I guess you can call it "back on my bullshit", but I'm giving social media another try. I had a Mastodon instance a while back and when I looked at the cost of running my own (I am never not running my own. There's no version of this reality where I'm on someone else's instance. Is that main character energy? I don't care, you should want to own your own creative output), it was like $40 a month, + £25 a year for Ivory and that's just too much. All that, combined with how difficult discoverability is in both directions just made it untenable for me at the time.

However, I recently discovered the linuxserver Mastodon Docker image. I had been using a linuxserver image for FreshRSS until recently (Reeder is now iCloud only so I don't need an RSS backend) and they work so well out-of-the-box that I wanted to give Mastodon another try, on infrastructure that I'm already using (the same server this blog's hosted on) so it's not costing me ~$500 a year.

I've been feeling for a while like there's writing I want to do that is now-focussed. I miss that about how I used Twitter and Instagram - that was always used for what I'm doing now; what I'm thinking now. And my blog was for what I've done of note. I've tried to fold more of that stuff into this blog but a lot of it doesn't fit and is just left un-written, and I love to write. I don't want to not write just because I don't have somewhere for that writing to live.

So I'm writing on Mastodon as well now. It'll take me a while to find my voice there; it always does. But I have my brief - Mastodon is for what I'm doing now, and blog is for what I've done. I like that distinction: it keeps both places focussed.

The discoverability issue is still there, but I've always wanted to be unmotivated by my follower count. The number of people watching shouldn't dictate what you do. That's part of why I don't have comments or anything on here. I assume no-one reads, so when I do get an email or a message about a post, it really means so much, and that's what social media used to be about. I want that again; I got so much from that era.

If you have recommendations for accounts to follow on Mastodon (especially if it's you!), please email me some links!