I’ve been a member of the bird site since 2007.
I have sent 39 thousand tweets, to a tiny audience of under 1000 followers and folow-ees
(it’s a word now). My first tweet was sent from a dressing gown, on a Saturday,
after opening an account, trying to stitch Twitter, Flickr and an earlier version
of this website together.
On the 27th of October, Elon Musk bought Twitter. He then walked in to HQ carrying a sink, fired half the staff, made his personal views about content moderation clear, spooked advertisers who are took their business elsewhere, and previously very loyal tweeters and now looking to alternative platforms. Stephen Fry left.
Mastodon is looking to be the clear winner, a federated platform for microblogging. For those of us who lived through UseNet, Livejournal, Tumblr, Twitter… Mastodon feels like a nice home - each server is based around a community and the federation system allows you to follow friends in other servers. There is a learning curve, but there was when we picked up Twitter 15 years ago.
For now I’m not leaving the bird site entirely, but I am spending a lot of time over
on oldbytes.space.
Feel free to add my account there.
This website has hosted an embedded Twitter feed since the relaunch on Jekyll, which was provided by Twitter’s own Javascript and API. Whilst the Mastodon web and app experience are pretty good, I’ve not found ready to roll widgets. There is an RSS feed for each individual user, so I took a bit of time this evening to change the sidebar from bird site to Mastodon.
If you want to use the code on you’re own site, you are more than welcome to. This site runs on Jekyll, and whilst the code is generic enough to run anywhere (just add a reference), Jekyll users can drop it in to assets/js and add it to their JS assets through base.html.
Let me know if it’s been a help.
Edit: - I’ve added a null check to the alt text, and it will now display all image types.
