Gaithersburg Residents Now Have a Mastodon Server
Crowdsourcing news and sharing information amongst our selves as residents of Gaithersburg is vital. Local journalism for a city the size of Gaithersburg is virtually non-existent.
By Keith on January 7, 2023
I'm back. A couple of years ago, I launched the Gaithersburg Newsletter. It went pretty good. I was able to have some minor impact on the Gaithersburg elections - maybe. So I had a website to publish stories with and a Twitter account to spread the word. While I was getting positive feedback about the work I was doing, it was too much work. It wasn't possible for me, myself and I to keep content fresh and to do the work to write stories that aren't trivial.
I stopped publishing in January 2022, now, I'm back.
I still have the Gaithersburg Newsletter website, you're reading it right now. But the big thing is that I built a Gaithersburg Mastodon server. Check out the Gaithersburg Mastodon server here.
Why Mastodon?
As soon as the Elon Musk deal went through, I deleted my Twitter accounts. There's just no way I can associate myself with someone like Musk.
I looked at Mastodon, but I initially felt like it was too clunky for users. I still think that's true, but the decentralized design is powerful too. By decentralized that means we control our own Mastodon instance, and regardless of what happens at any corporation, our Gaithersburg Mastodon server should live on just fine.
A big advantage with leveraging Mastodon is that literally anyone can join our Gaithersburg Mastodon instance. Then they can post stories, comment on other people's stories. It cost nothing to subscribe to the Gaithersburg Mastodon.
I'm thinking of this Mastodon server a public good owned by all of us, even though I'm the only paying the bills.