Moving from twitter to mastodon

I’m on mastodon — on the fediscience.org instance to be precise. I’ve been fairly inactive on twitter because I’ve not liked what it has become for a while now, my followers would have noticed that from my general lack of engagement on that platform for the last 2-3 years.

This is a big deal for me given I’ve been on the platform since 2007. I never got into facebook despite joining the platform quite early on, and completely left that platform (and its associated ones, instagram and WhatsApp) some 5 years ago. So, twitter has been my main social media platform for the best part of 15 years! I liked twitter from the very beginning.

In fact the original 140 characters was perfect for me because during most of my first two years on the platform, I used to send sms messages to a specific UK number from my fieldwork sites in Northern Ghana to post my tweets. In those days, each SMS was limited to 160 characters so each tweet would cost the price of a single SMS, which I was happy to pay given the service it was providing me — helping me stay in touch with the outer world via my tweets from the field which often were completely cut-off from the outside world. Occasionally, on one of my fieldwork sites, I even had to climb up a tree to get good enough mobile signal (mostly GPRS, and if lucky edge network — those old enough to use mobile internet before 3G would remember!). I had a Nokia E50 phone back then, which I loved — I still think it is one of the best mobile phones I’ve used. So I tweeted using my reliable Nokia phone for a number of years, and when I got my first Kindle Keyboard with 3G it had an experimental browser feature, which I used to tweet as well.

So all of these fond memories of using Twitter in early years are the ones I would cherish the most. Interestingly, a week or so being on fediverse feels quite similar in many ways, looking for people to follow, seeing others finding you on the platform, and just having a clean timeline with no ads and largely interesting toots. I really hope this will continue and become even better. I have no intention of going back to twitter now, although I’ll keep my account there active for now so that people know where to find me — my name and link on my profile should lead them here 😄