The Internet is exciting again

tl;dr - i have started to embrace the fediverse, and it gives warm fuzzy feelilngs

Being left out and left behind

Every now and again my friends and I try out a new game. They are usually the ones discovering the games, and then they loop me in if the game passes the litmus test of not being terrible. But, whenever I join, the others are usually a bit ahead of me. If not in equipment and level, then in playtime and general experience with the game. So, while I’m fiddling around figuring out what weapon to use or what skills to invest into, they are already ahead of me in the level and getting more things done. Not all games are like this, but you can probably imagine that it’s harder for me to get motivated to play more when it happens. I get overwhelmed with a feeling of being perpetually left behind - a feeling of not being able to participate - and that very quickly drains any joy that could’ve been found.

I always felt the same way around social media. Always perpetually missing out, and looking for some kind of joy that can never be found. Until recently, I couldn’t really put a finger on why I felt that way. Not being able to identify the reason for this annoyed me, because I have little to no desire of being social media famous or whatever. So, why was not participating feeling wrong? Also, why do I keep coming back? I should know better than to doom-scroll through repeated hateful speech and advertisements in search of a dopamine kick that never comes. Why am I still participating, when it feels bad and I know it’s bad?

Then… a man-child billionaire bought a corporation.

The old world’s on fire 🔥

So, in case you blissfully haven’t heard of it yet - Twitter’s been in the news a bit recently. The short story is that a dude bought the whole thing, fired more than half of the workforce¹, and then removed the ban of the account of a disgraced former president.² There’s a lot more nonsense going on, but it’s all the bad kind. The re-instating was the final drop for me, so yesterday I deleted my account and the app from my phone.

It’s the internet equivalent of looking at a car crash; it’s really hard to look away. In all honesty, it’s kind of cool seeing such an empire fall in real time. And when I thought about that, that’s when it clicked for me. I don’t dislike the whole notion of microblogging or the general idea of social networks - I dislike that they are empires.³

So, what’s the opposite of the kinds of tech empires?

A whole new world 🎶

The answer, is Mastodon! Actually it’s the Fediverse, but today we’re only talking about the Mastodon part of things⁴. The gist is - instead of a single entity hosting everything, the idea of the Fediverse is that those that want to can host their own services, and then there are tools and protocols to make the services communicate and speak together.

The usual easy pitch is that it is kind of like email; no one “owns” email - but different providers can still talk to each other. For a super nice in-depth guide to many of the concepts, there’s the excellent Guide to Mastodon.

I am now @Olivia5k@tech.lgbt! This showcases how neat the hosting model is. Perhaps obviously, a domain called tech.lgbt is made by and for techie LGBT people. I am one of those, so I figured it would be a suitable home for me in this new internet paradigm. And of course, it was. I posted an introduction post with some descriptive hashtags (like #trans), and some lovely people came by and said hi. When I came out as trans on Twitter I also made a post with the #trans hashtag, only to discover that it was only used for pornography. That was a meh moment if there ever was one, heh.

Another cool usage that I want to showcase is The Internet Archive. They own and operate a Mastodon service that they use for communications. It’s super clear who they are, and since they don’t have open registrations, it will stay that way. Again, very similar to email.

Yesterday when I was browsing around and just exploring things, the service went down for a few minutes. I guess the operators did some maintenance or something like that. While downtime is generally not something that’s desirable, I was actually pretty excited. It reminded me not to take it for granted. It might not be there tomorrow. It reminded me that the Internet is there to be explored, and that just gives me warm fuzzy feelings inside.

Suddenly the Internet was exciting again

I think it’s easy to kind of overstate when a big shift is happening in the world - especially since we’ve been practically bombarded with world-altering historic events over the last few years. I have hope that this opens up a new neat world on the internet though; one that’s smaller, less hateful, and less filled with fucking ads.

If you are interested and want to join this movement, you can and you should! Again, the Guide to Mastodon is excellent. Right now many Mastodon services have closed their invitations due to the massive spikes of users leaving Twitter and looking for something else. I have invites to @tech.lgbt, if that’s something that would suit you. Feel free to fire me an email if such is the case! Other than that, the guide linked above has a good suite of suggestions on how to move forward.

Is Mastodon going to overtake Twitter (et. al.) and take over the world? No. Actually, not doing that is the point. We need less empires, and more collaboration and communication between humans. Being part of that right now is really exciting though.

Feeling good about the Internet. Can’t remember when that happened last. Here’s hoping that the feeling can last for a bit. 💜