’s a surprisingly optimized web app that looks decent.

Maybe I’ll take some time and send some feature requests or just pull requests to assist with the UX…