A world without Tolkien would be very grey. In my episode of Talking Shop, from MasterClass Original Series, I talk about my love for Tolkien, and what I learned from him about creative writing, facing the impossible and creating fantasy worlds.

https://www.masterclass.com/series/talking-shop?utm_source=instructor&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=pp_%7C_inso_-_ng2_%7C_all

My first impression of Mastodon was that is was messy to have all these separate instancies. It was a lazy attitude, I was only thinking of convenience. In a way it was like complaining that the web had more than one single server. Now I see that fragmentation and local communities are important for resilience and control of bad actors.

Big cities are very anonymous. In small towns you can’t fool your local shop clerk too many times before getting noticed. #twittermigration

Twitter is becoming increasingly hostile to writers. I'm still currently posting here, but strongly recommend that readers follow me on Mastodon or my site's RSS feed if you want to know when I post something new. Do the same for other authors you find useful.

https://twitter.com/twittersupport/status/1604531261791522817

I put "John Mastodon, CEO of Mastodon" into DALL-E 2 and this is what it spat out.

The second photo is him founding the company in the late 1990s in his college dorm room.

#JohnMastodon

While using Twitter I used favorites feature to "bookmark" posts, which I'd like to read later. Then I had IFTT automation, which would save these favorites into a text file, which I could later use to open saved links (in case original post got deleted). With the move to Mastodon, I decided not to use any external automations and self-host and wrote this tiny script.

Details are at https://git.sr.ht/~sashk/mbookmark.