There are many headliners in this news this year. Among them being Twitter and its ever changing APIs which aim to hamper the ecosystem of applications supporting the platform. I’m not sure what the real descision process was behind them removing so much of their support for external clients, but it resulted in my favorite clients and integrations being gutted. That gutting forced me to re-think how I want to be part of the social media landscape, so it was time to make a change.

A while back I had heard of the Mastodon which aims to create a de-centralized version of Twitter. You can join an existing instance or create your own pretty easily. The appeal for me here is that it was built on Ruby on Rails which I am very familiar with in my career. However, not wanting to take on personal technical debt, I opted to start an account at a well established instance on masotdon.social. The appeal for me was their code of conduct and policies around federation. The beauty of Mastodon was that you could filter out entire instances if you identified many of it’s users to be spewing hate or trolls. Twitter seems to suck at stopping bad actors on their platform and so far at least my instance has been working fairly well for me.

My plan is to start ramping up my tooting (that is Mastodon’s version of tweeting) while ramping down my Tweeting into the new year. Lately I have been posting to both services, but that is getting pretty tiresome. So consider this post a warning that the new year will bring new changes, including my reduced presence on certain social media platforms. I do like keeping in touch with folks and sharing stories, inspiration, and my journeys with the world, but I’d like to do it on my terms more. Looking forward to 2019 and beyond with less Twitter and Facebook in my life and more smelling of the roses with optional sharing of said roses.