Twitter to Mastodon
It definitely feels like Twitter is slowly dying.
I have used Twitter for years, definitely more as a consumer than a publisher. During this time I have refined the accounts I follow to provide a clean and useful stream of information. This was aided by the use of Flamingo as my client of choice which provided a feed free of adverts and cruft.
The first sign something was wrong with Twitter was when Flamingo no longer received any new updates. This was followed in the tech press by news that basically all third party clients had been cut off; a very sad day.
At this point I tried the official client and website - both were horrendous. I switched to using Tweetdeck which, although marginally better, was far from a friendly experience. This is my current approach as there is nothing else really available. I will still need to use it as it is one of the means that the school my children attend send out news updates.
Recently there was the announcement that the free API access was going to be removed. This in turn will kill a whole other corner of Twitter usage. There has also been a significant drop in the number of messages I am seeing in my feed over the last couple of weeks. People are giving up on the mess that it has become.
I had been reading about Mastodon for a while and finally decided to give it a go. The first hurdle, and the one most people stumble over, was picking where to create my account. I did some reading up and one of the people I admire had decided to use Hachyderm so I went with that.
The sign up process was pretty straightforward and I have also linked my github profile to my Mastodon profile. For a client I am using Tusky on my android phone.
I used MovetoDon to find out that only four accounts I follow on Twitter were findable on Mastodon - not great but it's a start.
My initial impression is that it is fairly similar to Twitter from a high level but has way less traffic.
I think it is a short term solution and I will end up following both for now but it will be interesting to see where it goes.
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