Nasty or nice?

Why would an otherwise unremarkable 66 year old man from the East Midlands think you want to read my twitterings & witterings about subjects that have niche value? Well, to be honest I don't, this is a weird experience, and partly a chance to explain myself, and partly a chance to work out why I do things in one way rather than another. Why am I using Mastodon rather than Twitter? (It will never really be X except in Elon Musk's head), Why am I happy to spend hours on a project, with marginal gains and yet lose patience in tasks & chores in a time that is shorter than some synthetic elements half lives?

In no particular order, I am still using Twitter, having started using it as a direct result of the New York Hudson forced landing of Delta 1549, where film and pictures appeared hours before they started to appear on MSM, and also as a falling out of love with Facebook, that was clearly abusing its dominant position amongst social media. My use was fairly sporadic, mostly because (As you will quickly see) I have a fairly mundane life. However around the time of my retirement a number of things happened which changed my attitudes to social media, perhaps for ever... Brexit (Which I am implacably opposed to) and COVID 19 Vaccine introduction (Which I think is one of the greatest responses to a modern tragedy) and boy the fights were epic. And the scores? Lost One, Won One... But the costs were pretty high, particularly during the vaccine wars, people were doxxed, lives changed, and it's probably not over exaggerating to say people died as a result of information spread online...and the coincidence of Musk's acquisition of Twitter meant that some individuals who had been removed for spreading false information suddenly were resurrected. So I wandered around for a bit, and found the fediverse... This weird slightly odd, altruistic environment where people set up an infrastructure, which wasn't owned by an individual (Looking at YOU....Elon, and Jack) and had a feel very like my first introduction to Twitter. And I really didn't get on with it...where was the excitement, the fights, the heedless cruelty and name calling from behind a block.. Where an opinion just had to exist to be valid, and no amount of patient scientific detail or explanation would work... It was dull.. so I came of SM for a bit, then like the junkie of old, started back with the occasional toe dip, and before you knew it (or I knew it) I was back baby!! This time the fights weren't over Vaccines or Brexit, but...well everything..it was exhausting. I retreated

A couple of years earlier, my mother had died , and left me a nice little pot, and out of that I decided to build a PC that would be the envy of my friends, and have the ability to do everything, up to and including run the entire UK space project (Yes a Sinclair Spectrum!!) I started playing with Virtual Machines, and adding interesting bits and pieces and almost inevitably the fediverse came into view, my friend Matthew told me about Matrix/Synapse, the federated chat (Think WhatsApp) and after a devil of a job, aided by both real Matthew and Artificial Claude, I managed to get it working, and it linked... and so Mastodon, that Himalayan peak of difficulty...and it took less than an afternoon.... and it very quickly became clear that it was populated by nice sensible people who wanted to express opinions, but also were interested in hearing yours, and if you provided evidence, they might even moderate their views...and it was lovely... it was much gentler, it wasn't (or doesn't seem to be) overrun with bots, simply disagreeing and sewing division... It opened my eyes that social Media doesn't have to be combatitive I will ramble on more about this in the coming days, but in the meantime... Stay Well