I recently read the best thing I've come across in a while, Amy Newell's latest installment of Woe. She's been very open about her struggles with her own mind, and much of it resonates deeply.

Something I've struggled with a lot over the past couple of years is the increasingly terrible hellscape we've manufactured for ourselves to live in. It feels like things are only ever getting worse and, reinforced by a self-selected assortment of doomsday thought pieces, like our chance to fix it has passed and we're all pretty much fucked.

Amy's apocalyptic death spiral is very familiar to me. I easily get caught up in the bad stuff, overwhelmed by the sheer seriousness of it all, and paralyzed by headline after headline about the end of democracy, impending nuclear war, billionaire techno-utopian schemes to track and control our every move, etc. etc. The dystopian world inside my head starts to feel real, and it's only downhill from there.

The problem is, I have real things in the actual real world that I want to do and spend time on, which I can't when my brain is permanently preoccupied and fixated on how the world as we know it is imploding around us. How can I possibly care about shaving some seconds off this query whilst Ukrainian software engineers are sleeping in mud-floored bunkers just trying to stay alive. What do you mean am I done that thing? Don't you know it's the apocalypse?!

But this is a trap. It's been hard to accept that I can't always trust my own mind. I had to learn the hard way that it can sometimes work against me. Sometimes, it's worth using every ounce of willpower and energy I have to bump my brain out of a rut, like these times when it gets stuck. Sometimes the world I really feel is real, isn't. Or at least isn't the whole picture.

This is what made Amy's tips for getting unstuck so valuable. My main takeaway is this:

The way out of an apocalyptic death spiral is through disconfirming evidence, through acts of protest or imaginative building of something new and different, and through solidarity.

When I'm spiraling, I need to remind myself that there are many true facts in the world, and many of them run counter my sense of imminent societal collapse. There are actions I can actively take to combat the things I hate about the world, and there are beautiful people in the world who I can do them with.

I've spent the last couple years re-orienting everything about my life in this general direction. I thought I knew what would make me happy, and like so many people who get to where they always thought they wanted to be, I was wrong.

Now the priority in my life is relationship and community building. I found some people, and I found a place I actually feel excited to call home for the first time. I need to remind myself daily that there are good things happening in the world, that I am participating in them, and that I get to do it all with people I love.

I often find myself frustrated that broken things still work. What's the point of having rules and standards and ways things should be if it doesn't matter whether they're followed? I'm starting to suspect that the answer is that there is no point, and all those rules only exist to give us the illusion of order and security, which in reality don't exist at all.

Take the web. Invalid HTML will render just fine in most browsers. This was an explicit design choice in the early days of the web, and the on-the-record reason is that

it was decided that allowing people to get their content published was more important than making sure the syntax was absolutely correct. The web would probably not be as popular as it is today, if it had been more strict from the very beginning.

Maybe MDN is right and the web wouldn't have taken off the way it did if it were stricter. Maybe not. But there's probably something to that. Similar arguments are made about English being so casual and flexible and also the lingua franca of our time.

Letting go of gendered nouns and case inflections and welcoming more new words into the dictionary every year than other languages, along with having no central governing body dictating the grammar, makes English much easier to learn and much more flexible to accommodate local usage than other languages.

Of course it's also because the British once did and now the Americans do dominate global affairs, but lots of other nations have had global empires at one point or another and none of their languages succeeded in becoming the worldwide default for business and science.

Anyway these things grate on my personality. I often find myself wishing that broken HTML would simply break the website so that someone would fix it. But what would end up really happening is that the page would end up abandoned. Why do I have such a hard time accepting that “mediocre but exists” is better than “does not exist at all”? Perfectionism is taunting me, trying to convince me once again that if something is not done well and exactly to spec, it's wrong and bad and not worth doing.

Anyway, I think there's a lesson there. Sacrificing purity and adherence to arbitrary rules for the sake of inclusion and moving tf on with your life is the right move.

What is Mastodon?

It's social media. It looks and feels like Twitter, but underneath it operates very differently.

If you don't care about technical implementation details (like the vast majority of people..) you just need to understand that a “server” (often also referred to as an “instance”, they're the same thing) is a website where you sign up for an account. Also important to understand is that you can follow and interact with any other account that exists on any Mastodon server/instance.

Where do I make an account?

Mastodon is unlike other social media in making it hard and confusing to get started. For example if you go to mastodon.com, well.. you'll see an ad for forestry equipment. But if you go to mastodon.org.. no wait. That one's blank. The website you're looking for is joinmastodon.org, which is where you'll see a big white button that says “Create account”. If you click that, though, you'll be taken a long list of servers each with a button prompting you to “Apply for an account” and no further information about what that means.

How do I choose a server?

Like with any new technology, tech people are mostly adopting Mastodon first, and many prominent technologists have recently announced they are permanently closing their Twitter accounts and moving their shitposting short-form writing to Mastodon. Many of them have accounts on the mastodon.social server, but lest you be tempted to follow them there, the server is “full”, i.e. it is no longer possible to create an account there.

If you're willing to just take my word for it (I'm friendly, care about people's feelings, and think safe spaces are just what the world needs right about now), these are few instances that are well-run in my opinion, where your feed should remain mostly free of fascist propaganda and you'd be well served to create an account to get started.

Note it is always possible to changes instances later and you can follow any person on any instance from any instance. Mastodon makes it very easy to move your account to a new server. So there's no need to stress about picking the “right” server right off the bat. You can always move later.

Anyway, that list:

mstdn.social This is a very large instance where many people created their accounts after mastodon.social filled up. It will feel very similar to having an account at a Silicon Valley megacorp where you have no control or influence over the structure, which is totally fine with most people and will feel very familiar if you're coming from Twitter.

Other mega-instances with similar structure and governance to mastodon.social include:

masto.ai and mastodon.cloud

Some more niche instances that might be a good fit depending on your interests:

hachyderm.io This is an instance run by a very well-meaning community and many smart people I trust are there. It's geared toward technologists, but everyone is welcome.

indieweb.social This is the instance where my account lives. I like the values of the indie web movement and was part of that community anyway so it was a logical place to join. It's a smaller instance but runs reliably and has sensible moderation.

If you want to look into it more yourself, you can find out more about a server by browsing through its “About” page (link in the bottom left corner, usually) and checking its rules (usually a section at the bottom of the about page). Each server is run by a different person or group of people and each has its own moderators.

Things you might care about when picking a server are:

• Moderation style: What is the code of conduct, how is abuse handled, how are abusers censored?
• Server rules: More notable will be what rules are absent. The list should at least include “no fascism, racism, or homophobia”. Watch out for alt-right dog whistles like including “net worth” as a protected status, or absolutist views about “free speech”.
• Funding: Is the instance run sustainably? Some servers might charge a small fee to join to help cover server and moderator costs, most are free.
• Governance: Is there any way to escalate concerns to the moderators or server admins? What is the structure of the team in charge of the instance? Some have formal boards and committees, others are a single person calling the shots.

Why leave Twitter?

The short answer is because Elon Musk just bought it and is ruining it. What I really think is that he is an evil bastard who is turning it into an alt-right outrage machine and I have no desire to contribute to such a platform, and neither should you. A more diplomatic answer might include references to all of the nazis and other odious individuals he has re-platformed or better explanations of the specific ways Twitter is technically failing now that 1/3 to ½ of the people who maintain it have been chased away. Tim Bray, a geek I very much admire, has written a great piece covering just these sorts of things, if you're so inclined to give it a read.

Anyway.. hopefully this clears up some of the confusion around getting started with Mastodon.

I know it's confusing and messy to get started right now, but it's always like that with new technology. If the problem of choosing an instance is a barrier, don't let that stop you. Just pick one from the list above, rest easy knowing you can always and easily change your mind, and join us in leaving Twitter to the alt-right trolls.