Let's do an overview of the past 365 days on the Mastodon social network.

Yep. One year.

I wanted to make this post just to commemorate this.

A year ago, I stumbled upon mastodon.social, yet another decentralized social network and I was like:

Hey this looks good.

But… that’s about it. I’m a heavy Twitter and Tweetdeck user so the interface was familiar to me. That’s great, but what’s the point if it’s empty? I saw some GNU/Social people (I was myself using quitter.se from time to time), but that’s about it.

So I left it.

And then, 2 months later, April comes and the big boom happens. An insane amount of people were registering in just a few days, and Mastodon was receiving media coverage.

As the main and original instance, mastodon.social, was completely overloaded, I decided to setup my own: mstdn.io.

screenshot_09-02-2018_23-28-55

The mstdn.io family!

And here we are, 10 months later, more than 1 million users, thousands of instances, and a lot of new releases and features.

Let’s be honest, the majority of the accounts are from April and are inactive (I’d say between 10 to 20%).

However, as I said earlier, if it’s empty, there’s no point. But it’s not!

I’ve been using Twitter for 5 years, I have tweeted over 150k times, so you can guess it’s my main social network by far. Or it was.

It turns out that I have used Mastodon as much as twitter over the last few months, and even more now.

I love the fact that I’m hosting my own social network, that I learned a lot about sysadmin stuff, that the interface is fast and ergonomic, and so on.

But the thing is, I have more interactions than on Twitter. It’s as simple as that. It’s also interesting to see that sometimes a post is gets a lot af attention on one platform and is completely ignored on the other.

I won’t lie, that’s certainly because I’m into tech/Linux/FOSS/weeb stuff like a lot of people here. But there are many people interested in many things, and you can improve this by joining yourself.

Mastodon is awesome, however not everything is perfect, there is still a lot to be done, and the decentralized aspect means that there are people abusing their power on their own instance, banning accounts or instances just because they’re overly sensible or because one does not agree with them. Honestly, this kind of people don’t interest me, so I can live with that and ignore them. They do what they want on their own instance and that’s what’s good about a federated network.

Overall, I’m very satisfied with Mastodon, I will continue using it and believing in it. i can’t say as much about diaspora* 😉.

If you’re not with us already, I’m urging you to join the fediverse, it’s awesome!

You can toot with me @[email protected]!