It's officially been a full year since I first joined Mastodon, and with it the wider Fediverse. My experience so far has been fascinating, inclusive and generally trouble-free, and the improvements I've seen both socially (community-wise) and technically (software updates) have been great. I'm writing this to go into a little more detail about my experience as someone who had never used a microblogging platform before Mastodon.

My experience started a year ago today when I started looking around the platform and figuring out how it worked, and to this day I can't say I've ever had a better experience with social media as a whole. The community is vibrant, diverse and full of stories from REAL people who care. The software is polished and has seen so many improvements since I joined that it's frankly baffling how some still prefer proprietary platforms like Meta's Threads or Twitter (I won't call it X).

To give some background on how it's different from the platforms you already know, imagine a microblogging platform where your words aren't tied to a cryptic algorithm, where you're not locked into an ecosystem and can move around at will. All you have to do to be discovered is follow a few people or use a few hashtags. Anyone who follows you or a hashtag you use WILL see your content, with no algorithmic exceptions or bottlenecks. In addition, because of the way it works from a technical perspective, it promotes a more open internet by encouraging decentralisation; this means you cannot be silenced, moderated or otherwise controlled by a single entity, or have your data harvested for advertising. Speaking of advertising and data harvesting, the Fediverse is also more privacy friendly by default because there is no business model that requires them to harvest data for profit; everything is funded by actual users through donations, which keeps the ecosystem alive, stable and open.

I could go on, but the bottom line is that I love the Fediverse as a place and Mastodon as a platform. And I haven't even talked about statistics like how many news outlets get the highest quality comments on their content mostly from the Fediverse and not from proprietary platforms with algorithms.

And all the people who say it's "too hard" to choose a server are quite frankly wrong, very wrong. Joining the Fediverse has never been easier than visiting JoinMastodon.org and picking a server that sounds interesting. That's it. The sign-up process is so streamlined that you'll be finding content in no time, and with full-text search now available, you won't have to rely on hashtags.

I've had a great experience here and I'm not planning on leaving. So I'll see you next year, when I'll talk a bit about other interesting things I've noticed about the Fediverse, how it's evolving and what not.

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Thanks for reading! I wish you a good rest of the day, evening, night, or whatever other time you're reading this!