Every day brings more news of exis­ten­tial trou­ble at Twit­ter. It’s new over­lord is open­ly engag­ing with White suprema­cists and talk­ing garbage about the ser­vice’s algo­rithm had long had a lib­er­al bias (spoil­er: not true). Banned accounts are being rein­stat­ed and there’s a list cir­cu­lat­ing in rightwing cir­cles of left-leaning accounts they’re try­ing to get banned.

In all this I’ve been switch­ing over to Mastodon, a decen­tral­ized net­work whose struc­ture iso­lates it from the kind of takeover and con­sol­i­da­tion we’re see­ing at Twit­ter. My account there is writ​ing​.exchange/​@​m​a​r​tin. There are dozens of begin­ner’s guides avail­able if you’re think­ing of mak­ing the switch. If you’re look­ing for Quak­ers on the ser­vice, you can check out my following/followers list, which is chock full of them (prob­a­bly about 2/3rds of my list are Quak­er or Quaker-adjacent). Once you set up you should post an intro­duc­to­ry post with hash­tagged inter­ests. I fol­low the quak­er and quak­ers hash­tag and will spot you right away. There is a Quak­ers group as well. Friends Jour­nal also has a new account there, at mastodon​.lol/​@​f​r​i​e​n​d​s​j​o​u​r​nal.

Oth­er places to get your online Quak­er fix include the Quak­ers sub­red­dit and a very chat­ty Dis­cord serv­er (fol­low the link from the sub­red­dit for an invite). Two oth­er ser­vices get­ting buzz are Post (where I’m on the wait­ing list) and Hive (where I have a place­hold­er account at @martinkelley).