Social

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!

TikTok - the popular social video platform - is my new recipe discovery engine of choice. When bored or idle I might browse through my “For You” page until I stumble upon a recipe. I’ll then like (❤️) or bookmark (🔖) and come back to it later.

Yes, that’s right boomer, I’m explaining TikTok to you in a blog, like from 2004.

See, the thing is, I really love TikTok, despite being outside their likely target demographic. The platform has a tremendous blend of creativity and culture which triggers something fuzzy in me. I enjoy watching other people’s pets or a new dance craze as much as the latest viral sea shanty, comedy duet, news update or recipe.

I woke up this morning to a notification injected into my timeline in the Twitter app.

Apparently it’s my “Twitter anniversary” which I can “celebrate” by tweeting out a pre-made picture of the number 13. That’s too easy. Instead I recently downloaded my Twitter data. Let me be self-indulgent and take a look and see what happened over those 13 years.

For those who haven’t tried downloading their Twitter data, what you get is a browseable archive with a summary front page.