Hello, Fediverse (and a goat or two)
When Twitter started to spiral it barely registered in my life. I'd tried to get into the microblog format over a decade ago, and I found I liked words too much to be able to participate. I've had a peripheral relationship with Twitter since. Friends sharing their favorite ridiculous tweets, the occasional Discord embed, and of course cross posts on sites, including Reddit.
Now there was a site that held sway over my free time. Well not entirely. I was introduced to Reddit by a friend 12-13 years ago, but I was initially a lurker at best. He'd suggested several sub-reddits for me to explore, but I was busy spending my time in forums...because I'm old and I liked having regular conversations with a smaller group of people.
Fast-forward to 2019, the year I discovered Apollo. I don't actually remember how I encountered it, it was pretty mature at that point. I pretty quickly set myself up with a paid membership, customized my comment thread colors, swapped icons weekly, and found that this was the mode of interaction I preferred and was active with.
What happens next doesn't need repeated here, or anywhere really. The exciting part for me was finding the Fediverse out of all of this. Again, the catalyst has already escaped my memory (I blame long diagnosed, not quite as long untreated ADHD), but the results are exciting.
The technical side of things, using an open source protocol (ActivityPub) to build out from, the many exciting project “replacement” projects that were much more mature than I was expecting to find (I normally keep on the pulse of these sorts of developments). On top of that, the community here was ready and waiting to welcome all of us stragglers.
Pixelfed just released an amazingly smooth Instagram import feature. Mastodon has a bevvy of tutorials, and helpful “on-boarding” docs available. kbin, through struggling a lot today, has a very dedicated community that's excitedly helping out newbies like myself to acclimate to this whole new 'verse. Even WriteFreely has the best short video introduction to how ActivityPub, properly configured, can be used to integrate across platforms/instance/pods, whatever you want to call them.
Alright, finally the all important goats portion of the post. My wife and I bottle raised two young boer-mix goat boys last year, and they were more than a handful for my first ever goats. This year though we were more than ready to expand our little family. We picked up Poppy and Pomona here, and are looking to get two more before the end of the year (fingers crossed on two dapples, boy and a girl likely).
