I heard about via some friends who are into privacy tools and open source software. I first joined Diaspora and then was introduced to Mastodon, Pixelfed, Misskey, etc.
Long time ago I was reading stuff about distributed systems and I read about ActivityPub. Given all my real-life friends are using corporation-based social networks, I never made an account in Mastodon.
Until a few days ago that I tried to upload a cat video to Instagram and it lagged a lot. It was very frustrating. I noticed how ads were loading super fast, though. So I finally decided to create an account on Mastodon.
When mastodon got a lot of attention late last year during the twitter exodus I decided to check it out. I wasn't on twitter in any meaningful way, so for me it wasn't a replacement.
I like the ideas behind fedi - I grew up on IRC in the 90s, and fedi feels familiar, like the old internet: distributed, messy, personal... anyways, I ran a one person mastodon instance for awhile, until I realized I wasn't into it enough to warrant the time. So now I just join other people's instances ;)
By the way thanks for setting up the Lemmy instance. @[email protected] when you decide to make uFail stick, please let us know how to support you and the server. Cheers!
I used to be part of Twitter a long while ago, but all the politics and negative news started getting to me, so I stopped.
I heard about Mastadon after Twitter started to implode. I had tried to join some different instances before landing on one of @[email protected] ‘s mastadon. Now I’m a paying supporter of mstdn.social 🎉
It was Mastodon. I went to DEF CON back in 2021 and someone talked to me about it. It sounded really interesting, but I didn't check it out for quite some time, but finally did so in early 2022. It was cool, I thought, but there wasn't much going on, and I lost interest.
When Elon was getting close to buying Twitter, I re-engaged. Suddenly, things were hopping, and I've been having a blast ever since.
Interesting question. Cannot really remember how and why. Probably stumbled across it by accident…
I registered an account on a Mastodon instance about three years ago. Kind a thankful that I did that (for whatever reasons), last but not least because Twitter gone to waste.
I knew about stuff like GNU Social when I was younger, but I never really cared until everyone started going to Mastodon. I didn't have a Twitter or anything beforehand, I just noticed all of the computer people finally moving to a platform that didn't make me retch.