Finding my digital home
I’m not one of the cool people who were on the Fediverse before the big Twitter exodus of 2022.
When Elon took over, I was one of many who mourned the death of Twitter and moved on to a better place: Mastodon. It was such a refreshing change of pace.
There were so many queer people like myself. Instead of following celebrities and techbros who think you’re too “common”1, the superstars on Mastodon are more genuine people like Lisa Melton, who started the WebKit project at Apple back in the day.
The atmosphere is much more liberal on most servers, while others like kolektiva.social are communities of full-blown anarchists and antifascists. What doesn’t seem to exist on Mastodon is a conservative community, and that’s made the place so pleasant.
Like Micro.blog, people are encouraged to focus less on going viral for the sake of going viral, and more on sincere posts with an emphasis on organic growth.
In comparison, Micro.blog takes it a step further and completely removes likes, reposts and pretty much all the other post and account metrics, and leaves you with just the posts and comments. I love that. I have no idea if I have 1000 followers or 0. I do my share of deleting posts here, but never because it didn’t get enough interaction.
Over the last few months I’ve found myself spending less and less time on Mastodon. I’m not sure why, exactly. I still love the community and my mutuals post hilarious and interesting stuff, but my obsession is gradually fading. Maybe that’s not the worst thing; I was pretty much chronically online over there for a big part of the last two years. Maybe I just need a break.
However I have become enthralled with Micro.blog right in the middle of my Fediverse hiatus. I love the minimalism and the deeper, longer post formats and I guess just the overall vibe of a blogging platform vs a more traditional social media site.
Technically they’re both microblogging platforms but I’m a sucker for having my own page with my own CSS and a custom domain name.
Something else that’s been swaying me more towards Micro.blog is that it is, in fact, part of the greater Fediverse. I can follow accounts on Mastodon and Tumblr without logging in to either. I’m following a lot less people here and discovery is a little harder due to the lack of algorithm, but I like that. It doesn’t feel like it’s designed to have constant reign over my attention.
I still check Mastodon every day or two, but blogging feels like the next stage of evolution in my digital social life, and I’m having so much fun.