Microblogging migration: my New Year list of people whose every post I want to see

For the last few years I’ve spent a little of my Christmas downtime curating my own personal filter bubble in the form of a list of people whose every post I want to see. Previously I derived a Twitter list of people I retweeted most in the preceding 12 months, adjusted for balance of gender and ethnicity.

This year is different thanks to the surge in use of the decentralised, open source, social media platform Mastodon. I use and highly recommend mastodon.me.uk, a volunteer-run community administered and hosted in the UK. If you want to follow me there, I’m mattedgar@mastodon.me.uk

Before I deactivated my Twitter account of 16 years, I spent a few weeks encouraging people from my “most retweeted” list to make the move along with me. I direct messaged 43 people whose tweets I always appreciated. Only once mind, no need to be pushy. I soon reached a tipping point where more than half my favourite people were findable in the fediverse. Some would have joined anyway, I’m sure. And for the ones who haven’t, I hope my message brightened up their day.

My “Most reposted in 2022” list is built from the ground-up on my Mastodon boosts. Many of the people featured on my previous Twitter lists, but there are a few newcomers who I found only on Mastodon, and joyously one or two who stopped posting to Twitter before me and I’ve now re-found in the fediverse.

One of the common fears people have expressed when switching to federated social media is that they might pick the wrong server and be cut off from their friends on other instances. The good news is that federation works, so it doesn’t really matter that much once you’re up and running. My favourite people are spread across 10 different servers, but I can follow them all in one list.

Lists in Mastodon are private, so I’m sharing here in case you too want to follow any of these fabulous people:

Happy New Year, everyone!

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