It's interesting to me Will was able to move from Bear to Joplin and generally enjoys it as much as he did Bear.

I use and love Bear, and the closest I have to that with a more cross-platform-friendly constraint is Standard Notes, who also recently added regional pricing. Not to my surprise, though, as they were willing to offer economic difficulty discounts for a long time. All you had to do was drop them an email, but now it's all automated.

Still, I'm not sure I can leave Bear just yet. I do have one eye on a migration to SN because Bear is, as Will mentioned, strictly Apple-only, and in the long-run, that is very much a "problem."

What's going to convince me SN is good enough is when their editors feel as polished as Bear's do. My experience in the past with its editors has left me wanting for much more. Bear is also cheaper which is very high on my priority list right now.

I encourage you to get in touch over email by using the following convenience link for any discussion: comment via email.

I've been on the fediverse/Mastodon since 2019 and have made some amazing friends.

At the moment, I run SmallCamp, and help moderate Fosstodon along with a fantastic team and over 250 300 350 600 800 950 patrons.

Part 1: looking like an actual person.

1. Please fill out your bio and make an #introduction post with that hashtag, yes. Look at what other people are posting about to get an idea.
2. Put up a nice avatar that you like (whether of yourself or your hobbies).

People are much more welcoming when they can see who you are.

Trust me — these two things really help when people have locked their profiles and you're trying to add them.

With these two steps, we are trying to tackle the problem of: "Yes, you know you're a safe person, but how do I know that?"

People have no qualms about hitting reject… none of them are chasing a high follower count.

So, anyway, once these two steps help you follow more people, your timeline looks more lively. And you want to stay. And you follow more people. And it's a cycle, see? 🙂

Remind yourself that people on the fediverse/Mastodon have been cultivating a safe space for themselves for months (and for most of us, it is more likely to be years).

Anytime a lot of people join at once and in a short amount of time, like right now, their guard tends to be more up than usual.

The culture on the fediverse is a bit different. And remember, any new social network is always hard at first. It gets better.

Part 2: make a few posts.

Keep posting about your day and thoughts like it's 2007 and Twitter hasn't yet taken off. Just vibe. We're all here to chill. Mostly.

Find your community, not an audience.

Post about what you had for lunch.

Send a photo out into the internet — as long as it's safe for you to do so — about the beach you're sipping beer at.

Introduce your dog with a selfie or a regular photo.

Psst! Monetisation… that kind of stuff doesn't work very well here. We're not Twitter v2.0. We're just trying to bring the good old, open, social web back.

Part 3: learn the culture.

It's like Twitter, but it's not Twitter.

You'll notice a few things that we care about:

1. Adding a "content warning" to your posts. This is especially true for politics, or any kind of content that might trigger someone. Remember safe space? Yup.
2. Writing alt text for images… we're big on this. A lot of disabled people use Mastodon regularly, and in any case, it helps everyone. I know I've used alt text before to make sense of some images sometimes.

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You're ready. Go have fun? Say hi.

I encourage you to get in touch over email by using the following convenience link for any discussion: comment via email.

The timeline.

The reverse chronological timeline has been failing for me recently. As has the notifications tab for mental health reasons.

I think I was a little afraid to admit it to myself, but it is.

I log in a few times a day, read only a little bit (whatever is recently posted at the time), miss out completely on what's posted when I'm sleeping, and have found myself missing posts from people I generally enjoy hearing from.

All the cool kids live on the other side of the globe, so I'm more likely to miss out than not.

Sometimes through some interaction I find a toot that was posted 7 hours ago (while I was sleeping) that I feel sad about missing.

Maybe it's a social media problem too. Why do I need to hear from all these people? Why do I feel sad if I miss out? I certainly don't feel that way when I'm away for a few days for IRL reasons. But I do feel that way when it's just my daily schedule where this happens.

Lists?

Unfortunately it's lacking UX improvements too. You can't hide boosts and/or replies like you can on the home TL. I hide all boosts and would require that on my lists too.

Lists are simply not tenable for me without these "filters."

Notifications.

Why not use the bell icon for people I enjoy hearing from? The bell icon crowds my notifications and actually overwhelms me so I'm a very conservative user there… and is not a proper solution to the problem anyway. In fact, it brings me to my next problem.

What if I enjoy hearing from 50 people? I'd see about ~200 notifications per day. This is separate from all the other kinds of notifications: boosts, stars, new spam reports, and so on.

I'd love for notifications to be "grouped" in hourly blocks to make them more readable and consumable.

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These, I believe, are also growing pains. Maybe they will be tackled one day, maybe they won't. I definitely feel like usability has been tanking and I'm not a fan.

Maybe it doesn't need a new "algorithm" as much as a whole bunch of well thought out convenience features to make the current timeline usable.

And, let me be clear: at this activity level, for me, it is not.

I encourage you to get in touch over email by using the following convenience link for any discussion: comment via email.

I think my break is over.

However, you will not find any personal posts (or personal side stories) from me anymore over here. Please follow my socials for those.

Techie posts, though, are… okay. Strictly techie.

My blog has some RSS feeds — if you would be keen on following along. 😊

I encourage you to get in touch over email by using the following convenience link for any discussion: comment via email.

I'm taking an indefinite break on this blog. It has been a long time coming… wrote a little about it on Fosstodon, too, a while ago. It's a locked post so you might not be able to see it.

With that said, I'm also done with my monthly reviews, which is something I wanted to be clear about. ~11-12 meaningful posts over 17 months, and I'm OK with that. It was a good run. I wasn't chasing perfection and that's freaking brilliant.

The future?

Right, there's a reasonable chance I will archive this blog at some point, but we'll see. What does archiving mean? I don't know yet. Perhaps a static bunch of pages that's still accessible?

For now, stays as it is. Maybe I'll have something once in a long while to write about. Maybe something abstract, or much more appealing – something concrete like a dev/code tutorial.

We'll have to see how it goes.

The why.

There are many reasons for this break, but chief among it is feeling safer talking on a closed platform (like a private account on the Fedi, or a private Twitter account, or closed-as-in-private instant messengers) as opposed to a huge, open web.

And, this is maybe my old paranoid self, but I don't feel good, never have, about writing my opinions. This is a very unbalanced relationship. Besides, the internet has enough opinions, from people much smarter than me, so I really don't want to be taking up a stupid amount of space here.

And, like, I can't say I've felt joy in writing things of late. It just isn't flowing anymore like it used to — neither the prose nor the kick.

And, then, I suppose, in line with the ongoing theme over the last year ish, I'm constantly moving my focus — some consciously, some incidental — away from the internet, and privacy, and free software, and such… towards my career, my life goals, my mental health, my physical health, and figuring out who I am as a person. And just being in a better place overall. Which is of course a non-linear and perhaps a not-so-pleasant journey. But it is one and I want to be focusing on it.

Cliché? Maybe. It's the truth, still.

Signing off from here. Everything is fluid. Nothing is scraped on stone. This is what it is today.

I didn't have to make this post, but I'm a drama queen.

See you on the fedi and other private spaces.

I encourage you to get in touch over email by using the following convenience link for any discussion: comment via email.