I keep telling myself I should stop thinking about social media so much, especially in the "current moment", but it keeps happening. This post started as a bunch of posts on Mastodon until I stopped myself and decided to Blog About It instead.

Mastodon is fine

Eugen being the BDFL of Mastodon (the project) might have been beneficial in the early days, but it feels more and more like a liability at this point.
If Mastodon is to survive for another 8 years, it cannot be run as a pet project anymore. And it also should not be run as "just" a Twitter-like anymore because Bluesky is effectively winning that battle with more resources than the Mastodon project could ever get.

A lot of the good ideas for the Fediverse aren't coming from Eugen or Mastodon at this point, and they rarely involve just "being another Twitter". Which leads me to my next point.

"Who is the new Twitter?" is a boring question

I really do not like this question.^[1] This isn't me being salty about Bluesky "winning", by the way. I would be bothered the same if Mastodon was being declared a "winner" because:

Why should we have only one website, exactly?

Why is this all we care about? Why is this the focus? Why do we obsess over who has the most (active) users?

Are we constantly arguing about decentralization, who does it and who doesn't, and complaining about monopolies only to want (effectively) a monopoly for our online spaces? Really?

Sure, it's more annoying, but I think it's healthier to have different spaces for different people.
I've been on Twitter since 2009, Mastodon since 2017, and Bluesky since early 2023 and at this point, I can say that all of these are true:

• I know people…Read more

This post is mirrored on cohost as well and was written with it in mind. But also not? It's fine, don't worry about it.

Like many people in my age group, I think it's fair to say that I grew up online.

the pre-social media years

My "life online" really started in the mid-2000s when I joined the forums of Crystal XP. This name probably won't mean anything to you, but if you used Windows XP at the time, you might have seen their "BricoPacks". These were 1-click installers that reskinned your entire Windows installation. Their most successful one was the Vista Inspirat one. Pretty wild stuff. Oh, and also CrystalXP was "responsible" for that one Tux and its myriad of variations you might see on every other Linux fanboy's profile.

But like I said, they had forums. I joined those forums after reading CrystalXP's Photoshop tutorials and wanting to share my progress and get advice. I met a bunch of people, some of whom I am still friends with to this day, learned a ton about graphic and UI design.

I drew icons, wallpapers, all of varying quality that I would post to my DeviantArt profile.
I went hard into the Windows customization bit. At first, it was simple stuff, but around 2006-2007, I got enamored by Mac OS X's UI from watching a friend's Mac screenshots.
From this point on, my goal was to make Windows XP look like Mac OS X (Tiger and then Leopard). I wish I still had those "desks" screenshots because man, I was good at that shit. I made skins for iTunes, a skin for ObjectBar that mimicked the Leopard menubar, skins for Miranda IM that copied Adium skins.

A year later, I would get my first Mac. A…Read more

The Mastodon instance I've been on for the past 7 years, octodon.social is shutting down next year. So rather than try to find a replacement, I decided to run my own, single-user instance.

The issue isn't that good, well-moderated instances don't exist, they do! But one of the big reasons why I stayed on Octodon was because I knew the moderation team personally so I trusted their decisions and agreed with most of them. I just frankly couldn't be bothered with having to find and vet a new instance and I like to tinker so, after some advices from my friend Niléane I went and spun up my own!

It's up at https://social.erambert.me and you can find me on Mastodon by looking up @eramdam@erambert.me.

The setup isn't anything too fancy:

• a dedicated server hosted by OVH
• OVH's object storage solution for media files behind Bunny
• running Mastodon 4.2.10 (current stable version at the time of writing)

All set up while following the official documentation.

The only quirk of my setup might is that the "local domain" (domain the instance responds to) and the "web domain" (domain where the Web interface lives) are different. Meaning that people can find me by looking up @eramdam@erambert.me despite the actual instance running on https://social.erambert.me. It's a behavior that is well documented by Mastodon and is usually trivial to implement when you host your website on your own server...

Except I don't do that 😅 My website is, for now, running on Astro and hosted on Vercel so I can't just modify the web server configuration to set up the necessary redirection.

Now, I'm not the only one that tried to do this with a similar setuip link link link. But none of those solutions were satisfactory for me because:

1. they…Read more