I am now up and running on the Mastodon Social Network, which promises to be a sane site for ham radio fans. And, maybe replace Twitter.

A month ago, I had never heard of Mastodon or the Fediverse. Then, my friend Mark Smith N6MTS did a Cycle25 presentation about both. I decided to take the plunge.

Mastodon is an open-source, user-controlled micro-blogging platform. It works pretty much the same as Twitter, except users control how it works and you can do a lot more to curate the content you receiver. Since Twitter started getting silly, Mastodon social network usage has spiked up to around 10 million, still a far cry from 200+ million tweeters.

So, now you can find me @VE6EY on Mastodon Hams Social, the North American hub for ham radio and SWL types. You can also find the UK based Mastodon.Radio which runs in parallel. I find the neat thing is that like-minded sites can easily link to each other through Fediverse.

Fediverse is a “federated universe” of open-source micro-blogging and other sites that follow the same connectivity and publishing protocols around the world. It is seen as an alternative to Facebook’s Metaverse.

I find I can do pretty much everything on Mastodon, including publishing my blog and communicating with folks who have similar interests. Time will tell how this work out, but you might give it a try.

Mastodon Social Network Might Thrive

I have never used social media for news and probably never will. Nor am I into being tracked and manipulated through algorithms. Mastodon lets you choose your areas of interest – control is in your hands.

You can set things up to follow only your local server contacts, or monitor the Fediverse. Unfortunately, Donald Trump’s Truth Social is also part of Fediverse, but I can easily ignore that.

So, social media is no longer monolithic. Big firms can no longer control it. You can. Whether or not these new developments provide a socially improved social networking depends on us.