All things considered, the process for getting on Mastodon is pretty straight forward. There were not any MAJOR problems apart from the initial pain point of picking a server to start from. Part of the issue when trying to decide what server to use is the lack of clear information that says “No matter what server you pick, you can follow anyone from any server.” Having that language prominently displayed would go a long way to easing people on to the service.

I feel like there is a freshness to Mastodon that the bird app has been lacking for a while. I would describe it as Reddit + Twitter since each instance can have its own moderation and rules. I’ve long believed that Reddit has done the best job of allowing content while also not being drowned by the waste water of the internet. Is Reddit’s model perfect? No but it’s pretty resilient moderation method, one that I see some resemblance of on Mastodon.

Maybe if this service gets more and more popular, we’ll see people spinning up there own instances.

The web was better when we all had weird random places to call home and not all congregating around a small handful of dominate ones.

One of the less than ideal aspects of living in Houston is that fall and winter never quite feel like fall or winter. We’ll have numerous days of temperatures in the 80s (sometimes in the 90s) when I have distant memories of it topping out in the 70s.

But thankfully(!) Christmas will feel very much like Christmas should with temperatures in the 30-40s.