Mastodon

Migration as a Service

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Morning Folks! In the great roulette that is post-Twitter social media, I’ve largely thrown my hat into the ring with Mastodon. I’ve been there long enough at this point that it just feels the most comfortable. I pretty regularly poke my head into Bluesky as well, but it feels very much like I am a visitor rather than a resident. Largely I say this in part to make sure my biases are known. Yesterday Mastodon, the primary branch of the fediverse hit 15 million total users which of course caused a round of congratulatory posts as a result. Thing is… I am not sure that number means what the general public seems to think it means. From my understanding that is 15 Million total accounts signed up on Mastodon servers, not necessarily 15 million unique people.

That led me to joke that likely 10 million of those accounts are accounts that users had migrated away from. The thing is… migration is common in the fediverse and folks pop back and forth between instances for all sorts of reasons. This is a feature of the software and part of why I am so comfortable here. While I actively participate and help administer Gamepad.club, I know that if something were to happen down the line, I could just move my chair to another stall and keep trucking on like nothing happened. I don’t have to worry about some tyrant buying up my social media of choice and then enacting all manner of stupid changes because, in a worst-case scenario, I can just create my own private instance and still keep communicating with everyone as if nothing happened.

Someone might misinterpret my joke as throwing shade at folks who migrate servers regularly. There is this one couple that in the time I have known them… have migrated almost once a week for the last year. The thing is I have no ground to stand on as I have migrated around my own account quite a number of times. However because of the way that migration works… most of those older accounts are still out there and still being counted in the total census of accounts. I thought it might be an interesting thought experiment to walk through my own migration history and talk about each of the hops.

@Belghast@Mastodon.cloud

This was my very first account on the Fediverse and I joined on August 16th of 2018 during what was at that time the first big migration wave. I don’t remember exactly what the hubbub was on Twitter at the time but there were a number of folks packing up their stuff and moving to Mastodon, the most famous of which was Wil Wheaton. That did not go well for him… and he was pretty much harrassed off the platform. I had no clue about anything and signed up on the first instance that seemed to have openings, not understanding that accounts were bound to a particular instance and that I was not actually joining mastodon.social the flagship instance. I was on this server for I think three days in total, but here it is out in the void taking up space as a unique Mastodon user.

@Belghast@Elekk.xyz

On August 17th of 2018 I signed up for Elekk.xyz but since the server was “approval only” I think it took me another day before I completed the migration. It took a couple of days before I realized that different servers specialized in different things. That isn’t necessarily a hard and fast thing, but at the time Elekk was the only server specifically advertising itself as gaming-focused. Noelle the admin was super awesome so it seemed like a no-brainer to migrate especially since I had only actually been on the other server for a few days. A good deal of your relationship with a specific instance is tied to whether or not you are aligned with the admin that runs it. This will come up later, but Noelle seemed drift compatible with my interests so I moved and was pretty happy there. I was considerably more active than the average user and the self-identified “gamers” were a bit more casual than I was used to but it still felt pretty comfy.

@belghast@nineties.cafe

Friends… I bounced around a LOT in that first year. Honestly I bounced way more than I even realized prior to sitting down to write this post. Time is largely meaningless when it comes to memory and I thought the events of Nineties.cafe and later MMORPG.social played out over a few years… but alas that is not the case. On August 25th 2018… I migrated to Nineties.Cafe so initially it appears that I was only actually active on Elekk that first time for a little over a week. Essentially my blogging buddy Liore decided that she was going to throw her hat into the ring for site hosting, and I joined along as a moderator to help out. The server was hopping for awhile but largely died down after a couple of weeks. It was a cool idea but there were only a handful of us that were ever active on it. Sadly the only way you can see this instance now is through the Wayback machine and as a result, this is not counting towards that 15 Million account total.

@Belghast@MMORPG.Social

In December of 2018 a friend of mine Gazimoff, who you will probably note is the current owner of Gamepad.club… decided to create a Mastodon instance targeted at MMORPG players. This was a really fun instance and I moved over once again to help moderate. Once again it was new and exciting… and extremely active for a month or so until the shine wore off and folks ended up going back to Twitter. I was still active here for quite a while and considered it my active home on the Fediverse. More than anything Gaz learned a ton of lessons on how he would not host a server in the future, as MMORPG.social became unsustainable. It folded in June of 2020 but I was “maining” this server pretty much its entire lifespan. It was a good year and a half and I had a lot of nostalgia over that time. Once again the only way you can see this site is through the wayback machine and as such it is not counting toward the 15 Million users.

Back to Elekk

With the death of MMORPG.social I needed another home on the Fediverse and since I didn’t really have any negative feelings towards Elekk I went back there. I honestly would have likely have stayed there were it not for assisting two different friends as they attempted to run their own instances. I migrated back in June of 2020 and was there until April of 2022. For a few years it was a great little home that gave me a window into the larger Fediverse. I never had any issues with the users of the instance, but I was starting to feel a bit stifled by the administration of the server. It had changed hands since I was first there, and while I adore the new admin… they were a bit quick to defederate from instances instead of limiting them. I get that there were some legitimately serious attacks on the server from hostile actors, but also defederating from the flagship instances like Mastodon.social can be frustrating for the individual users that have friends there. I wound up shopping for a new home in large part because I did not love being disconnected from friends I still wanted to talk to.

I hold zero ill will towards the admin or the users because you gotta do what feels best for your community, but I needed to get to someplace a little less cloistered.

@Belghast@Mstdn.social

Stux is an admin that runs a number of instances: mstdn.social, masto.ai, mastodon.coffee, and a bunch of other side projects like a Pixelfed instance. He seemed like an admin with a very steady hand that was not prone to isolate instances from the bulk of the network, so in April of 2022 I migrated there and had a lot of fun. I met a ton of people that I still communicate with on a regular basis thanks to the local feed on this server. It felt like a giant instance but had a bunch of really friendly folks who were very active, and when I joined I think it was prior to it hitting 10k users. However the mass migration in November of 2022 wreaked havoc on this server as it ballooned up to around 120k users… and at that point, it was a constant struggle for Stux to keep server resources online. He reached a point where he literally could not buy any more resources from his server provider and while he had shut off new sign-ups at 100k users… thinking that would help… he forgot to shut off the ability for users to send invite links that circumvented this. Legitimately over the course of a few days, we shot from 100k to 120k, and things ground to a halt. This account still exists in a tombstone state but is still counting towards that 15 million.

@Belghast@Masto.ai

I had legitimately planned on sticking with Mstdn.social for the long haul, but Stux fired up a new Mastodon instance in an attempt to handle the overflow. There were a lot of us who were more active users who decided to help lighten the load and migrate over to Masto.ai, and I did so on November 7th, 2022. It had the same vibe as Mstdn.social and a good number of the folks that I was talking to regularly made the jump as well. It was a great little place and quite honestly I would probably still be happy there had some other events not transpired. Some folks have an axe to grind against Stux due to his fairly public drama with the admin of Mastodon.art… but honestly, he was always a super chill admin as far as I was concerned. This account is still out there and active in a Tombstone state, so it will be counted in that 15 million.

@Belghast@Gamepad.club

So there is a whole situation that went down with another site and its admin… and I think in part it prompted Gazimoff to seriously consider starting an instance again. MMORPG.Social was a lot of work but also in the process of running that site for a year or so… he learned a number of important lessons. Mostly it seemed like he wanted a nice cozy gaming instance that would be a safe place for friends to gather, and as such in January of 2024, we started Gamepad.club. I officially migrated on the 24th of that month and have been there ever since. It has been impressive to see the site grow over that time and always seems to hover around 100 active users and a little over 200 total accounts on the server. It is legitimately my hope that this is my final resting place on the Fediverse, but if something changes down the line I will pack my bags and move again as that is just the nature of how this platform works. I’ve also got an account dedicated to Blaugust on this server, so technically I count as two different users in that 15 million number. Technically I also have an AggroChat account over on Botsin.Space which counts as one of those users as well.

What About Other Server Types?

So while I am throwing a bit of shade at that 15 Million number… thing is there are a lot of people on the network who are not being counted in it. That 15 Million users are just folks who are using Mastodon as a platform and not counting all of the folks on the larger Fediverse made up of a bunch of different server types. The above tree has become popular as a representative of what the Fediverse is versus Mastodon, but there are a number of platforms that are not even represented there. For example, I use Bookwyrm to track my reading so that account would not be counted towards the 15 million. All of this is why it is really hard to pin down how people are actually on the Fediverse in one form or another.

So while I am not entirely certain about this milestone… it is nonetheless impressive. The fediverse is way more active than anyone seems to think. I have no clue what the total active population would look like if you filtered out all of the dupes, but it would still be a large number. I think that is really the aspect of why I like Mastodon and the larger Fediverse so much is the interoperability of everything. I could in theory use my Bookwyrm account as my main account and still have access to talk to everyone on the platform. Similarly, Lemmy is a Reddit clone, and I could use my account on Lemmy.zip for all of my Fediverse needs. The result though is you end up creating a bunch of accounts on a bunch of different platforms… only to use a handful of them. I enjoy the concept of Pixelfed but never really use it because it is separate from my preferred Gamepad.

All that said… I love knowing that no matter what curveballs might be thrown at me… there will always be a place for me to participate. There is never going to be a time when some billionaire buys the network and takes it over to skew to his particular sensibilities. The side effect of that freedom however will always be that there is some friction to getting started. That friction is a bit more than most users will want because it isn’t ever as simple as just going to the app store and downloading something. In fact, doing that… is almost guaranteed to give you the worst possible experience as the official app is awful and the flagship server it connects to… is isolated from large swaths of the network. I realize none of this is going to win me any more converts… but it is still where I feel most comfortable.

If you are looking for a good home though… Gamepad is a great place but many other servers are equally good places. It is also perfectly normal and just accepted that folks are going to migrate for various reasons. I have no clue WHY I went down this rabbit hole, but if you have made it this far in the post I appreciate your tolerance of my nonsense.

Gamepad is Cozy

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Good Morning Friends! I’ve not really talked about it here on the blog, but for a while now I have been helping with the operation of Gamepad.club. Recently there have been some situations in the greater Fediverse where instance Administrators have gone missing leading to periods of significant degradation in operation and instance culture. Due to these wider concerns, Gazz wanted to protect the instance from ever being in a situation where an administrator could not be reached. I was asked and I agreed to help around with the instance. The variance in our operating times helps us catch those sign-ups and approve them a bit faster. So if you have any questions or concerns about Gamepad.club feels free to hit me up through any of my many social channels. I’m not really around on Twitter anymore so if you reach out there, it is going to take a while for me to even notice.

I have to admit I had been somewhat hesitant to talk too broadly about my role as an administrator on Gamepad.club not because I was ashamed to talk about it, but more because I wanted to spare the instance any undue heat. I had a fairly significant falling out with the Administrator of another gaming instance that launched last November. Largely I was trying to keep from our small home drawing her spite and her blocking the instance. However, I feel like I have been walking on eggshells since the events surrounding the launch of that instance and my being removed from the moderation team. When the same exact things happened to the other moderator of the instance, I just got tired of trying to be cautious. I will not let that bullshit that we dealt with damage my joy when it comes to the fediverse any longer. I feel safer on Gamepad than I did on other instances, because I have known Gazz for so many years, and he also knows me.

We’ve not had what I would consider meteoric growth, but it has been steady growth nonetheless. I think the great social media land run is more or less over, and folks who would be willing to leave Twitter already have their flag planted on some instance here. Most of our growth has been folks migrating from other instances because they wanted a more chill local feed. Truth be told the great thing about the Fediverse is that there is no real reason why anyone needs to be on any specific server. More than anything it is about choosing your local feed and maybe having a “cool address” behind your name. We’ve thrown out a placard and announced that we were open for business, and folks have answered that call a few at a time. Even I put off moving entirely for a while because it is a bit of a hassle to uproot yourself and plant yourself in a new place… even when you feel like that new place will be a better home.

I have to admit I am honestly fine with having a bit of a personal touch to our home, rather than trying to bring in thousands of people. None of us are trying to make a living off running an instance, but instead just trying to carve out a comfy home for ourselves in this new social landscape. The really cool thing about where we are now in the fediverse is that you can maintain a small instance, yet still have a good federation with thousands of other instances. I think last I knew we were federating actively with some 9000 other instances. Small instances that are not terribly well federated have issues with hashtags and the like, but so far the handful that I follow habitually are still introducing me to new people. I admit I was a bit concerned about that by moving away from one of the “stuxlikes”, but I’ve not really seen any tangible difference. I don’t think Patreon fully covers the operating expenses but if nothing else it is putting a decent dent in them.

So far things seem to be trucking along swimmingly. There has been a bit of weirdness when someone migrates from an instance we have not had migrations from before. We aren’t entirely certain what is going on there but it settles out after a few minutes. Essentially when you migrate from another instance there is a flurry of activity as the new server handshakes with both the old server and every server that you were following folks on. The whole “moving” instance thing is relatively new as in the past the only option you had was to export the list of folks you were following and then import that list into the new home. Previously there was no means to move followers, and the new process essentially asks for permission from every instance. If it succeeds the instance has the person who was following you previously follow your new account and then unfollow your old account. This works great so long as every server is running the same version of Mastodon, but largely falls apart when you are talking about other fediverse variants like Pixelfed, Pleroma, Misskey, etc.

Because of the voluntary nature of server migration and follower moves, this is in part why I always suggest folks export all of their data manually to CSV so that they can fall back to importing those if anything does not go as planned. In a worst-case scenario, you can then manually import everyone you were following, and hope the nature of the fediverse takes hold and they follow you on the new account. Server migrations are commonplace enough that rarely does anyone really bat an eye when someone jumps instances. More than anything the ability to change instances provides a self-healing characteristic that you just don’t have in another environment. If an instance gets stale, too busy for your tastes, or is unsustainable by the administration team… then you can move your home and in most cases, the entire process takes less than fifteen minutes from start to finish. Instances sign onto the Mastodon Server Covenant as we have as a way of providing at least three months’ notice if an instance needs to shut down.

Right now we are going through a rather public scenario where a large instance is shutting down. Currently, folks are using this as an excuse to decry the failure of Mastodon. For me, I largely view it as the system succeeding because instance admins have thrown out the welcome mat to make sure the folks from Mastodon.lol needing a new home can find one easily. Migration is one of those things that is just built into the Mastodon experience. I’ve shared the entire history of my instances before, but Gamepad.club is my tenth instance and in each case, I had perfectly valid reasons to move. That isn’t to say you need a reason other than “I want to” and the beautiful thing is that after awhile folks understand that the nature of the fediverse involves people shifting into more comfortable positions. I would never put the hard sell on anyone to migrate to any instance because so long as there is no defederation nonsense at work, we will be able to talk freely no matter where you end up.

Anyways long post that went in a bunch of different directions as often mine do. I’m helping out with the operations of Gamepad.club and while I’m technically an administrator I still very much take my lead from Gazz. I mostly help out with tedious things like loading emojis and helping to approve account submissions, but am there to step in if there ever comes a need for me to take a more active role. It is a good home and we’d love to have you, but also there is no pressure to move if you are happy where you currently “live” on the fediverse.

You Waited Too Long

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I realize I talked a little bit about this yesterday, but I am pretty happy I went ahead and made the move to Gamepad.club. So far thanks to the amount of work that Gaz poured into making sure we had good federation, the experience has largely been uninterrupted. I still have access to the various hashtags that I had been following and am still seeing a similar volume of traffic coming from them. That is one of the sometimes gotchas from moving to a smaller instance, is that oftentimes hashtags don’t work quite as well. Generally speaking, the federation of a given instance is dictated by who the members of that instance follow. The more users on an instance, by nature the deeper the federation and the more successful things like hashtags become. I follow 814 accounts and as a result, my joining an instance adds those 814 connections. You can quickly imagine that mesh being extended for each person that joins a given instance.

Relays come into play to try and solve this problem. They end up granting servers access to everything being federated within a specific group, and by joining multiple relay networks you can artificially expand the reach of your server. So while you effectively live in a much smaller bubble, the local instance… you can still see topics actively being propagated amongst all of the instance servers in that network. When Gaz was setting up Gamepad.club he joined enough networks to create this effective mesh of 4000 or so servers that we were connected to. So while we have a fairly quiet local feed, the federated feed feels pretty much like it did when I was on Mstdn.social or Masto.ai.

So you are probably asking yourself if everything is effectively the same… why did I bother moving? The truth is there is no requirement to really move servers ever. Stux is great and the instances that he is responsible for mstdn.social, mastodon.coffee, and masto.ai are also pretty great. There is a thing that tends to happen when folks become active on the Fediverse. They discover the local feed and for a while it is exciting and new. The problem with a local feed on a giant server is that eventually it stops being exciting. Eventually, it becomes this dumping ground of too much chatter going on at once to ever hope to follow any of it. On a smaller server, the local feed often feels like going to the corner store and seeing a bunch of people you only sorta meet and are as we call it in rural america… “on waving terms” with. I wanted that back, and while Gamepad.club is pretty quiet and largely made up of people that I already follow, I am certain at some point in the future it will be that place for me.

Migration is also just part of life in the fediverse. It is largely considered a “feature” rather than a bug and it means that even thought right now Mastodon.social the flagship instance is being impacted by a round of denial of service attacks, the rest of the network continues to truck along fine largely oblivious. Legitimately had Gargon not said anything about it and it was boosted into my feed… I never would have known because it hasn’t been impacting any of the instances I have been involved with this week. I’ve migrated so many times at this point that while I end up putting it off usually… it is also a fairly painless occurrence and given how often it happens for various folks… it is just accepted at normal. I’ve talked about my long history of moves, but just to throw it all out there here is my history on Mastodon.

  • Mastodon.cloud – signed up for this not even having a clue that instances were unique things because like so many Twitter transplants I assumed it was a monolithic service.
  • Elekk.xyz – when I realized different instances had different purposes I joined the only “gaming” instance at that time.
  • Nineties.cafe – my friend Liore started an instance on Masto.host and I popped over because it was something led by someone I actually knew.
  • Elekk.xyz – back to Elekk when Nineties.cafe was shuttered for various sundry reasons.
  • MMORPG.social – migrated over to a new MMORPG-focused instance because why the heck not?
  • Elekk.xyz – back to Elekk when MMORPG.social was shuttered for various sundry reasons.
  • Mstdn.social – I joined this server because Elekk was under new management and had defederated from a bunch of instances that my friends were on, making it impossible to communicate with them anymore. Stux seemed like a nice admin.
  • Masto.ai – Mstdn.social was overwhelmed with new sign-ups, and Masto.ai was created as an overflow instance. A bunch of us longer-term Mstdn.social folks migrated to try and help ease the load.
  • Gamepad.club – My friend Gaz creates an instance and I once again throw my lot in with a smaller instance because while I am perfectly fine with Masto.ai I missed the smaller instance feel.

So in my five years on the Fediverse, I have migrated nine times, and each time had its own reason. The thing is… I could have stayed on Mastodon.cloud and never moved. Some people are going to want to plant their flag and never leave. Others like me, are going to flit around the fediverse between different environments at will. Truth be told… ALL of my accounts other than the two defunct instances are still active and I could migrate to ANY of them at will again in the future.

The scary thing at the moment is that those who failed to get off Twitter when the rest of us migrated… might have waited too long. On February 9th the Muskrat is shutting off free access to the Twitter API. As a pre-emptive strike, he shuttered access to the accounts that were being used to run all of the third-party Twitter clients. Most recently his gaze has turned to the API accounts being used to create helpful migration tools like Movetodon that allowed you to connect your Twitter account, and then allow you to follow those same people on Mastodon. As of this week, those accounts seem to have been flagged as violating Twitter rules and policies. So the easy migration period is over, from this point forward you are on your own.

Yesterday in the real world, my team spent the day gutting Twitter from our public-facing websites. Previously we had used the free Twitter API to cache copies of all of the tweets sent from our official accounts. We had them appearing in the sidebar, and the cached copies kept us from running into issues with connectivity and causing that UI element to “wig out”. However even our very meager access pattern would end up costing us over a thousand dollars a month. I figure soon over the coming weeks you are going to find all of the ways that you used to integrate Twitter with applications you enjoyed, similarly shuttering that functionality. That means more than likely all of those video game integrations like the one I have used the most to get screenshots off my Switch and PS4/PS5, will be shut down and non-functional.

Twitter didn’t die in the fiery cataclysm that some of us thought that it might. However, it still seems to be dying a slow rotting cancerous death as it loses functionality and as a result cultural importance. I popped over the other day to change out the mastodon information in my profile and found myself depressed at how different it feels. Sure there are folks who are still using it, but the quantity of activity is a pale comparison to what it once was. I miss a lot of people, for example, I miss seeing Liani’s posts filling up my feed, but I can’t support what is happening over there especially when there is a better option. February 9th is going to be a significant moment in this saga because it will be interesting to see how devoid of Twitter content a lot of sites suddenly end up being. I just have to hope that my paths will cross with the folks stranded on the sinking ship that is Twitter because the easy life rafts have already departed and they might have to dog paddle away on a door.

Anyways long twisting post later… Gamepad.club is great and I am glad I made my move. It is small and quiet, but sometimes I need that in life. If you don’t have a good mastodon home already, then I welcome you to check it out.

Moving Your Home Fediverse Instance

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Good Morning Friends! Over the last several days I have fielded a large number of questions about Mastodon and the Fediverse at large. There is one aspect that I hinted about in my guide post, but did not really cover in detail and that is how to move instances. I bring this up in part because yesterday I moved instances. It is something that I have done a number of times over the years for various reasons. For fun here is a quick rundown:

  • Mastodon.cloud – I started here because I had no clue how anything worked and was joining during another wave of mass exodus from Twitter in 2018.
  • Elekk.xyz – I was not there long and then moved to Elekk because in the directory it reported to be a gaming focused instance. While gaming discussion does happen I was kinda surprised by how not true that statement was.
  • Nineties.Cafe – My friend Liore decided to start up an instance and happily moved over, and ended up helping with the administration and moderation a bit. We had some fun times here.
  • MMORPG.Social – After awhile Nineties.Cafe died down and my friend Gazimoff wanted to try and create an MMORPG focused social network, and as such I moved houses once again and helped a bit with administration and moderation.
  • Elekk.xyz – When things got too hard for Gaz to keep it running, I migrated back to Elekk and mostly went into read only mode for awhile, occasionally favoriting and posting daily blog posts but not a ton of direct interaction.
  • Mstdn.social – Then yesterday I moved once again to a larger instance run by a lovely Dutch fellow that goes by Stux, and is more general purpose.

To most people this is going to seem like madness, but in truth instance migration is built into the fabric of the Fediverse and a rather normal custom. Why did I decide to pick up my box and move it to another home? Well the reality is in the time I had been semi-afk on Elekk, it became a much more locked down environment than I realized and as a result I had been severed from a number of people on Mastodon.social and Mastodon.online, who through no fault of their own decided to pick the big flagship instances that some instance operators are blocking. Elekk is still a lovely place and if you are there currently there is zero reason to ever leave, that is unless you ALSO have friends in places that you could not communicate with.

Most instances that you would be migrating to or from are going to be running Mastodon as the backend software. Pleuroma is also extremely popular, but I have no experience with those instances and as a result I am uncertain how this process works there. However if you see an interface that looks something like this when you go into user preferences, you are on a Mastodon based instance. Under Account > Account Settings there is a functionality that allows you to move from one instance to another. There are two ways to do this, but the first is automated where you plug in the information for the instance you are moving to, and go through a series of dialogs to indicate which bits of data you want transferred. The instance you are leaving will then go dormant and show that you have moved to a new instance (will show this shortly).

If for whatever reason there is a difference in software versions, a misconfiguration… or something purposefully blocking this functionality there is another method. Essentially you can go into the Data Export section of the Mastodon user preferences screen and dump individual CSV files for each of the pieces of data you might want to migrate. Then on your new instance you can go into the Import screen of the same area and pull in the individual CSV files. Something you need to know about this process is you can migrate the people you follow, but you cannot migrate your followers. This moving process happens often enough that when someone gets a notification that you have followed them on a new account, most of the time they click follow out of habit. The Fediverse in general is way less focused on clout and making follower numbers go up. I personally like this manual process because it allows me to edit the CSV which is just a text file, and remove any accounts that I might not want to carry over to the next instance for any reason.

When someone goes to your old profile, they are going to see something like this indicating that the account has gone dormant and moved. Notice how my header image and avatar are greyed out, and in the side there is a note indicating that I have moved to @Belghast@Mstdn.Social. What is nice about this process is that if anyone happens to stumble upon any of your older “toots” out in the ether, there will be a breadcrumb trail that can lead them back to your active account. Among all of those accounts I talked about earlier, the only instances that are still alive are Mastodon.cloud and Elekk.xyz, and as a result I logged into both of them yesterday and set up my redirections.

Hopefully through this little sequence you can see that the process of moving instances is nowhere near as tedious as it might sound at first. As always if you have any questions about the process please feel free to drop me a line below, or if you are yourself dabbling in the Fediverse feel free to reach out to me @Belghast@Mstdn.Social. There are certain customs and traditions in the Fediverse that might see a bit odd at first, but over the last four years I have gotten accustomed to them. I am always willing to help new folks as they start down this journey.