Month: December 2022

What I Like About Mastodon

I’ve always been an early adopter. I signed up for Twitter at the beginning. It was cool. You would have conversations with people you wouldn’t normally get to to interact with. The saying was “Facebook is people you knew. Twitter is people you will know.” Then things changed. Social networking became social media and interacting went away. It was all about fake internet points. A bunch of other things happened and I didn’t enjoy Twitter anymore.

Then I found Mastodon and it was like Twitter used to be before it was corrupted. In my first week on Mastodon I had more interactions with people than the last year on Twitter. I haven’t been on Mastodon for a long time but long enough to have an opinion about it. So here are a few things I like about Mastodon that convinced me to stick around.

It’s decentralized.

No one owns it. You pick a server and live happily ever after or you don’t and pick another server. Servers have their own rules and etiquette so pick one that works for you.

No adds or trackers.

Do I really need to elaborate on this. It’s just awesome.

People are nice.

All the toxicity of Twitter doesn’t exist on Mastodon or if it does I haven’t seen it. The few times I’ve seen someone start to step out of line, the community quickly reminded them that this is not Twitter and certain behavior is not tolerated. When that is unsuccessful it very easy to block or mute the person.

Filter hashtags.

I don’t care about the World Cup but a lot of people do and they post about it. Just like you can mute a person you can mute a hashtag and remove all that unwanted nonsense. The flip side is you can follow hashtags. When someone posts using a hashtag you follow, those posts will appear in your feed.

These are just a few of the top things I really like about Mastodon and I might elaborate in the future. Next post I’ll be writing about some tips I learned to make your experience a better one. In the meantime feel free to follow me on Mastodon. https://twit.social/@heavymetalhero

I Gave Up On The Advent of Code.

I made it through 3 days before giving up. My daughter got sick, I fell behind, and I realized I was in way over my head. Challenges that took me a couple of hours were done in a few minutes by others. But I still learned a lot.

Even though I stopped doing the challenges, I still watch videos to see how others are doing them. I'm learning what I still need to learn and learn better ways to do things I already know.

In addition to all my programming failures I realized a few life lessons I learned doing the few challenges I did.

Pay attention to the details.

I've always been a big picture guy. Programming and AOC has taught me the importance of focusing on the details.

Break big problems into smaller ones.

I guess that's all programming really is but AOC really hit me over the head with this lesson.

Read all the directions.

A lot of my time being frustrated was because I didn't read ALL the directions. I wrote a solution, entered my answer, and got told I was wrong. Looked through all my code and every thing seemed fine. After about an hour reread the directions and realized I was solving the wrong problem.

Conclusion.

So even though I failed at the AOC it wasn't a total failure. I still learned a lot and found many topic that were new to me that will require further study. In the last post I said I was going to post my code to GitHub but I'm not. My code is too embarrassing and understanding GitHub better is one of the many skills I need to improve upon.