Mastodon

I use Publer to post identical content across Threads, Mastodon, and Bluesky. Same words, same time, same bloke. It’s a massive time-saver, and means I can reach people wherever they happen to hang out online without having to faff about copying and pasting between apps.

I wasn’t running some grand social media experiment. I was just having a moan about Windows updates like any reasonable person would. But the results were so stark they opened my eyes to exactly what these platforms reward - and it’s not what you might think.

I run a small Mastodon instance for Ubuntu Members and related projects. If you’re a contributing Ubuntu Member, then you can have a free account on the site.

It’s been running without tremendous issues for nearly a year now. Each time a new release of Mastodon appears, I dutifully follow the guides to upgrade it.

Each upgrade requires me to ensure the backups are functioning then follow the precise steps in the release notes. That’s usually just running a few commands to get the latest release, update dependencies, and restart everything. It’s very straightforward and usually takes only a few minutes.

Linux Matters

I recently started presenting Linux Matters podcast with my friends Martin Wimpress and Mark Johnson.

In episode 4 (that link will only work once the episode is released) I briefly talked about some simple bots I setup on the Ubuntu Social Mastodon instance (which, incidentally I talked about in episode 1).

This blog post accompanies episode 4. Linux Matters is part of the Late Night Linux (LNL) family. If you support us on the LNL Patreon, you’ll often get the episode delivered early, as well as advert free. Thanks, if you already do.

Depending on who you speak to, Twitter is (or isn’t) in turmoil, and Mastodon is (or isn’t) here to supplant (or backup (or not)) the “de facto town square”.

Whether any of that is true or not, there’s been a surge in people signing up, and trying out the Mastodon experience.

(via this tweet)

For those who aren’t familiar with all this, learn more about Mastodon over at the friendly-looking main Join Mastodon site.

Mastodon is interesting. It’s “free and open-source software for running self-hosted social networking services.”. To any normal personal that’s “Open Source Twitter”, largely.

Anyone can grab the code and spin up their own Mastodon instance. I put one up a year or so ago, but unfortunately I didn’t have the time or resources to maintain it, so I shut it down. Maybe it will return.

Currently I’m using the mastodon.social instance, so that makes me https://mastodon.social/@popey - but other instances are available. Boy, there are a lot of them!