What I did in 2018 was

1. picked an instance where the local timeline looked interesting/relevant to some of my personal interests
2. looked through there and also #hashtags for my interests
3. through those avenues, followed everybody who looked remotely interesting at all! With the understanding that I was going to start big and some of those people probably wouldn’t accept my follow, and some of them probably wouldn’t turn out to be interesting to me/compatible in the end so I would remove my follow.

I feel like casting a wide net and filtering down to match your own taste and the kind of people you want to meet is a good way to start curating the Mastodon you personally want to see, since an algorithm isn’t going to do it for you. It takes time but is rewarding in the end. With Masto in specific, most instances by now have upgraded software to the point where migration tools are available, so if you end up not even liking your local timeline you can take all your followers, follows, blocks etc and just try someplace else.

You could probably also use lists to help with this process somehow but I never really understood them either here or on Twitter lol.

I’ve been on Mastodon for several years, most of it on a singular instance (well before the Twitter migration). You definitely have to go looking for your own list of interesting people to follow, and the hashtags are quieter than I’d like, but I enjoy it as a chill place to just hang out and read fun stuff and occasionally have low stakes conversations.

I’ve tried a few other fediverse services but none have really stuck with me except for probably now Lemmy and Kbin.

It will use ActivityPub

Embrace, extend, extinguish.

Trusting this thing would always be a bad idea.

I’m about to the point where I’m just going to go back to pirating. The value of streaming services was in their convenience. I was willing to pay money for that, but the more fragmented and complicated all of it gets, when I can just pay for 1 VPN and go to a site and click a few links…

I’ve had a Flip 3 for about a year and I honestly love the phone, but more for the style/fun factor of the flip over the actual usefulness. I was a huge fan of flip phones in the feature phone era and hated having to switch to candybar, lol, so I had to give it a try!

Pros for me:

• Looks very cool, flip phone nostalgia value
• I have some mobility problems and being able to set the phone on a table to use it as opposed to having the weight stressing my hands is nice
• Great for reading ebooks in a 2-page view
• Can see notifs, quick check music, dismiss alarms etc without opening
• Fits great in small pockets

Cons:

• This particular model is so ridiculously slidey on the outside that it won’t even stay still on a level table so a case is 100% required, but hopefully other foldables will avoid this lol
• Relatedly, not exactly a big case variety for this style of phone
• worry of “what if the screen cracks” hanging over my head

It’s been a fun purchase, but I’m not completely sold on the necessity or usefulness yet. If my screen is still okay by the time I’m ready for a new phone in a couple more years then I’ll call it a good purchase. So far I haven’t had any problems or signs of issues at the folding point, hopefully the trend continues, but I do make a point to leave the phone open most of the time when I don’t specifically need the folding functions.