Twitter to Mastadon

I am writing this short comment to anyone who might visit this site or be interested. I am currently beginning the process of potentially leaving Twitter and using Mastadon as my primary social media account. Since 2016 I have not been a member of Facebook or any other purely social media site other than Twitter. I recently created a LinkedIn account but I do not use it extensively since I am now retired from Oklahoma State University. Should I take on a new professional role that would be aided by a more active LinkedIn presence I will become more active there, but for now it is simply a professional placeholder for the most part.

I have enjoyed Twitter since I joined in early 2011, but with the recent ownership change and the new policies (or lack thereof) I find my desire to remain on the network “strained” at best. I have always used third party clients to use Twitter and never used the web interface and therefore avoided much of the less desirable traffic (thank you Twitteriffic and Tweetbot), but in all honesty who knows how long that will remain possible.

Given these developments and the recent movement of some of the small number of people I follow to Mastadon, along with the more distributed nature of the service I have elected to join myself - my account is located at @AllenFinchum@hachyderm.io and as more of the accounts I follow move in this direction I will spend my time on this service rather than on Twitter. I have never been a highly active poster on Twitter using it primarily to follow people I know or am interested in along with a few mainstream media services, so in some ways my departure in time will probably not be noticed, but I simply wanted to state my position for the record as I begin this process.

The links to both my Twitter and Mastadon accounts will remain on this site until I am ready to fully disable my Twitter account - hopefully sometime in the not too distant future.