I first heard about Mastodon back in April. I liked it so much, I decided to host my own Mastodon instance. Thus, thecave.social was born.
I first heard about Mastodon last week while lurking on Twitter. For those who don’t know, Mastodon is a free, open source, decentralized social network with instances run mostly by individuals.
This past Wednesday I had a chance to attend NSHappyHour. It’s was my first time attending since moving to Vermont two years ago. I had a great time catching up with everyone, and I was reminded just how awesome the Mac and iOS developer community is in the Boston area.
Lately I’ve been struggling to release new things out to the public, things such as blog posts, open source code, a new website and service I want to offer, even updates to some of my apps. What’s worse is that a number of these things are done and are just sitting on my computer. For instance, I’ve been using an updated version of Cross Post for nearly two months that isn’t available in the App Store.
Earlier tonight I setup a new Twitter account that tweets a link each time I publish a new post here at thecave.com. The new Twitter account is @thecave_com. Of course now that this is setup, I’m wondering…Do I really need a separate Twitter account, or should I just tweet the links from my @kirbyt account?
I started organizing developer related meetups in 2001 starting with a weekly happy hour for dev friends and co-workers. Over the years I ended up organizing different types of events, from monthly meetings that included speakers to parties and happy hours to annual snowboarding trips. I even started NSHappyHour for Mac and iOS developers, which is still going on each month in Salem, MA.
Dan Counsell wrote an excellent post about removing distractions. In the post he talks about how he removed distractions by removing social media apps such as Twitter and Facebook from his iPhone. He’s done other things too such as reading a book instead of checking Twitter, and he started a “No Technology Day” on Saturdays, which is something I think I might start doing as well.
On December 22, 2001, I was in Whistler with my friends Dave and Joe. We spent the day snowboarding, then that night we went to see the first Lord of the Rings movie. Little did I know that night would become a tradition of sorts for me.
Last year my wife told me more family and friends would “like” my photos on Facebook if I posted the them directly to Facebook. At the time I was using ifttt to selectively cross post to App.net and Facebook. This meant my photos on Facebook were actually links to the App.net, which is where the photos were being stored, and this required my Facebook followers to tap the link to see the photos. Not the best experience for my followers.
When I lived in NYC I organized and ran events for computer geeks like me. It was a lot of fun, and a great way to meet new people. Then I moved to Salem, Mass, a suburb of Boston, and again I organized and ran events in Salem and Boston. And again it was a lot of fun and a great way to meet new people.
I decided to go back to cross posting between ADN, Twitter, and Facebook. I’m not as active as I once was on any one of these social networks, so I figured cross posting won’t cause too much noise in the streams of followers.
It’s the Internet. If you post it then you are sharing it with someone. And who knows what that someone will do with it. You want privacy then get off the Internet and stop sharing.
I know I don’t blog as much any more. There just never seems to be enough time. But I’m still around. You can follow me at:
http://twitter.com/kirbyt
and
http://friendfeed.com/kirbyt