I never was into social media. Never had a twitter account, never had a 
facebook account, never had an instagram account etc,... I did have a 
reddit account for a while, but I ditched that when things started to get 
way too corporate-y. It got really bad with them looking to go public... 
I don't remember what the last straw was, probably ads or something but it
came to feel really wrong to exist in that space.

Some time last year I had decided to try out SDF's mastodon instance, 
because unlike all the above examples, it is not owned by a corporate 
entity and allows any one to run a server, like irc. It took me quite a long 
time to get used to the concept, having never really done any "real" social 
media things. Eventually I moved to the hackers.town instance at some 
point, because the SDF instance was having some issues, and that's where 
cat (1) would hang out as well and it seemed to have many interesting 
people. Then the twitter exodus happened, and lots of people suddenly 
started flooding in, causing some minor server issues again. Cat eventually
moved off onto his own instance, and I now finally also decided to run my 
own (2)(4) - more instances seems like a good thing, especially now that 
more are needed to spread the load of the twitter influx. 

Whilst mastodon is vastly less evil on the surface than the aformentioned
giants, even now after about a year, I still have mixed feelings about the
whole thing. The biggest issue I have is that it's very tempting to want to
talk to people and engage with them as if it was regular conversation (as 
one does in normal communities) - but at the same time, anyone can take 
something you posted, and boost it - causing it to be read by people who 
were not part of the initial conversation, and end up seeing the post 
without (often important) context, which can easily lead to some
misinterpretations, misunderstandings, and grief. At least in theory. In 
practice, I guess it hasn't really been too much of an issue yet, 
nontheless posting on it often gives me some form of social anxiety. I much
prefer irc and it's approximation of regular linear real-life-like 
conversation. And anything non-conversational/article-like I would much
rather post on gopher. Thus mastodon occupies still some sort of weirdly
awkward middle-ground in my mind. And in the back of my mind it also feels 
like part of the set of tools that have destroyed society as it once was 
(that being social media in general). But it's good to have something that 
allows me to reach out to a wider audience without having to use any of the
much more evil tools at least.

The fact that it's all http kind of sucks. There's nice console clients 
though. I wrote a little toy that provides a continious stream of the 
federated view on my old wyse terminal (3)(5), which makes for an amusing
ornament.

The mastodon installation wasn't exactly a fun process. It's all ruby, 
which means you'll be dealing with their package manager. There's just 
something extremely depressing about watching hundreds of dependencies
being pulled in outside of OS package management. Moreover, their official
install instructions instruct to use a specific version of debian or 
ubuntu, which of course I ignored, having installed it on FreeBSD - but you
know if it mentions specific OS versions, you're going to be in for a bad
time. At the end of the day though, I managed to get a functional setup,
with only minor problems. I spent the next day mostly just on setting up
grafana dashboards, firewall rules against auth bruteforce attempts (by the
way, they frustratingly return 200 http responses on auth failures making
this harder than it should be), and did some initial css themeing. 
Anyway, the theme and FreeBSD init scripts I wrote can be found in this
repo: https://codeberg.org/jns/mastodon.linkerror.com - The patch also 
contains some changes to get rid of the silly 500 character limit.

(1) gopher://baud.baby
(2) https://mastodon.linkerror.com   (any one welcome to sign up!)
(3) https://toobnix.org/w/v8RbKZCjujVj9i1r4JPxKQ
(4) https://mastodon.linkerror.com/@jns  (my account on mastodon)
(5) https://codeberg.org/jns/t00t3rm

In other news - here's song + music video I made for the new cyberia coin
laundry a while back, which I hadn't shared on gopher yet: 

    https://toobnix.org/w/v8RbKZCjujVj9i1r4JPxKQ