This blog post was published on 3rd April 2023 and the information may be out of date.

When Elon purchased Twitter and started making fundamental changes, I joined the exodus to Mastodon. My personal, anonymous fandom account still exists, but it’s private and has MFA securing it as an extra security measure. My professional account is still up because unfortunately, that’s still the best community for tech and security.

I moved to a friendly Mastodon instance and rebuilt my community of friends. It didn’t take too long to find nice like-minded people; Mastodon is literally a “federation” of individual instances, where the admins of each instance can decide which other instance they’re happy to connect with. As a result, I never accidentally see things like hate speech in my timeline. I absolutely love it; I live for the older days of existing online, where everything was decentralised and it was easy to be anonymous — I’ve been concerned with my own privacy from a young age — and people didn’t think Facebook and other social networks were the front page of the internet.

Anyway, what I really like about Mastodon is its inclusivity. You are strongly encouraged to add helpful and thoughtful captions to every piece of audio or visual media you upload, and the majority of Mastodon users (including me) will think twice or outright refuse to boost (the equivalent of a retweet) posts that don’t. If I can’t be bothered to write alt text, I simply don’t make the post in that format.

I dread to think of how many photos, videos, and the horror, undescribed screenshots of text, I’ve posted to Twitter during the time I’ve been on it. I only joined Mastodon in November. I even write alt text on my reaction gifs now.

Mastodon also encourages content warnings, which effectively put your post behind a spoiler tag of sorts, with a short explanation of why you’ve hidden the content. It’s a very respectful way to interact on the internet, giving people fair warning about upsetting content, or something as trivial as a spoiler for a TV show or movie. I even use it to post about subjects I don’t think most of my community would care about, but people who share the same interests as me can still tap to take a look.

As an aside: captions and transcription are wonderful and I hope they continue to be more commonplace. I don’t personally have an accessibility need — although I do have suspicions that I’m a bit neurodivergent — but I do prefer reading over listening to a podcast or watching a video (as my husband and colleagues will attest when I try to find a fix for something and repeatedly hiss “not everything has to be a bloody YouTube video” at my computer). It gives everyone the option to consume media in a format that suits them and that’s another internet revolution I am happy to see.

If you’d like to learn more about Mastodon and the Fediverse (to which it belongs), please check out this great website: https://fedi.tips/

Disclaimer: This is a post about personal growth and change; I do not intend to virtue signal or make the conversation about myself when the focus should clearly be on colleagues and peers with accessibility requirements.