Back in November, the DEV Team announced that we had begun exploring the Fediverse:
With the caveat that…
We look forward to expanding our presence into new and exciting servers in the future — for now, this is our home for toots.
The time for that expansion has come! Beginning today, we’ll be Tooting from @ThePracticalDev@Fosstodon.org. 🥳🎉
Because this is such a novel and exciting time in the social media sphere, and we here at DEV are particularly interested in the independent web as well as the potential of open source software, we wanted to let you in on how and why this decision was made.
We started on Mastodon.Social for a few reasons:
- @ben had already made us an account there back in 2017. Thanks Ben!
- At the time, it was the fastest-growing and best-known Mastodon server.
- It was a topic-neutral place to start as we observed the growth of the wider Fediverse.
- We knew that we’d have the opportunity to switch servers fairly easily and at any time.
Here’s why we chose Fosstodon.org as our new landing spot:
- Our OSS roots run deep! We’re eager to contribute to the conversation in a space that’s oriented around open source and its potential.
- At ~49k active users (at the time of this posting), Fosstodon is a large server, but still much smaller than Mastodon.Social (~213k active users). We’re hopeful that being part of a smaller, more focused community will help us reach our community members more effectively.
- Fosstodon is primarily an Anglophone server, and our social accounts are run in English.
We're still cross-posting our Twitter feed to Mastodon using moa.party for now. We recommend checking it out if you're looking for a simple solution to expand your presence across platforms.
Ok, your turn: how did you decide where to make your home in the Fediverse? Have you considered moving?
Top comments (26)
Toot! Toot! Great choice of instance DEV!
If folks are looking for me you can search for
@nick@iamdeveloper.comon whatever instance you're on.It'll redirect and find me here.
Nick Taylor (@nickytonline@toot.cafe) - Toot Café
320 Posts, 272 Following, 395 Followers · Staff Engineer, Ecosystem (frameworks) @ Netlify he/him 👨💻 Volunteers at @CollabLab & virtualcoffee.io
I also chose toot.cafe back when the main reason for doing so was, "hey that sounds like a friendly name" :)
I have never been a part of social media, but Mastodon appealed to me with the per-topic servers. I am @webJose@dotnet.social.
José Pablo Ramírez Vargas (@webJose@dotnet.social) - dotnet.social
49 Posts, 33 Following, 36 Followers · Senior Backend Software Developer Have worked for many big ones: HP, P&G, Brightstar, IBM, Intel. Two-time nominee for Microsoft MVP in C# back when I moderated the Spanish MSDN Forums. My passion is .Net/C#, but I do enjoy pretty much anything about programming. Lately I've been involved a bit into some front-end programming and some NodeJS backend too. Daddy to #wjconfig I write code with discipline. Oh, I love Age of Empires! #AoE :dotnet: :javascript: :typescript:
I selected this server because my primary language and passion is C#/.Net.
Sounds like an excellent choice! Have you enjoyed it so far?
It's been nice. One of my followers is Nicholas Blumhardt (@nblumhardt@hachyderm.io), the author of nothing less than Serilog, Seq and Autofac. This guy is one of my heroes.
So cool 🤩
I’m so happy to have Dev on Mastodon. I chose to stick with Hachyderm as my server of choice. The moderation and development team are amazing and their values line up great with creating a safe place for people.
I am @j3dev@hachyderm.io
hachyderm.io/@j3dev
I'm also on Hachyderm. Great community. Lots of techies there, too.
hachyderm.io/@mr_eking
For those who are interested, Scott Hanselman (hachyderm.io/@shanselman) had Kris Nóva (hachyderm.io/@nova) on his podcast where they talked about how she set up and maintains the Hachyderm instance. 43 minutes.
I joined the Hachyderm.io Mastodon server because I saw that Molly White was on there and she always seemed like someone who had good taste. Picking an instance felt urgent because it was the week that Twitter lost about 90% of it's staff and there was speculation that Twitter might crash.
Despite it being a total shot in the dark, I'm very happy on Hachyderm: it feels like one of the more general purpose tech instances.
I chose Fosstodon for similar reasons. So far it's been a good experience.
It would now be good to have a place in my DEV profile to put my Mastodon account reference. Similarly it would be good to have code repository links supported for things other than GitHub e.g. GitLab in my case.
I also picked Fostodon, but that’s cause it’s what came up when I searched tech, being a dev that’s broadly describes my key interests.
Mostly talk about #Flutter and #React as well as whatever game I’m playing. Lol
Liking it a lot more than twitter, their is actually engagement and people aren’t complete tools.
fosstodon.org/@RemeJuan
Toooooooooot 😎
Toot toot!
I can relate. I moved from Mastodon.Social to TechHub.Social and may yet move again to dotnet or hackyderm. We shall see!
Thankfully Mastodon has aliasing and migrations that make that fairly easy.
Totally! I've been impressed with how smoothly the migration process has gone. Kinda makes you wonder why other social media sites haven't figured that out yet 😜
I've removed my DEV auth connection to Twitter, and put my link in as my profile URL (because we don't support Mastodon here in profiles yet). There's no future in centralised social media.
Even if I didn't prefer Mastodon, or even if big companies succeed in making it like Gmail, or even if it becomes yet another heaving mass of people fighting to get as many followers as possible...
Still a better love story than Twitter.
This is one of the reasons why I've been considering abandoning fosstodon for a while. Not only is it a "primarily" anglophone server, it straight up disallows toots in any other language.
What this effectively means is that I'm not allowed to respond to toots from my friends, or even my government (which has been migrating to the fediverse lately), which indirectly tells me that I, as a non-native english speaker, am not welcome on that instance. Very annoying at best and kind of gate-keepy at worst.
Awesome move guys!
I created a Fosstodon account shortly before the mass migrations started, and I've enjoyed using it more and more!
The primary pain point (at least for me) has been slowly rebuilding a follower/following base similar to Twitter.
It's funny though just how true the saying is that "people are nicer on Mastodon" :)
Even though I first started writing on Medium, I've recently started expanding to write on this great platform as well! Anyone interested can find me at dedsyn4ps3@fosstodon.org
Honestly I had a big, unegaged and probably mostly inactive following on Twitter, while much smaller, the Mastadon following is actually engaged.
Quality over quantity hey.
Greetings from @reinhart@bots.reinhart1010.id! Well I decided to set up a new server/instance for three main reasons:
Oh yeah I created my own instance one month prior to Musk’s acquisition, by the way.
I also drop my profile here if any devs want to follow me. I toot sometimes 😁
Thømas Bnt :thinking_coffee: (@thomasbnt@mstdn.io) - Mastodon
36 Posts, 104 Following, 115 Followers · Je suis un développeur web français et collectionneur de Mugs. Je contribue activement à l'Open Source et je suis modérateur bénévole sur dev.to. Mes principaux sujets #A11y #WebDev #Series #Linux #RaspberryPi #OpenSource #DevCommunity
One of the great things about it: I followed you a while ago, and the change of address was totally seamless. If you hadn't posted about it, I'd never have noticed.
I tried Fosstodon first. After trying a couple others I landed in the biggest Canadian one, mstdn.ca. I prefer to keep my data hosted in Canada and it gives me more relevant Canadian content in my local feed. And I like that it is general topic, because I'll post about tech but also lots of other stuff.