As the “will-he-or-won’t-he” circus surrounding Twitter and Elon Musk has continued to evolve over recent months, many folks have found themselves either moving from Twitter to Mastodon or, as in my case, re-evaluating Mastodon after having given it a previous try.
Following a brief stint of trying a few Mastodon instances, I wound up planting my flag on mastodon.technology, and was perfectly happy there — until yesterday, when I saw a blog post from Ash Furrow, that instance’s long-time maintainer. He indicated that he’d soon be shutting down mastodon.technology for a variety of reasons, some very personal and very sad. I feel safe in saying that all who ever used this splendid instance wish him well, especially during his current difficulties, and appreciate his unstinting devotion over the last few years.
Fortunately, it’s fairly easy to migrate your Mastodon account from one instance to another, taking along your lists of followers/followed plus certain other data, albeit not one’s old posts on the instance you’re leaving — which, in this case, will cease to exist when the previous instance’s server goes offline in the near future. Anyway: within a short time after learning of the need to leave mastodon.technology, I’d successfully moved over to the instance which had been my extremely close second choice a few months back: Fosstodon, a/k/a fosstodon.org. Although its name clearly is related to free open-source software (FOSS), Fosstodon — operated by Kev Quirk and Mike Stone — also welcomes all kinds of folks, especially nerds like me, so I already feel quite at home there. I still have the same handle, @BryceWrayTX, but now it ends in @fosstodon.org.
The impending demise of mastodon.technology forced me to make the following changes to content herein:
- Any links which formerly pointed to my former profile on mastodon.technology now go to the corresponding profile on Fosstodon.
- I found replacements for any mastodon.technology toots (mine or others’) I’d embedded, notably in my three posts about how to do that embedding fully statically:
- “Static Mastodon toots in Hugo” (2022-06-03).
- “Static embeds in Eleventy” (2022-08-27).
- “Static Mastodon toots in Astro” (2022-08-29).
As I tooted yesterday upon my migration (along with a link to the aforementioned blog post by Furrow):
Sad to see mastodon.technology go (best wishes to Ash Furrow), but am hoping to be a good citizen (again) here on fosstodon.org.