Hi!!! I'm Chris, or Kirby, or Nyanide, or.. well if you know me past those 3 names, no you don't. : )
I'm an 18 year old guy hailing from the worst parts of Chicago. I'm pretty internet famous not to brag.. m'lady. Well not really famous, it's more just well known amongst some people on an obscure part of a decentralized microblogging network. There's nothing particularly special about me aside from I know how to finger the computer so it complies with my heinous demands, and sometimes I write code. Only sometimes.
So naturally I guess I should tell my life story, or well, how I came to discover and get comfy with the Fediverse. That thing that some journalists call the Mastodon network. I quite like the place. Anyways..
It was a very bright and sunny day in the summer of 2021. Unlike that of a dark and stormy night.I was out at a public park performing obligations (walking around the entire park) for the local authorities (summer camp instructor). And I happened to become extremely bored because the task of simply following a guy around a public park was not very interesting. And at the time I had this app installed on my cell phone called "Tusky", it was the top result on the Google Play Store when looking up "social media". I'd taken a bit of interest when I saw it was for a decentralized Twitter clone called Mastodon.
I don't quite remember if I'd made the account on the spot or if I'd already had it before this moment, but I ended up opening up Tusky, logged into an account on ieji.de [@chris@ieji.de], customized my profile, made a few followers only posts [I had used a 0 follower private Twitter account for a few months before signing up to ieji, I was scared of the internets], and then looked at the public timeline because I thought the known network would be hellish.
It was just one guy spamming the public timeline. I lost interest soon afterwards.
So fast forward a few months later, to November 2021.Earlier at the summer camp, I'd read that DistroTube had this cozy lil' instance called "DistroToot" at distrotoot.com. I hadn't thought much of it at the time after trying out ieji but by November I had again taken interest in Mastodon. "Well, it wouldn't hurt to give Mastodon another try at a place more tailored to my interests. Maybe I'll have a great time.. but I shouldn't get my hopes up." So I went on distrotoot.com, and started filling out the form to sign up.
"Arite... chris as the username, yadda yadda yadda.. chris is already taken? Shit well I got over here too late! This only started like 10 months ago.. let me use my noggin.."And to my relief, that username was accepted. Soon afterwards I signed into my new account from Tusky and became a causal browser when Reddit became too boring. Yes I was a Redditor for a short while. No it's not something I particularly like looking back at now.
Soon enough I made my very first public post, I posted about the then juuust uploaded LTT Linux challenge. At the time everyone on Reddit was super excited about it. I'd nearly been the first person to post the YouTube link to r/linux! Only to be beaten by a guy who clicked the fucking share button on his phone's YouTube notification like a smartass. It was a pretty exciting time to be part of the Linux community, or the washboard Reddit community rather. I mean at least it's better than r/linuxmasterrace.
The community over at DistroToot absolutely ate my post up and started replying and giving their thoughts about the challenge. "Woah.. people are replying to me?" at that point I started to pay more attention to DistroToot. "This place really isn't like normal Twitter, people actually respond to you on here!"
The people on DistroToot were very nice people, it was a very tightknit community. You had people on there just passionate about different Linux/Unix related operating systems and it was such a joy chatting with them. So I posted more and more... and soon enough, I had already reached 1000 posts after 2 months. That was a shock to me. I had only reached 200 Tweets on my public Twitter account before that, and I'd ended up using that for around a year before deleting it.
At that point though, there was no stopping the addiction train. I absolutely *loved* DistroToot. And I ended up learning so much about the Fediverse and how it worked during just my first few months on DistroToot alone. But eventually though, around February 2022, DistroToot was announced to shut down. This was foreseen by some community members, DistroTube didn't like maintaining any of his extraneous services and that included maintaining DistroToot. I would've been heartbroken, had it been a normal centralized social media site.
But this wasn't just your run of the mill forum or centralized Twitter-like crap. It was THE FEDDY VUUUUUURSE. So I had already begun looking at other servers to move to to continue to feed my addiction. But then something interesting popped up on the public timeline, an announcement, from two pretty well known regulars of DistroToot, SplitShockVirus [or just "SSV"] and Mathstew92. They had started a new instance called "Starnix". After DistroTube announced he was shutting down DistroToot, SSV and Mathstew started teasing about a new instance they were working on in response, and they'd finished setting it up. So I signed up to it.
The rest is pretty much history. Starnix is still a thing 3 years later, and people are still using it. But I moved away from Starnix in early 2023. So that's how I discovered and got my start on the Fediverse.