Hello, I'm still alive

A move from Twitter to the Fediverse has sparked my interest in blogging again

Hello. Again.

I built this site back in, (checks notes), 2020. The theme I built is called Lockdown so there’s a bit of a clue there.

My intention was to long-form write about stuff that wouldn’t fit into a single tweet. It never happened though. Here we are at the back end of 2022 and I haven’t really touched this place in 18 months — I want to change that.

Checking out of Twitter

Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and his well-documented antics thereafter would inevitably lead me to question my participation there. I’ve been a user of the platform since 2008 and tweeted around 40,000 times. Not as much as some people but even if I wasn’t writing I’d be doom-scrolling.

I made the decision to leave quite quickly so I downloaded my Twitter Archive and nuked my account. I’ve parked my @Caramboo name — just in case someone wanted to pretend to be me.

I can use Nitter to monitor a few Twitter accounts for various reasons and I’ve setup FreshRSS as well, for the same reason.

That’s it, I’m an ex-tweep.

The Fediverse

I’m embracing the Fediverse and I can’t believe that I didn’t make the jump earlier. Mastodon and PixelFed will become my home for micro-blogging and photo-sharing. My accounts are up there in the top menu. I’ve also got a Writefreely site sat there doing not very much. I’ll think of something to use that for I reckon.

I’ve also installed an instance of GoToSocial just for kicks — it can federate with other instances using the Mastodon API. It’s in Alpha at the moment but it’s steadily heading towards beta status. I’m going to follow along with its development and what better way than to use the software.

I’m at @caramboo@social.vanilli.uk

Back to blogging

In view of all the fun, I may as well resume writing here again. I’ve been reverse engineering my own code trying to work out where my head was at two years ago. I might create another theme just to brush-up on my Hugo skills. I think I’ve gone a bit rusty.

The image at the top is a view of Lourdas in Kefalonia, taken by me from near the summit of Mount Ainos in August 2022