infosec.exchange

I started looking at Mastodon a bit more than a year ago, when the prospect of New Management at Twitter was becoming a looming disturbance in the timeline and although no-one really knew exactly what to expect, “something good” was clearly unlikely¹. As described in Tweets and Toots, I set up at mastodon.social because I really didn’t have a good answer to the question of which community I felt part of.

In December 2022, I posted Why I Unfollowed You to mark my progressive disengagement from Muskland, and really haven’t spent a lot of time there since. A couple of weeks later I pinned what I regard as my tombstone post and which still represents my position:

This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.

I’ve enjoyed the time I have spent on Mastodon a lot more than my latter-day experience with the Hellsite. It’s less exhausting and stressful, and even the cat pictures are better, to my mind. Or are those statements redundant?

I’m not finding myself posting that much more on Mastodon — most of my posts are essentially pointers to long-form posts here — but I do find myself boosting a lot more than I retweeted. Boosts don’t incorporate commentary in the way that quote-tweets can, so the semantics are simply and only “I think people who follow me might find this interesting” and I don’t find it particularly scary to hit a button with that label.

It turns out that the question of whether Mastodon should also provide an easy way to do the equivalent of a quote-tweet is a contentious one. Not having that in the experience was a conscious choice and while I’m not certain that the sky would fall if it was introduced, it’s a cultural thing now and I don’t think there’s a pressing need for in-line argumentation.

The one change I am making today is to move from my original instance, the flagship mastodon.social, to the smaller infosec.exchange. So, I am now @iay@infosec.exchange.

The new instance is quite a lot smaller: as I write this, mastodon.social has 878K users, of which around 220K are in some sense “active” (there are enough users on the instance that it’s no longer open access). infosec.exchange has closer to 30K users in total. This makes a big difference to the “local” timeline: it’s an unusable firehose on mastodon.social and while there’s probably a way to filter it down to a reasonable level the smaller instance just feels… friendlier, somehow. The denizens of infosec.exchange don’t feel like my family, necessarily, and they’re not even all in the same line of work as I am (my Mastodon bio describes me as “Infosec-adjacent”), but they’re definitely my tribe. The things they are talking about are the things I talk about.

As well as feeling more at home, and having a manageable local timeline, I’m also sympathetic to the idea that large instances (and implicitly a small number of large instances) is just a bad direction. Obviously that feeling is informed by the limiting case of conventional monolithic social media: the incentives for site owners are just too misaligned with those of the would-be socialites and enshittification is, if not actually inevitable, at least hard to avoid.

The move itself was very smooth, perhaps because I waited for a day when neither instance was being DDOSed by people who don’t want us to have nice things. If you’re thinking of doing this for any reason, my only word of advice would be to change your original profile to be exactly the way you want it before flipping the “send my followers over there” switch, as there are some things you can’t do with an active redirect in place.