Goodbye Fosstodon
Last night I demoted my Fosstodon admin account, then flipped the switch and migrated to Micro.blog. Here's some thoughts on why I did that.
I wanted to write this post as a follow up to my previous post about the Fosstodon drama, where I said that I was done with Fosstodon. This post is going to focus more on why I went with Micro.blog and what other options I considered.
Isnāt this a bit quick?
Nope.
Since Mike and I announced that we plan to step away from Fosstodon, Gina has stepped in as the new admin and is in the process of building a new team to support Fosstodon.
Mike and I have had a long call with Gina to give her the warts-and-all rundown of everything involved, and sheās good with it. There will no doubt be many more calls of that nature as we hand everything off to her, and I will continue to be there to support the transition to the new team, but I donāt need to be on Fosstodon to do that.
The options
In my previous post I said that I wasnāt sure whether I was going to stay on the Fediverse or not, but having taken some time and considered my options, Iāve decided to stay. Thatās because when the fedi good, itās really good. Itās not ideal when youāre getting shit every 5 mins for different things, but Iām hoping that being just another guy on the fedi ā rather than āthat Fosstodon admin guyā ā will help reduce the noise.
Anyway, I digressā¦
Once I decided I was going to stick around, I created a shortlist of potential options for my new home on the fedi, which were:
- Move to another instance
- Create my own instance
- Ghost with their ActivityPub implementation
- My own GoToSocial instance
- Micro.blog
I didnāt want to move to another instance, mainly because I wanted more control than that would offer, and creating my own Mastodon instance would be expensive given the amount of followers I have. Plus itās overkill for a single person, I think.
The Ghost offering has great promise, but itās still in active development and I donāt think itās quite ready yet. Plus, thereās currently no way to migrate accounts.
I seriously considered GoToSocial, but ended up deciding that the headache of managing my own instance would piss me off long-term. After all, the point of all this is to give me some free time back, not swap out administering one instance for another.
Micro.blog
So I decided that Micro.blog was the way forward. Iāve played around with Micro.blog a few times over the years, but Iāve invariably come away confused. This time I decided to go in with a fresh pair of eyes and an open mind, eager to learn what it was all about. And I think I finally understand it.
In their help post, Whatās the difference between Micro.blog and Mastodon? it says:
With Micro.blog we wanted to build new features for indie microblogs and connecting blogs and conversations in a community. We did not try to recreate everything from Twitter, and many of those differences apply to Mastodon as well.
Reading that was a bit of a lightbulb moment for me - Micro.blog isnāt a social network. Itās a collection of blogs that can talk to one another (duh! right). So instead of being confused about the hosted microblog website (in my case thatās qrk.one), versus the back-end Micro.blog timeline and how they both connect and work together. I now think of the front-end simply as a website, and the back-end as the CMS to manage that website.
Thinking of it in this way has really cleared the Micro.blog fog in my mind. People can visit the front-end of the site to see my microblog posts (you can also see them on the notes section here), but if I want to interact with the other blogs on Micro.blog, or accounts on the fedi, I need to use the back-end CMS for that. Itās pretty obvious, really and works in a similar way to Ghostās ActivityPub implementation - website at the front, āsocial feedā at the back in the CMS.
Anyway, I went with Micro.blog and so far itās been really good. Iām yet to see any drama on the timeline; itās all very cordial, and thereās all kinds of interesting topics (and photos) being discussed. Itās just a really nice place to be.
I also like that thereās no in-your-face notifications. Thereās a place where I can check where Iāve been mentioned, but thereās no bubbles when I login, so I do it when I want to, rather than when the software wants me to. When I login to Micro.blog, itās usually to see whatās going on with other people, rather than checking my notifications, which is a complete 180 to how I used Mastodon as I would login, see the purple notification button with a fairly large number, and would immediately be triggered and have to go through them.
Itās refreshing not seeing that little bubble and being forced into checking. As time goes on, Iām checking the mentions section less and less - I still check it, of course, but the community is becoming far more important than the notifications, which is the way it should be.
I do wish that Micro.blog had a mechanism for liking posts though. I understand Mantonās rationale for not including it, but I personally use likes as a kind of āthank youā or acknowledgement that Iāve read a reply, rather than writing a reply just to say thanks. Thatās a me thing though, and in the grand scheme of things, not a big deal.
Manton (the founder of Micro.blog) has also been great. I have quite a lot of followers, and I know from experience that the ActivityPub protocol can be very noisy. So I didnāt want to just migrate all my followers and cause potential issues for him. We orchestrated it so I migrated at a time where he could keep an eye on things, and everything seems to have gone very smoothly.
I have no idea if the migration has completed, or how many of my followers made it over to my new account, because thatās not really important on Micro.blog. Follower numbers arenāt reported anywhere, which I like. Iām getting lots of interaction to the couple of posts Iāve made since completing the migration, so I think everything went fine.
Just in case though, if you want to follow me on the fedi, just search for @kev@qrk.one or kevq on Micro.blog. If youāre too lazy to search for me (I donāt blame you), this link should allow you to follow me.
Final thoughts
This post ended up being way longer than I intended it to be. Iām very happy with my move to Micro.blog, and Iām very happy to be rid of all the noise and hassle of managing a large Mastodon instance.
I hadnāt mentioned any of this to my wife, but she asked me a couple of nights ago if something had changed. I asked her what she meant and she said āyouāve had a spring in your step the last few days. You seem lessā¦stressed?ā Thatās all the validation I needed that this was the right decision.
Before I end, Iād like to make one final point. Mike and I received a lot of heat on the fedi for ārunning away as soon as it got toughā. But that isnāt accurate. This last round of drama is just the latest in a slew of issues, dramas, and headaches that we had to deal with most days. Had it not been for Mike, I probably would have walked away a couple years ago.
So thanks to Manton and Sven from Micro.blog for putting up with me the last week or so, and thanks to Gina for taking the helm at Fosstodon and ensuring thousands of people donāt end up losing that great community weāve all built over the years.
Hereās to pastures new, less stress, and more happiness for all involved. š