I used to love Twitter. It was in 2009 that I joined it as @avandeursen. I mostly used it for work, to share and discuss research and education in software engineering. Looking back, this is what I liked best about Twitter:

1. It allowed me to connect to people who shared similar interests, even if I had never met them before;
2. It gave me a platform to share my views on current developments in my research area with thousands of people
3. It helped me stay current

Unfortunately, I find it harder and harder to stay excited about Twitter:

1. Human dignity is increasingly under attack at Twitter, making it a platform of harassment and mis-information. Mechanisms to handle this, such as moderation or ability to block, have been weakened instead of strengthened.
2. The owner of Twitter exhibits erratic and irrational behavior, thereby normalizing it.
3. Twitter randomly blocks or delays sources of useful information (e.g., Mastodon, New York Times), thereby making Twitter itself less useful.
4. Access to tweets has been limited: Now, they are only visible when logged in into Twitter, and older tweets (before 2014) are lost. To me tweeting is a form of (micro-)publishing, so hiding tweets defeats the purpose.

Thus, it is unavoidable that I take a step back in my Twitter presence. Platform X doesn’t deserve my carefully worded tweets.

As an alternative, I have been exploring Mastodon during the last 12 months. It’s not perfect, but there are a few things to like about it.

For one, it is entirely open, being based on the open ActivityPub protocol, and running on open source software. Naturally, my posts are open too, openly visible to anyone, even those without a Mastodon account.

Furthermore, it is federated, meaning it is a collection of micro-blogging servers that exchange messages with each other. This has interesting consequences:

1. There is no single owner of Mastodon (or the broader Fediverse of all ActivityPub-compliant servers). Billionaires can’t buy it.
2. As a user, you can select a server to join, for example a server on your favorite hobby. While this sounds easy, in practice finding a meaningful server to join isn’t always easy (and a potential road block to joining – see also below).
3. The server owners are responsible for formulating and enforcing an anti-harrassment policy, which is another factor in selecting a suitable server. Server admins can also block entire other servers if they consider the posts on such a server incompatible with their own code of conduct.

My own journey started a year ago on mastodon.social. I picked this server as it was the first and largest Mastodon server (300,000 users at the time of writing). I soon found a few friends who were active on the smaller fediscience.org with around 2,000 users to date. I therefore moved to this server, and have been there for the last 10 months.

In that period I shared around 250 posts, and built up a network of 300-400 people. While these numbers are small compared to Twitter (where I had over 4,000 followers), I find the engagement more meaningful and more pleasant. Mastodon very much reminds me of Twitter in its early days, when everyone did their best to get the most out of this exciting new technology.

Recently I have moved my Mastodon account to the mastodon.acm.org instance. The nice thing about Mastodon is that such moves are transparent to your followers: They automatically follow your new account instead of your old one if you decide to move. The new instance I picked wasn’t around yet when I originally joined Mastodon. It is hosted by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and has around 250 users at the moment. The server is intended to provide a trustworthy space for computing professionals from around the world to connect and engage with each other in a meaningful way – which sounds spot on for me.

As a computing professional, I am a (paying) member of the ACM. I am very happy to see that ACM offers this service, including moderating content to enforce the server rules to be “professional, respectful, inclusive, accessible, honest, and friendly”. Anyone interested in computing can join: I sure hope to see you there!