Jonathan Beckett @jonbeckett@mastodon.online

While waiting for a meeting to start, I'm tinkering with Jekyll and Hugo - deciding which might be the best option for hosting a static version of my blog somewhere.

Oh my word - I just installed toot on my long suffering laptop. I'm not sure if this is a good idea or not.

Welcome to my desk - and yes - that is a bullet journal, even though I am surrounded by Outlook, ToDo, Trello, OneNote, Teams, Planner, and who knows what else :) #workingfromhome

As much as I tend to be an optimist about things, I can't help wondering if the various #mastodon instances will essentially coalesce into factions - some of which will close their walls to the outside world - and we know how that goes (cough... truthsocial... cough...)

Went for a run this morning. "Week 1 Run 2" of Couch to 5K. Can't quite believe how much fitness I have lost in the last six months not running. Feel a lot better for having got off my backside though.

I'm resisting the temptation to jump ahead to week three or four in the programme.

#fitness #running #cto5k #health

While helping explain how Mastodon works to a friend earlier, I realised that during the last 48 hours, watching the #introductions feed has felt like Tumblr did back when it started - and that's no bad thing.

Of course - after playing around with an emulated retro computer for a while, you start to wish you had a real one. And then you start looking at Ebay. And then you recoil in horror at the cost of 40 year old hardware that somehow still works, even though it was only designed to last a few years :)

The real reason (or at least, the reason I tell myself) for messing around with turning a Raspberry Pi into an amiga - or a laptop into an Amiga for that matter - was to run an old-school word processor on it.

Try it - you can install Word 5.5 in DOSBOX for free.

It's amazing how much more productive my writing becomes when I don't have a web browser filled with infinite rabbit holes only a few clicks away.

Best use of a raspberry pi ever :) Because who doesn't want an Amiga sitting in the corner of the room, reminding you (a) how far ahead of the curve they were, and (b) how little progress has been made since :) #amiga #retro #raspberrypi

@Mayana Please add me to Blogging, Everyday Life, Friendly People, Retro Computing, Writing. #Trunk

Looking forward to going out to lunch with co-workers today.

After working in an office and travelling all over Europe for the last twenty years, at the beginning of the pandemic we sold the office and switched to home working.

It has worked well - software and web development work well without distractions - but it's still nice to see friendly faces, and share something to eat together.

It didn't take long, did it. The marketers are arriving at Mastodon, and posting links to products and companies, rather than telling stories, sharing experiences, or taking any part in the community.

Given the chance, people ruin pretty much everything.

I wrote a few words about the emergence of Mastodon this morning - mostly to remember the past several days. https://jonathanwrotethis.wordpress.com/2022/04/26/exodus/ #mastodon #fediverse #internet #social #twitter #exodus

Is two coffees *before* starting work a bit much ?

So - it's the morning after the night before, and the tidal wave of mansplaining, grandstanding, and attention seeking seems to have abated somewhat.

I'm wondering how those departing Twitter towing a colossal number of followers will cope with the inevitable levelling of the playing field that the federated internet brings.

In my mind, this is is all about interaction - not about audience building. It will be interesting to see what the marketers do with it when they arrive.

I guess it's time to use the #introductions tag myself :)

Hi - I'm Jonathan, a software and web developer in the UK.

While not bashing my head against the desk repeatedly at work, or sitting in conference calls pretending to be clever, I write idiotic blog posts, occasionally trudge around town in running shoes, and attempt to survive living in a house with four women and two cats.

One more thing that newcomers might not realise - you can follow anybody from any other server. Just search for their full name, and the server they live on.

e.g. @ jonbeckett @ mastodon.online

(obviously remove the spaces)

Once a person is followed by anybody on a given server they appear on that server's federated timeline.

To all of those joining #Mastodon today and starting to realise how the fediverse works - don't worry about changing your mind about which server you should have joined. You can join them all.

It's better to think of the servers as communities with shared interests.

mastodon.social and mastodon.online are both general communities. There are lots of others that are more specific to interests.

Explore :)

I'm going to go get some popcorn, and then enjoy sharing the evening ahead with the influx of new #mastodon users.

I'm also waiting for all the same people that cause all the same problems on all the other social networks to arrive. I imagine they won't arrive until there's a big enough audience for them to start their attention seeking shenanigans.

I just spent the last few minutes posting about Mastodon at Tumblr. I'm not sure anything will come of it, but perhaps when people start reading the news about Mr Musk today, they might at least head to joinmastodon.org and have a read...