Pete's Log: RIP mastodon.technology
Entry #2153, (Fediverse)(posted when I was 44 years old.)
mastodon.technology, the Mastodon instance I've been using, is shutting down. The announcement briefly made it to the top of Hacker News.
The news comes shortly after the Fediverse has seen another large Twitter influx after the news Musk is buying Twitter after all. And mastodon.technology being one of the bigger instances makes it particularly noteworthy. The local discussion on mastodon.technology currently features various threads on how to self-host, instance recommendations, and people announcing new instances they've started.
I am mostly a passive consumer of Mastodon, but I had managed to curate a small but interesting set of accounts I was following. Luckily it looks like Mastodon makes it (theoretically) painless to move to a new instance. Now I just need to find one.
I had intentionally not followed many instance-local accounts since I enjoyed reading the local timeline, so following them would have just had me seeing posts in both my home tab and local tabs. So now I'm going to have to find the accounts I enjoyed most and follow them with the hope that after they migrate somewhere and I migrate somewhere, things will just work and I can still follow them.
I do already have one new account up and running on a promising instance that is dad-focused. We'll see how it goes. If nothing else, it's an interesting exercise in learning more about the Fediverse. Strengths and drawbacks and all.