So, depending on who you ask, I've either been on Mastodon for exactly a year or for a year and a day. No, really. The Mastodon app on my phone claims my account was created November 25th, 2022. However, the web app on my computer lists November 24th, 2022. Baffling and also fascinating! Is that based on when I first used each system? Either way, I cheated and checked the archive I use for text mining. My first post was at 2022-11-25, 22:28:27Z. So there we go. Roughly 5 pm on the 25th, when you convert for time zone. I can't remember writing it, but I can take a pretty good guess as to where I was and who I was with.
That first post, if you were wondering, read "Would an anime girl profile pic be the vibe?". I have yet to set my profile pic to an anime girl and probably never well.
So! I've been on Mastodon for one year, on a server called isometry.group which is run by a friend of a friend. I think that's worth some self reflection. I've never really used social media before. My formative internet expirience was flicking between webcomics, a ghost who never posted or contributed. I cut my teeth on forums, where I spent years on the Paizo forums (if anyone was wondering why I know an ungodly amount about Pathfinder, this is why). Pokemon Showdown has been a constant companion throughout my adult life. I had a brief flirt with Twitter prior to Mastodon (where I interacted with many of the same people), but never really got super into it. A proper classic social media? Never really been me.
So let's review. I've been here for a year. In that time, I made friends, went viral, broke the server a little, invented a server wide running joke, posted some memes, told a lot of really really bad jokes, been followed back by one of my favourite webcomic authors, started a website, wrote a bunch, automated my account for laughs, made a bunch of bots, text mined my social media, and generally vibed. My interactions with strangers have broadly been minimal but kind of picking up steam lately.
Mastodon functions for me as a "weird group chat". I can slap thoughts out and maybe make someone laugh or at least get a reply. I can keep up with whatever my friends are up to. I can meet their friends and sometimes strangers and sometimes I nail someone with a Deez Nuts joke I put into a video game I made a year ago and then forget about, an expirience we immediately bonded over. It's been pretty good. I'm happy here. I like this.
But, better than that, it functions as a group chat I can interface with as I wish. Group chats have always been really hard for me, chaotic and difficult to follow. I either talk too much or talk too little. The mortification of the time I realized they made a new groupchat with everyone but me will forever stick with me, tainting how I interact with friendly groupchat. Mastodon doesn't have this problem. If you don't like me, you don't have to follow me. People still follow me, ergo I am still liked. Further, I can banish takes I don't like from my timeline. I have that power. It is a weird group chat, but not be consensus. It is individual and that is powerful. I wrote a whole blog post about this, actually.
I haven't tried Bluesky or Threads and I don't intend to. I don't have any philosophical issues against them, really! Well, okay, Threads is run by the Zuck and fuck that guy, and I'm not sure how much I actually trust the Bluesky team. But I'm not some kind of "Mastodon should win" evangelist. I think it's important to have multiple platforms that specialize in different things. There are things the fediverse does well. There are also things it doesn't and can't. And that's okay. It should focus on the things it wants to do well, which happen to be many of the things I care about but not necessarily what other people care about. Let people do whatever they want. Heck, I'm definitely not on Mastodon for political reasons. I'm here because someone I was dating asked me to be and then I made some friends. And now I can't leave because this is where the friends are. And that's okay! Mastodon works for me and it might not for you and that is healthy and normal.
Also I've been saying "Mastodon" because I use Mastodon, but I'm aware that "Fediverse" may have been a more accurate term for that previous paragraph and you know what? I don't really care! Sorry! Not what this post is about!
One year is a long time and I've definitely changed during it. I used to run most of my posts by another person for approval. Was I funny? Would people like this? Perhaps a hold over from my groupchat traumas and I'm very grateful to anyone who put up with this (or helped workshop weak jokes into something better). I don't do this anymore, unless I'm posting something that maybe toes the line.
I think the signifier of a new social media also marked a turning point in how I interfaced with and used the internet. I set up my RSS feed reader around a year ago too, and that changed everything for me. The last year has been big for personal changes as well. I graduated and moved and started a masters degree. My website opened in early 2023 and has been evolving ever since.
My website especially, I think is a big signifier for how much I've changed. I wrote my own static site generator in Python while trying to solve a simple problem (how to make a navigation box appear on every page). It took around 48 hours and was the most intensely focused on a coding project I've ever been, only pausing to sleep and eat. Now I have a whole collection of scripts responsible for building, populating, and updating my website. Dates autofill, different sections backlink properly, etcetera. It's pretty great.
There's a lot I love about my website. The quote of the day on the home page changes once a day, which makes me so happy. It does so by re-generating and re-uploading the entire page once a day, instead of being smart and using javascript. I kinda love the nonsense of that solution, the sheer jank of having a cron line to call a bash script to call a Python script to interface with the Neocities API, all these layers of tech to provide such a simple effect. There's something beautiful about it.
I think my website and Mastodon compliment each other nicely. The website is my resume, a log of my accomplishments in digital space. It collects my projects and bares my soul for anyone who dares to look. It is never complete, always a work in progress, a blank wall with the expectation and promise of pictures. My Mastodon functions as a peek into my unhinged mind, for quick thoughts, for the dumbest jokes best forgotten about after a minute. I sometimes crosspost, putting things I've written onto Mastodon to see what happens. This is a privilege I hold only for my absolute favourites. My Writing and Blog pages are littered with things you haven't seen if you've only followed me on Mastodon. I recommend following the RSS feed if you want the full stream of content. Mostly, crossposts don't seem do much. The post for DST did hit Witch Mastodon and go a lil viral which was pretty cool. But apart from that, it's just the usual crew who seem to read my stuff, which is fine! I'm happy that anyone is reading it, really.
I went somewhat viral one time! At the time of writing, this post has 15 boosts and 79 likes, which I believe are both records for isometry.group. It broke the server a little too, which was really funny. The post was celebrating that the head writer for The Onion considered something I made funny and honestly that in and of itself is incredible. It still feels unreal to me. The worst part, of course, is that I try to keep a strong separation between my online and professional life so I can make as many dick and gender jokes on Mastodon as I want. Because of that, there's no way for me to get this shining endorsement onto my resume. Alas.
I've been writing a lot and loving it. I'm at the writing compulsively phase, frequently wishing that I was writing when I'm not. I tried to write one complete thing every day during November, which broke when I got covid. Some of my short fiction makes me really happy and proud to have written it. I have thus far (despite several attempts) been able to get anything published formally. But I can always just put it here and that's okay! That's ideal, really. My goal in writing (and all creation, really) has nothing to do with other people. It's always to see how the act of creation changes me. Putting my thoughts onto a page crystallizes them and lets me see myself more clearly. Sometimes I write a thing and realize later I was writing about a fear I didn't even know I had, like that domming might be causing me to dehumanize my partners (it probably isn't, but it's good to know I was anxious about it). It's lovely and meditative. I recommend it.
I haven't been making so many games lately. My day job requires me to code and I find that it doesn't work for my hobbies to overlap too much with what I do for money. That's okay. I'll get back into it someday because I do miss it. I have been making bots occasionally, which is an artform I love so much. Fail Horse Bot is the most recent addition to this group, and it posts randomly generated variations on the "honse" meme. It's so fucking stupid, I love it so much.
I automated my Mastodon for a while. The "fields" on my profile change every half an hour, a fun and interesting detail that probably most people don't even notice. I wrote a script to post things automatically for me, selecting them from a file of draft posts and automatically posting each day with a probability based on the length of the file. It was an interesting experiment in recreating the "every post scheduled" system I had with Twitter, but I'm not sure I actually like it. I think I'll stop using it when the current file runs out. Although, it did always amuse me that each post listed its interface (which normally says "web app" or whatever application you use) as "Totally Real Interface". In retrospect, I should've gone with a your mom joke.
One year. We can talk around that all we like, but perhaps representing it visually is the way to go. Take a look:
The upwards climb, the way it curves steeper really speaks to me. I've been using Mastodon more lately. Is that good or bad?
I trained a Markov bot on this data, the ever popular Fake Cahatstrophe. Its dataset is several months old, as I cannot figure out how to automate grabbing archives of the data. I might be able to do a thing where it grabs my posts of the public timeline and stores them? Something to look into. I am going to update it with the grab I used for that chart.
I also ran a bot that's going to rehost my twitter archive to Mastodon in real time, two years late! As we can see from the chart, it's not going to get good until late 2024. But its second post is coming out soon!
This isn't the only chart I've made recently.
This version is a little out of date and a little fucked. The Messenger data is partially reconstructed and untrustworthy past late 2020. All of these datasets are several months old. I have plans to update the graph once I finish working on a fix for the Messenger day, and then make a whole blog post about it.
I think there's a lot of value in looking at a life as data. I can see the eras of my life here. I can see when I had friends, when I was in love, when I was alone. The gradual drop-off of Hangouts is tinged with nostalgia. I know exactly who the giant Messenger spike is and still think of them fondly. Discord came alive around when I started making in-person friends again after the pandemic started to ease up a little.
Life is full of changes. Sometimes you join a social media for a year and have an excellent time with it.
I am very much an indie content creator at this point. I make games, I write, I blog, and I maintain bots. This is wild to me and unexpected. People often tell me they don't understand how I do so much with my time and I don't know either! It doesn't feel like a lot to me! I barely produce anything and I have strong doubts about the quality of it all! The hours I spend staring at my keyboard willing ideas to flow weigh heavily upon me. The curse of the dabbler is that by doing a dozen different things, I always feel marginally worse than the specialists. I've been getting a little better. I've started to feel good about some of the things I write, which is a new and pleasing sensation.
I post everything I make online for free (except for the one thing that was funnier to charge for). This makes sense to me. It's the internet how I want it to be, free and open! But, and I really fucking hate to make this point, I probably should be asking for money? It's a weird contradictory hypocritical thing. I love it when other people who make things ask for money because they make cool things and deserve money! But I really really really hate it when I have to shill. I despise it in a way that words feel unable to adequately capture. But I also need to reckon with the fact that I am living in poverty. I'm thankfully not at risk of going homeless anytime soon, but I am working a full time job (which I adore) that is definitely paying me below the local poverty line in one of the most expensive cities in this country. Yay.
I am putting hours of my life into making things and I hope it does bring people joy! If so and you have some cash you want to spare, you can send me money! The option exists! I have a Kofi or you can just choose a pay-what-you-can option on my itch. I'll probably just spend it on like, rent and food, because I don't have a lot of money and I'm so bad at spending money on myself (because I don't have a lot of money). But hey, maybe if I had more, I'd better!
God, that feel so awkward. Fucking hell. My dream job at the moment would just be to make weird things full time and while it will probably take years to get to a point where that's viable, this is a good first step. One of my goals for the next year is to get better at asking for money. I'm tempted to write a shillbot that just posts ads for me from my main account, but that feels like bad botmaking practice and a cheap copout. Maybe I'll have a designated shill day once a month or week? #shillSunday has a nice ring to it. And it would be cool if my friend also did this because like, fuck capitalism. We all should be paid more. Universal basic income, you know?
Remember when this post was about Mastodon? Me neither.
I've been on Mastodon for a year. I've done a lot with it in that year. I've done a lot in that year in general. I'm hopeful I'll do even more with the next one and I hope you will too. Thank you for reading, for interacting with me in any way, for making the world a better place. Love you all.
Today's link of the day is, uh, shit. It feels like it should be on topic, but also I've talked about myself a bunch? I'm gonna cop out. I've been keeping my Links page pretty updated. Go take a look at it and grab something that catches your eye. I vouch for everything on that page!