I joined Twitter almost ten years ago (@kgeographer) in order to connect with members of my professional communities, Digital Humanities and Geographic Information Science. It has been occasionally annoying but extremely beneficial, and over 1200 folks have chosen to follow my feed.
In 2015, when a certain politician became a presumptive nominee for US President, another community became equally important to me, the #NeverTrump crowd, because I view that utterly disgraceful individual as a mortal threat to the “noble experiment” that is the United States of America. Over the years I’ve been a frequent critic of the US and many of its past policies and action, but I learned that I am much more patriotic than I thought.
Twitter has become essential to me, and I am hard pressed to imagine doing without it. Because a growing number of my professional colleagues and friends are moving to Mastodon servers from Twitter, I have established the account, @kgeographer@mast.o. In the coming weeks I plan to gradually follow the hundreds of colleagues and friends I follow who have made this switch, or like me, are transitioning to it. Let’s see how this goes.
But I will remain on Twitter, and reserve my politically-oriented tweets for that forum. Any Mastodon followers I gain will see the stuff I post related to #DigitalGeoHumanities, #Place, #WorldHistoricalGazetteer, travel photos, etc. They will be spared those responses of outrage to what’s happening in my (current) country.