My First “Fediversary”
- Published on:
- Categories:
- Fediverse 2, Mastodon 4, IndieWeb 7, Personal 16
- Current music:
- Sigur Rós — Ágætis Byrjun
- Current drink:
- Sweet herbal tea (it is camomile and honey, but I don’t sense it)
Technically, I tried Mastodon for the first time on April 06, 2017, and tried again a few times over the next few years, but it did not stick with me at the time.
I have some hobbies, but I’m not that deep into them. Not as deep as I’m in CSS and front-end, and, at the time, it was rather lonely to not have the people I enjoyed following for years around.
That did change when Miriam Suzanne opened the front-end.social instance, and my presence there is what I’m celebrating today.
I can say that, right now, almost everyone I care about in the front-end world is present either on this instance or in its neighborhood — having a dedicated place for active, sensible people made the whole experience good enough. Critical mass, all of that.
Since the time the LiveJournal started to lose people due to all the social networks pulling people out into their nets, I always had this thought that it is not the place that is important but the people there. Sadly, at the time, people did not really move to just one social network — some moved to twitter, some to facebook, to instagram, somewhere else.
LiveJournal was mostly pseudonymous, allowing you to create connections with people you would never meet in real life and who had completely different lives from you. The real-name policies of most social networks and the absence of control over your community led to people dissipating into the air. I could follow some of my older friends to one place, but not to another.
Even though most of the people I follow on Fediverse now are on Mastodon, I really like the idea that it is possible to have different types of networks, all connected, where you would not need to go and create another separate account in order to follow and connect with someone.
Like, there are things like Pixelfed, Bookwyrm, and the whole IndieWeb way of connecting your website as almost a first-class citizen to the Fediverse (see Bridgy Fed for example).
Now, even if something happened to front-end.social in the worst-case scenario, I believe things would still be ok. People would move to other places in the Fediverse, could keep following almost everyone they did previously, and ideally could move all the followers along with them (though I wish Mastodon did provide some backup mechanism in case the server goes black, and you’re unable to set up the migration).
All in all, I’m very happy to be on Mastodon and a part of the Fediverse as a whole. To the next anniversary!