I've staked out a small piece of the Fediverse that I can call my own, with an account on the Mastodon decentralised social network.

This is me 😊 Up there ^

If you know all about Mastodon already, I'm sure you understand why the ructions at Twitter have prompted a rush to alternatives like Mastodon; and why so many are taking a long, hard look at mainstream social media.

If - like me until recently - you don't know about Mastodon, you might want to go to the official page at mastodon.org, and scroll down to the section headed Why Mastodon? When you've read that, scroll back up, in leisurely fashion, and take in some of the highlights like Unparalleled creativity, Moderating the way it should be, Build your audience in confidence and Stay in control of your own timeline.

Encountering Mastodon has left me wondering where I've been all my social media life, and the answer to that is nowhere, because I've never taken to social, never understood it, never learnt how to use it or, more importantly, why.

Well, I knew why I wanted to use social media, and that was to market my indie books. I wanted to find an audience. And it never felt right, somehow.

Now I've discovered not only Mastodon, but the Fediverse as well, and I'm feeling seduced. Compelled. Inspired and ... creative, and not in a marketing way at all. But it's overwhelming, too, because there are just so many possibilities. The Fediverse is - and please correct me if I'm wrong - a federation of sites and applications that have implemented the social media standard called ActivityPub. Here's an excellent Fediverse resource. Federated sites can all connect, interact and talk to each other. And they're not just social media sites, strictly speaking. Some of them are for writing - like Write.As - here's a Mastodon link, and here's a web page - which is built on the open, ActivityPub-enabled software framework Write.Freely.