2022 has been an interesting year when it comes to Mastodon and Twitter. From the moment Elon Musk mentioned he was going to buy Twitter at the start of the year many decided it was either time to leave completely or setup an alternate presence on an alternative network.
So, back in April I bit the bullet and setup my own Mastodon instance. Being part of the Fediverse it meant that I could talk to not just Mastodon users anywhere but also those in other networks like PeerTube, Pixelfed, Friendica and many more – I’m not limited to a single social network.
In early May there was a massive influx of users into the Mastodon network which caused issues as the admins, who I’ll add are not paid and run their instances out of their own pocket, problems with capacity. They quickly sorted it and the network grew.
So what’s happened?
Since he bought Twitter there’s been several times where he’s done something which has caused another migration. In the last few days even more as he’s now changing the rules on what is acceptable, including links from Twitter to major mastodon instances are now being shown as being harmful – harmful to his network perhaps?
High profile suspensions
Over night (I’m in the UK, it’s 16 December 2022 as I write this) he suspended a group of journalists who were discussing the recent ban of users posting open data.
Doxing is never good & you should never post the location details of anyone else ever, however every aircraft in most jurisdictions in the world require a transponder which uses ADS-B. So knowing where an individual aircraft is currently located is public information.
ADS-B data is available unencrypted – it has to be for one aircraft to know where another one is, let alone air controllers which use it as a secondary radar. You can even receive them yourself using a simple USB based receiver – I have one myself which I feed into several of the online aircraft tracking sites.
Free Speech
Right now, even though he keeps talking about free speech (which is not what he thinks it is), he is contradicting himself by constantly changing the rules so that if he disagrees with something it’s likely to get banned.
A new wave of migrants
So with the ban of those journalists as well as suspending the official Twitter account of Mastodon @joinmastodon (probably because it’s a competitor? also technically illegal in some places) there’s been another influx of users moving away from Twitter.
8,485,732 accounts, +3,824 in the last hour,
+38,424 in the last day, +196,007 in the last week
Although I’m still on twitter I’m using it even less now than I used to – I even removed the Android app a couple of weeks ago. I’m now mostly watching it just to see how low Twitter can become.
So where have I gone?
You can find be at the following locations:
Mastodon: @peter@area51.social or https://area51.social/@peter – twitter replacement
I’ve also migrated @TrainWatch from Twitter as well – it’s at @trainwatch@area51.social or https://area51.social/@trainwatch
As I mentioned earlier I’m staying on Twitter just not as active as I used to be
PeerTube
Although I’m not moving from YouTube I’ve also setup a PeerTube instance so I can post video’s without contaminating my YouTube channels. You can find it here: https://area51.media/@peter
PeerTube is an open-sourced YouTube equivalent which also federates with Mastodon, so if you want to follow a channel or comment you don’t need another account – just use your Mastodon one.
Peter Mount's Blog 