Mastodon adventures

I've joined Mastodon, apparently just before "the big announcement" (spoiler: Elon Musk buying Twitter).

Nothing against Twitter! I'll still be there as @gnomethrower, but I'll also be on Mastodon via aus.social - you can find me on Mastodon as @gnomethrower@aus.social.

This page serves as an explainer of what Mastodon is, and also shows the Mastodon network that raptorswithhats.com is also me, hopefully (I haven't fully worked out how the verification process works).

Mastodon is a federated, distributed social network. It's a bit like Twitter, if Twitter were open source and awesome, and allowed you to team up with the folks running your instance to fight baddies.

You can join a Mastodon instance and interact with anyone on the whole Mastodon network - instances can come and go and it all keeps working. Instances with bad actors (think spammers, trolls etc) can be blocked and moderated by the folks running your instance (as mentioned earlier), or by you - you have the power to block entire sections of the "fediverse" if you so desire, avoiding having to interact with them.

You can find out more at https://joinmastodon.org/.