| Simone's Blog (no JS mode) |
What a week, huh!
Captain, it's been a year since your last post
I'm going to miss that Twitter bot. Alright, just thought to share some updates. This week, like thousands of people around the web, I also moved to Mastodon and It feels pretty good thus far. Am I still on the hype train? probably, but it definitely gives me the lost vibe of what the birdsite used to be when I first joined 10 years ago, everything mixed to some sort of y2k IRC culture. There's no deny in saying that it was hard to understand how everything works, there are many UX obstacles that might get in the way and confuse people, especially when we're used to cushy centralized socials.
The anxiety of picking the right instance, for example, is like when you move to a new school and you want to be part of the cool group. The FOMO is high, but once you figure everything out, and you know that it doesn't really matter which instance you pick, it's actually great! People made a huge effort to let new joiners in and make us feel welcome (so far). I personally used fedi.tips to grasp what the hell was going on under the hood, and also found this really useful web app, or a simple twitter query that searches for the Mastodon account of people you're following on Twitter (if they have any). Will Mastodon last? god knows, but it's certainly interesting to see what's going to happen next.
This year we also lost another soldier, his name was Heroku. Joking, it's still alive, but it removed the free Dynos, which sucks. I still remember writing my first Sinatra app back in high school and testing it on Heroku, definitely not going to miss the infamous 10 seconds for the app to wake up. Nowadays, Heroku feels like a clunky software wrote in Visual Basic 6 used by cashiers at seven elevens. Thanks to this post by Xe, I discovered this fantastic service: fly.io. Let me tell you, it looks too good to be true, I've been testing it for a while and today I finally managed to migrate my whole backend there. I won't go into details, Xe already made a great post about it, but if you're looking for an alternative it might be worth checking it out.