Restructuring Mastodon accounts
It’s time for restructuring Mastodon with new accounts.
Restructuring Mastodon
Back when Musk was forced to actually complete the Twitter sale, the kvetching over the future of the bird app was extreme. Lots of folks ran to various alternative platforms, such as Post and Mastodon. I chose Mastodon, and set up a couple of accounts as fall-back positions.
When it became clear that Da Twittah wasn’t immediately imploding, folks disengaged from the grand exodus. Da Twittah returned to its sort-of usual self. While there were some folks, particularly prolific political users, left for Mastodon, inertia kicked in. Count me in on that. Friends stayed, the teevee and other journalists stayed, and most importantly, the weather people stayed. (And in New Orleans, those weather people are important.)
Toot neglect
So, tooting (what one does on Mastodon, as opposed to tweeting) fizzled for me. I even investigated various mobile apps, in the hopes that a cool UI would bring me around. No luck. Some of this is on me, because I followed too many political types too quickly. There’s a lot of anger out there. While I may agree with most of what someone writes, negativity can be overwhelming. The other thing that became problematic was local folks who followed my history account. I followed them back, but many of them were all-politics-all-the-time.
Fixing the toots
I knew there had to be a way to make the elephants work properly. The best approach for me was to start over. This included starting my own Mastodon instance, nolabooks.social. I set up a basic hosting account and created a few users. They are (so far):
- @edwardbranley@nolabooks.social – no real activity yet. This will be the books/booksta/bookwyrm account
- @nolahistoryguy@nolabooks.social – Da History Stuff. my @nolahistoryguy on Da Twittah is a hot mess. I intend for this account to be more concise.
- @yatpundit@nolabooks.social – My @yatpundit account on the bird app was my first. I use it now for non-New Orleans political stuff and Arsenal FC banter. That continues with the toots.
Ongoing stuff
While I set nolabooks.social on a hosting site, I plan to set up an instance in my home office. I’ve got a spare PC and a Raspberry Pi 4 to play with. Weill keep you posted on that on the Linux blog.
