Bye Twitter

I quit Twitter a few months ago, not because Elon was buying it, but because I really don't like the way algorithms distort reality by amplifying the voices of celebrities and "influencers" who are often paid by companies and other entities to promote the "current thing". These tweets go viral, trend, and control the conversation on Twitter.

I still find myself checking Twitter occasionally. Unfortunately there is a lot of information there. People send me links to tweets or I want to find out what's going on in the topics I followed there.

By "quitting" I mean I deleted all my tweets and no longer post there, set my account to private and deleted the app.

I switched to Mastodon. Mastodon is a federated social media network. You can join a free server or start your own. I started my own. Nobody controls Mastodon, each server regulates itself. Since I'm the only user on my server, I don't have to worry about ads, trackers, algorithms, getting shadow banned, or being cancelled or dealing with people who have inflammatory opinions.

There is no algorithm on Mastodon. You just get a firehose of information from what's happening on your server - so on mine, my timeline is empty. There is also a federated timeline that shows posts from people I follow on other servers. Without the algorithm, the conversations on Mastodon are more diverse and there is not a small group of elitist people with blue checkmarks dominating the conversation. Servers are often focused on specific topics, sort of like reddit's subreddit scheme. Which makes it easy to avoid the purple haired weirdos.

No ads, no algorithms, no suppression of information, it's great.

I used Hostdon.jp to set up my server. I pay in Yen, and had to use Apple's translate tool to navigate the site, but my server costs about $4 a month. Not bad.