A while back, as Twitter lay dying and rotting, I went out and staked new accounts in other social media sites, gambling on which one, if any, would eventually succeed. One was Mastodon; I have an account at octodon.social/@pzmyers. The appeal of Mastodon was that it’s a distributed network, one that isn’t strictly controlled by a central authority. Unfortunately, that means it’s made up of thousands of interconnected instances, all your access to the wider federation, is through the instance you choose, and you’re at the mercy of whoever set up your particular instance. Back in August, I learned that the instance I had chosen was shutting down.
this is it. the ship is sinking.
on 2025-04-03, in 8 months, on its 8 years anniversary, the octodon will be permanently shut down.
use this time to slowly migrate your accounts and download your post archives. tell your local friends who might miss the instance announcement.
the first reply will contain a small list of instances to consider; the second a personal note for my followers.thanks to everyone who supported us, to our crew and members.
i am glad to have built and shared this with you over the years. it was a beautiful horrible adventure. i hope you will remember it as a good place that united so many people for quite a while.it always had to end eventually. for an impulsive little social website, 8 years is a good run. we have witnessed and remember so many friends who are gone. the octodon, too, gets to live impermanence and have a good end while we still can take care of it.
It was a good run, but this is a huge weakness in the service. The volunteers who run individual instances are allowed to just quit? Of course they are allowed, but there’s no automatic fallback to support individual users? Whoops. That’s not good. Do I need to go instance-shopping now, and figure out how to back up my posts there? Then there’s the personal note by the instance host about Mastodon in general:
i’ve had this moment on my mind for many years. 5 years, 10 years? one more, one less? Eight, of course. of course. i barely remember who created it. everything has an end and everyone needs to move on.
personally, i will soon move to a tiny gotosocial instance, and trim down relationships again. i am tired of asking myself if ppl talk to me as an admin or as a friend, let’s find out.
if you need more Whys, unordered:
- it hasnt been fun for so long. i really do not want to do this for the rest of my life. passing it on has limits and is itself tremendous work and trust.
- it knows too much. this database is huge, which is a technical feat to keep available at all times and fast already; and full of forgotten accounts and things that are long offline and should be let go of. yes it’s haunted
- i do not believe in mastodon. i have been less and less comfortable with the software, its direction, technical choices, and maintenance. even with the federated topology entirely. it was built like a twitter clone and requires the same work and has the same flaws
- it’s such a massive amount of personal data to care for, and concentrated for so many people i know. security patches are applied so fast bc it’s genuinely terrifying. it’s not healthy i can tell you, but i know what we all risk and did everything i could. i don’t want to any more. let’s burn it all
- one must imagine sisyphus letting the boulder roll and just sitting there, content and chilling. today i let eugen’s damned rock go down the hill, and i feel fine
i have so little energy left. such short time to use.
all this mess grew until it became a main occupation and i have so much more to dohit me up if you want the exported blocklist, or the emoji collection. i might publish them later as well
Well, that just went from an “oops” to a “yikes!” Maybe I’ll just let my Mastodon account whither and die, unless someone wants to suggest a more stable instance. Maybe.
I also have a Threads account. I don’t care for it and have neglected using it. Threads too often feels like one of those subreddits full of people telling long stories about some trivial annoyance that they recently experienced, or worse, that they experienced 11 years ago and have been waiting for the opportunity to tell everyone about it. There are a lot of good people on there who are happy with it, I just feel vaguely uncomfortable with it. Also, it’s by Meta, so it’s got Zuckerberg’s undead cyborg fingers all over it.
Doubly also LGBT and Marginalized Voices Are Not Welcome on Threads.
Bluesky is taking off right now, and of course I have an account there. I worry that it could meet the fate of Twitter — some rich weirdo could buy it and use it for their public masturbation sessions — but it’s working out well so far, especially given how they’re dealing with the wingnuts.
“Conservatives Join Bluesky, Face Abuse and Censorship.” Yeah, right.
So maybe I’ll just commit to Bluesky from now on, until it gets corrupted and wrecked, as happens to so many things nowadays.
Blue Skies
by Irving Berlin, performed by Ella Fitzgerald
“I worry that it could meet the fate of Twitter — some rich weirdo could buy it and use it for their public masturbation sessions”
Looking back, Musk’s purchase of Twitter may have been an orchestrated move. The information platform was converted into Trump’s bile fountain. How many voters had their minds poisoned leading up to the election?
Thanks for the link to your Bluesky account. I followed it and now I follow you there. I nuked my X account a couple of weeks ago. Bluesky seems more like old twitter and nice so far. I like the “don’t engage, just block” culture and hope it lasts.
I set up on Mastodon when Musk took over Twitter and I still like it. This week I also joined BlueSky and have found way more folks I used to follow on Twitter, so I like it too. mepard.bsky.social mepard@mstdn.social
I joined Bluesky last week.
I liked it immediately which is a good sign.
So far, how it works isn’t too clear yet.
For some reason, I ended up with large numbers of cat photos in my feed.
There are worse things that could have happened.
Reddit is the other social media that I use although I don’t even have or need a membership.
It’s organic.
I use Reddit a lot because it is useful.
It’s organized by topic and I can follow the topics I’m interested in. One topic is my local city/area. It’s everything from lost cats, to the latest Rave, to the best place to get your windshield fixed.
This is a huge advantage since the local media including the newspaper more or less disappeared.
It had really useful information during the last Covid-19 pandemic.
The Herman Cain Awards in particular were…interesting, watching prominent antivaxxers get Covid-19 virus, die in the hospital, and win the famous and stylish Herman Cain Award featuring a skeleton dressed up as death.
I like Mastodon just fine; I’ve never understood the problems people seem to have with it.
I’ve bailed, for the most part, on Facebook; I only very occasionally post anything or check for postings anymore. I deleted my Twitter account. I spend too much time scanning Mastodon postings as it is; adding another social medium seems counterproductive.
I only visit this site when I get a Mastodon post that tells me something interesting has come up that doesn’t involve spiders or forcing me to look at big pictures of them in the masthead. Sorry, but that’s just me, and I’m getting too old to change that. So if you stop posting on Mastodon, I’ll miss your other discussions, which I usually enjoy and agree with. But you gotta do what you gotta do, so best wishes.
Goodbye Blue Sky
by Pink Floyd
Mastodon sounds like Linux in that someone sets up a project to work on a version and it’s great until the people working on it lose interest and move on. There are many dead distros out there.
I wasn’t on Twitter but I did go with Bluesky because fashy Musk. Following PZ, John Wilkins, Rebecca Watson and Hemant Mehta so far.
I also joined Tribel, but haven’t delved much into it.
I don’t know if this will make a difference for the future, but BlueSky uses open source software, the AT Protocol. Supposedly, it will allow inter-network sharing, and thus be a more robust overall system. (I’m just repeating some of what I’ve seen, so I am sure there are others with better understanding and opinions than mine.)
My mastodon’s server’s going down, too. Seems i’m the only one really using it (even the owner/host never posts much).
There are ways to move your history and connections to another server.
https://fedi.tips/transferring-your-mastodon-account-to-another-server/
https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/migrating/
I’m moving to the larger https://universeodon.com/ – it is where George Takei and his substack team are, and has thousands of users, so I expect it’ll last a while, and I trust that the admins there are properly troll-proofing things if Takei’s willing to stay.
That said, I feel a little like the late 80s and the demise of the MUD (MUCK/MUSH) scene as universities discovered new uses for the Sun boxes that the students had set up the MUDs on and wiped the games out. Every time I found a ‘home’ in those online Zork-like games, either the DB crashed or the admins had to kill it.
PZ wrote: until it gets corrupted and wrecked, as happens to so many things nowadays.
I reply: PZ is being healthily, realistically skeptical, not morbidly cynical. Too many things in our society today are failing in many ways. Internet has more sites that don’t load [pharyngula too because of horrible hosting (bluehost?)], too many outbreaks of E-coli and other poisons in our foods, the corruption of billionaire owned main slime media, our entire political system full of toxic loopholes and do nothing, vain, corrupt elected officials, crapitallist corporations owning our lives and raping us with greedflation, etc.
(yes, welcome to the new DARK AGES)
On multi-user site architecture, we see that some kind of helpful, centralized administration is needed to keep it from dissolving or becoming corrupt (coding pun intended). However, the trick is to keep that centralized administration beneficent and not have it become a power hungry, abusive entity. One of the worst examples of that type of corruption is the governments in this country. We have sought out means of preventing that corruption, but have found no effective methods, yet.