Well, given that I made a conscious decision some time ago that I disagreed with Mr. Zuckerberg’s direction of his various platforms and therefore dropped off all of them, all I was left with was Twitter.
Since then it’s essentially been my primary source for news. While I do have my own political views, I like to maintain a balanced feed that contains an eclectic mix of opinions from all quarters in order for me to make my own judgement on the issues of the day. Even, God forbid, to sometimes change my mind based on the evidence. And when I say evidence, my default position is to believe nothing I read so I therefore do whatever I can to get to what, on balance, is the likely truth. I still recall fondly my SWL days back in the 70’s listening to how different countries would portray the same story!
However, since Mr. Musk’s involvement, while some good and trustworthy sources are still on Twitter, there are many that are moving away. Add to that, I fundamentally do not like one person owning a global platform as their own, especially given the appearance that there will be little to no moderation. My view on social media for some time now has been that while there a still many good people and sources available on them, they have, over time, been increasingly used as divisive tools powered by algorithms to simply drive advertising regardless of the consequences.
So, where does this leave me? Well, I’ve made the decision to start the migration to Mastodon. I’ve already joined, I’m @MarkRHaworth@mastodon.online I shall leave the twitter account open for a little while longer before closing it but will not be posting there (not that there was much anyway). I’m in the process of getting my blog back online and intend to utilise that along with Mastodon in the future.
Thus far I’ve found Mastodon to be a far more inclusive place, sure, the content is nowhere near (yet) as rich as on Twitter, but I’m sure that will change. Plus, it’s always fun to use something new. It also ticks all the right boxes for me in that it’s open source and distributed in nature.
I’ve added a ‘auto-post’ to Mastodon so with any luck, something, although I don’t know what yet, should appear there soon when I hit the publish button!
Mark.