The Mastodon in the Room

For many years I tweeted about my blog reviews, but Elon Musk changed Twitter too much for me to stay. If you're considering alternatives, read on about my choice.

Last November I created a Mastodon account. After my own Linux-using heart, Mastodon is free, open-source, and decentralized. Each Mastodon instance is its own community with its own policy, but they interact like email or wireless providers, and most are ad-free.

Some of my favorite features:

• Verify your account for free by adding a referring link to your personal website(s) and then adding your website link(s) to your account profile;
• 500-character limit on each post;
• You can edit, delete, and/or re-draft published posts;
• "CW" button toggles a blank warning label you can fill in to hide the post body in case of triggers or spoilers;
• There's no algorithm. You can control the flow of other users' posts to you, for example categorize your total follows into private lists so you don't have to be bombarded by all Mastodon users posting at any given moment;
• You can follow hashtags instead of people, so you only see when someone mentions a topic you're interested in, not everything else they post.
• Hashtagging your own posts lets you more easily look them up later. I use them when posting about specific #Movies, #TV, #Novels, etc.

Fellow Bones fans, forgive my borrowing the sixth season premiere title for this post.