no matter how you feel about The Donald, I think many of us can agree that today's events constitute a gross abuse of power by Twitter Inc, and are a microcosm of the broader problems of centralized media. many of us have expressed a desire to migrate, but it is unclear where to.
as one solution, I invite all of you to join me on my new Mastodon server, http://schelling.pt. here you will be outside the reach of corporate media & part of a decentralized network of independent Twitter-like servers, free to move between them
Mastodon is an open-source project based on the ActivityPub protocol; the interface is very similar to Twitter, the primary difference being that rather than a single company controlling the system, it is outside of any one person's control. on Mastodon, you know what to expect
even if you register on my server, you're free to move your account to another Mastodon server anytime! since the servers all federate (talk) to each other, there's nothing stopping you from finding a home with values that match yours. if one server bans you, there are others!
some servers ban "nazis"; they're at liberty to make their own rules. other servers do not. the beauty of the fediverse (federated universe) is that communities are free to choose their own destiny, and block servers they do not want to interact with. Gab is just another server!
this transition does not have to be one-way, either; for example, I am cross-posting between this account and pee_zombie@schelling.pt using https://moa.party
my hope is that once enough of us switch over to the fediverse, we won't really be missing much from Twitter
there's no commitment necessary, and its free to you; if you've ever been interested in decentralization and don't trust Twitter Inc, this is your chance to experiment. all are welcome!
@pee_zombie You wouldn't happen to know if it's possible to import my twitter threads? I wanna run my own server and use something like that moa thing, but I need to have my tweets back-dated so I can keep building my exobrian.
@ultimape that's a great question, one I'd love an answer to as well. I haven't see any such tool, but I imagine it should be simple enough to write one. masto supposedly will allow migration of toots across servers in the future, that same tool could be used
@pee_zombie The hard part is I need proper threading import and not simply injest random tweets.
I was trying to make one, then twitter changed their export format.
this is not a private server, as all toots (Mastodon tweets) are public; if you're not comfortable with trusting your data to me, feel free to join another server, or start your own! we'll still be able to interact as if we were on Twitter.