Mastodon

Following the recent changes at the blue bird company it seemed like time to look around for possible alternatives. After seeing so many people make the jump to Mastodon I decided to have a follow the herd and have a look.

After watching a few videos and reading some blogs and articles, it seemed as if it was worth spending some effort to establish an identity on Mastodon. As many others have said, the initial process isn't as intuitive as it could be, but with a little perseverance it became clearer.

Given the federated nature, installing an instance seemed sensible so I started down that path. Initially I thought using docker would be a good idea and keep everything simple, but as I wanted to not use nginx as the server this led me into all sorts of places that made life hard :-(

After spending a few hours not really making any progress I finally just built from source and after 20 minutes it was installed and working. The previous hours hadn't been a total waste as I had learned much about the required configuration and had the apache configuration all ready, but it was a lesson in how sometimes docker isn't the answer...

My initial attempt also had a different Web and Local domain set in an attempt to have a more cosmetic looking username - but for some reason I couldn't make it work as it should and so I ended up just splurging for a new domain to host it at :-) As always, every time you do something it gets simpler and this was no different with the change taking only a few minutes. Everything seems happier.

I don't plan on leaving Twitter, but over time I can foresee a drift to spending more time on Mastodon. Assuming things are working as expected, you may be able to find me @zathras@jetnet.social :-)