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.
Isn't 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 she's 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 don't need to be on Fosstodon to do that.
The options
In my previous post I said that I wasn't sure whether I was going to stay on the Fediverse or not, but having taken some time and considered my options, I've decided to stay. That's because when the fedi good, it's really good. It's not ideal when you're getting shit every 5 mins for different things, but I'm hoping that being just another guy on the fedi -- rather than "that Fosstodon admin guy" -- will help reduce the noise.
Anyway, I digress...
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 didn't 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 it's overkill for a single person, I think.
The Ghost offering has great promise, but it's still in active development and I don't think it's quite ready yet. Plus, there's 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. I've played around with Micro.blog a few times over the years, but I've 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, What's 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 isn't a social network. It's 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 that's 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. It's pretty obvious, really and works in a similar way to Ghost's ActivityPub implementation - website at the front, "social feed" at the back in the CMS.
Anyway, I went with Micro.blog and so far it's been really good. I'm yet to see any drama on the timeline; it's all very cordial, and there's all kinds of interesting topics (and photos) being discussed. It's just a really nice place to be.
I also like that there's no in-your-face notifications. There's a place where I can check where I've been mentioned, but there's 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, it's usually to see what's 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.
It's refreshing not seeing that little bubble and being forced into checking. As time goes on, I'm 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 Manton's rationale for not including it, but I personally use likes as a kind of "thank you" or acknowledgement that I've read a reply, rather than writing a reply just to say thanks. That's 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 didn't 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 that's not really important on Micro.blog. Follower numbers aren't reported anywhere, which I like. I'm getting lots of interaction to the couple of posts I've 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 you're too lazy to search for me (I don't 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. I'm very happy with my move to Micro.blog, and I'm very happy to be rid of all the noise and hassle of managing a large Mastodon instance.
I hadn't 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 "you've had a spring in your step the last few days. You seem less...stressed?" That's all the validation I needed that this was the right decision.
Before I end, I'd like to make one final point. Mike and I received a lot of heat on the fedi for "running away as soon as it got tough". But that isn't 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 don't end up losing that great community we've all built over the years.
Here's to pastures new, less stress, and more happiness for all involved. 🎉