I was struck by how many presenters at SRECon last week listed Mastadon handles instead of Twitter ones: well over half were on Mastadon, and I'd say around half didn't even list a Twitter username. Of course, that's a highly specific population.
Yes, a large chunk of engineers & computer scientists have shifted to Mastodon, which makes it great if you follow that crowd. It's the largest collective action I've seen in that cohort since people stopped using IE6 in favour of Firefox.
Now I'll head to Twitter a few times a week as a guilty pleasure to read the people left behind — comedians, political commentators, and journalists. But for stuff that's relevant to my job, Mastodon is great. And my Twitter usage has dropped by over 95%.
I just never read twitter links anymore because when I follow them now I get a pop up shaking me down to buy twitter premium or to disable 2FA with no way to view the post. So it's convenient for me that most of the people who used to link interesting content on twitter are now being linked via their mastodon handle instead.
I feel sympathy for people who still love the blue bird and don't want anything to go wrong, but this right here is why the ongoing dumpster fire has been very good for me, personally.
I used to love Twitter. I used Twitter way too much. Now I don't post at all and only read a little. It can be hard to realize how bad something is for you when you are in the middle of pulling those sweet endorphins at a steady rate. My life is so much better since a certain someone decided the drug was so good that he should buy the pharmacy. Admittedly I got lucky: if he had valued it correctly or knew what he was doing, then my outcome could have been much different. Cheers to incompetence!
"SREcon is a gathering of engineers who care deeply about site reliability, systems engineering, and working with complex distributed systems at scale."
Why? A blog is a very different use-case than social media (even social media based on microblogging). Yes, many social media communities are toxic, but many of them (or at least parts of them) can be incredibly enriching. There are plenty of Mastadon communities run with open governance structures.
Besides, most presenters will also list their personal URLs if they have sites they'd like to promote.
Maintaining your own site instead of using a common, sensible, resilient solution might be antithetical to some notions of being an SRE. A personal blog is also not a replacement for social media. Hacker News is something that an individual would be hard-pressed to replicate on their own.
yeah... ideally, there should be a reachable identity system for everyone, independent to centralized database. Content can be anywhere, RSS is nice, a content authentication system is nice too, but what's missing is an identity system.
