Tech projects, hobby programming, and geeky thoughts of Paolo Amoroso

My first day in the fediverse

To dip my toes in the fediverse, yesterday I joined the Mastodon.technology Mastodon instance for people interested in technology. I signed up as @amoroso@mastodon.technology but my journal was already in the fediverse as @paolo@journal.paoloamoroso.com

I had been meaning to do it for a while. My decision to dial down on Twitter gave me the motivation to sit down and try the platform.

Using Mastodon

I read the Mastodon user documentation, but playing with the system a bit was enough to get me up to speed with most of the features.

The website is clean and smooth and lets me do the customizations I really need, such as setting a light theme and changing the language to English. I like the TweetDeck-like advanced web interface. I initially planned to try a Mastodon client for my Android devices. However, the PWA works so well on mobile that it's good enough for me.

I expected more confusion between the local and the federated timeline, but figuring which is which and where to get what I want turned out to be easy.

The community

Within hours of joining Mastodon and posting two toots, I gained 2 followers and a few favorites and boosts. I also got into a couple of interesting conversations. On Twitter, it would have taken me months to reach a comparable level of engagement.

My first impression is people on Mastodon care about sharing and discussion rather than building a following like on traditional social platforms. It's also a place where more people who do cool niche projects and stuff hang out. For example, I immediately followed Techy Things @ZephyrZ80, a computer engineering hobbyist who designs and builds his own Z80-based single-board computers.

I'm looking forward to exploring the fediverse in more depth.

Update

In October of 2022 I migrated from Mastodon.technology to Fosstodon and my new profile is @amoroso@fosstodon.org

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