Extinct for a Reason

I have been a vocal advocate of Mastodon since around the time Elon bought Twitter. I’m not entirely convinced X is all that much worse than Twitter was. It’s certainly not better, but I don’t find it significantly more awful today than it was a decade ago, well before the name change. Things are a bit more politically lopsided now, but it’s always been a terrible place.

Before Musk’s takeover of Twitter, Mastodon was mostly tumbleweeds and furries.1 The Great Migration led to a massive influx of users, who brought with them a diversity of interests unrelated to My Little Pony.2 Almost overnight, the platform became a viable alternative to Big Social. But with time, it proved itself to be untenable. After years of doing my best to make Mastodon work, I can’t recommend it to anyone who isn’t involved in one of the niche communities well represented there.3

It’s not as if I didn’t try. I’ve been running my own private server for a few years. My own instance. That’s an investment. I used a managed hosting solution from Masto.Host. I highly recommend them if that’s something you’re interested in.

The service is affordable, but I’m looking to make deep cuts in my spending. I have to pay off my big-ass TV and want to buy a house in the next year or two. If I have to choose between cutting back by four iced cold brews per month and maintaining my own private Mastodon instance, I’d much rather drink too much coffee. So I’m shutting it down at the end of the month I shut it down.

I figured I’d join a bigger server maintained by a community and pitch in on the expenses via Patreon. Five dollars a month is three iced cold brews cheaper than twenty dollars a month. I only had to find an instance (server) that fit my vibe.

There are a lot of great and wonderful people on Mastodon. I don’t want to sell them short. But… while looking around for a new place to hang out my shingle, I found myself focused on a list of things I wanted to avoid, like bullying people over alt text, fetishizing young children under the guise of anime, people begging for money, literally thousands of dudes posting photos of their cocks to the Federated timeline, and so on. Then it hit me — I don’t have to deal with any of this if I just stop using Mastodon.

I decided to migrate to Bluesky instead. Not because Bluesky isn’t awful. It’s definitely awful. It’s Twitter. I hated Twitter, and I expect to hate Bluesky for all the same reasons. But it’s Normie in its awfulness. When I shout into the void, I’m not adding content warnings about the possibility of direct eye contact with a JPEG. I’m not dealing with that. I don’t have to. And I won’t.

Also, nobody I know uses Mastodon, except maybe my mother, and I think she’s only there because of me. So, like, what’s the point?

https://bsky.app/profile/hotdogonabun.com

Footnotes

  1. I’m not disparaging furries here. I’m simply noting that if you go back to the Mastodon of 10 years ago, most of the instances were dedicated to furry and furry-adjacent activities. ↩

  2. Actual diversity. ↩

  3. For example, people who like posting pictures of their cock to the internet. If that’s your kicks, go get ’em. Me, I don’t want to see it. ↩