Once upon a time, I was on Livejournal. So were all my friends. Then they started vanishing, leaving only auto-posted collections of cryptic fragments of their

Once upon a time, I was on Livejournal. So were all my friends. Then they started vanishing, leaving only auto-posted collections of cryptic fragments of their halves of conversations they were having on Twitter. Eventually I finally got on Twitter too. It was okay for keeping up with what my friends were doing. Not great, forcing everything into the arbitrary limit of 140 characters long after the "it fits in an SMS" requirement was dead was annoying. But it was okay. Kinda like having an IRC channel where you were the one who decided who showed up. And then it became a place for political argument, because that Increased Engagement, and Twitter was constantly chasing that as a way to serve more ads in between the conversations with my friends, even though the doubled post limit of 280 characters was still fucking horrible for any kind of discussion much beyond "u suck" "no u". Mastodon is a replacement for the reason I actually went to Twitter in the first place: I can go there and see a bit of what my friends are up to, with links to other projects. I would be happier if they were moving towards something longer-form but they are not. I've adjusted the post limit on my own instance to ~7 and it's pretty nice.