A Chance Encounter

Many people fall into the category of "self-proclaimed nerd"; I am no exception. I grew up with a fascination for how things worked on levels just deeper than what could be perceived, and my computer science degree from a cozy state university is a testament to this fascination. Towards the end of my years at that cozy state university, my boredom with "big social media" had grown quite large. I found myself browsing reddit more than anything; at least I was able to broadly follow topics of interest with content sourced from around (most of) the world. 

Thankfully, I found a job in IT fairly soon after graduation, and soon after starting at my job, I had gained a mentor. One piece of advice this mentor gave me was to "stay current, and read up on technology. Every day, read tech blogs, technology subreddits, and check this site called Hacker News." The heavy endorsements of Hacker News continued from my mentor, and within the week, I was checking the first page or two every morning. However, the system felt a bit too barebones and a bit too clunky for my brain, which was used to reddit. I stopped checking Hacker News (almost) altogether.

From time to time, I would pop in, and one such occasion was 2 days ago. The top post was titled Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store.

"Taking down what now?"

So it began. I watched YouTube videos on the Fediverse, and something in my little nerd brain was loving it (both Distributed Social Media - Mastodon & Fediverse explained

 and ActivityPub, the Fediverse and Decentralized IDs come to mind). Before the night was over, I had done some light research into Mastodon, and I had messaged a friend of mine about yet another hobby we could jump to. By the end of the next day, I had set myself up in Mastodon (@tanelg@mastodon.online), and by the end of the next day (today), I'm up on Plume. Talk about jumping in!