Foojay Mastodon Service: Here It Is!

After thinking about it, and collecting the feedback, there was only one direction forward: get a Foojay Mastodon service up-and-running!

And thanks to toot.io we don't need to worry about the maintenance and the bill has been covered.

If you were already following me on Mastodon, you may have noticed that I moved my own account to this new instance, so you can find me now on foojay.social/@frankdelporte.

What Is It All About?

Mastodon is a-kind-of-Twitter-alternative, free of advertisements and based on an opensource project.

Jeroen Baert has written a few very nice articles with more info:

• Mastodon Q&A
• Moving from Twitter to Mastodon

Where Is It?

You can find the Foojay Mastodon server at https://foojay.social/.

You can sign up via https://foojay.social/auth/sign_up, but please read the rules as we want to keep this an OpenJDK-oriented, but above all friendly environment, as we are used to from this community!

1. We welcome everyone active in the OpenJDK, Java, Kotlin, JavaFX, JVM, etc, and related communities.
2. No harassment, dogpiling, or doxxing of other users.
3. No impersonation of other people, companies, organizations, brands, etc.
4. No racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, or casteism.
5. No incitement of violence or advocacy of violent acts/ideologies.
6. No sexually explicit or violent media.
7. No intentionally false or misleading information.
8. Please do not upload (long) videos, but use a dedicated service for this goal (Vimeo, PeerTube (*),…) and post a link in your message.
9. No advertising, spam or excessive promotion.

Please provide a reason why you want to join the Foojay server as we want to allow everyone from the Java community.

(*): Just like Mastodon is a decentralized alternative to Twitter, PeerTube is a decentralized community-driven alternative to YouTube.

As we rent a server to host the Foojay Mastodon service, the cost is a main factor to consider.

That's why we ask not to upload videos on it, but use a dedicated service, so that we can accept a maximum number of members within the available budget...

TIP! After you've created a Mastodon account, fill in the "Bio" in your profile. This will make it very clear for other users what your interests are, so they can decide to follow you back.

Do You Want To Move?

If you already have a Mastodon account and want to move, these are the steps to be taken:

1. Sign up on NEW server
2. First on NEW server: Go to Account -> Moving FROM another account
3. Enter old account's handle
4. On OLD server: Go to Account -> Moving TO another account
5. Enter new account's handle and submit

Keep in mind, your followers will be transferred to this new account automatically, but your old posts will not be moved! So you start from a "blank sheet".

Tips & Tricks

• A few cool features:
  • Mastodon accounts all include built-in RSS feeds, just add .rss at the end of an URL, for example: https://foojay.social/@frankdelporte.rss
  • And the same applies for JSON, for example: https://foojay.social/@frankdelporte.json
• Do you follow too many people? Do you want to organize your Mastodon home timeline into several themed mini-timelines that are easier to navigate? You can do this on Mastodon using the "Lists" feature, and here's a guide all about it.
• Tim Hutton created a Python tool to easier handle your Twitter archive.
• Take a look at the list created by Marc R. Hoffmann on javabubble.org to keep track of all the people sharing Java-knowledge on Twitter, Mastodon and GitHub. This is a good starting point if you want to start following some of these people. And you can add yourself or others via the GitHub project.
• If you want to use both Twitter and Mastodon and cross-post your messages automatically from one to another, take a look at this project.

What Can We Handle?

That's a very good question!

We started with a small instance to see who wants to join and from here on we will see where this journey will bring us...