About 5 years ago, I set up a Mastodon instance in a DigitalOcean VPN, for me and some friends.

It never really caught up; I have been occasionally upgrading but almost never used it. A few days ago I finally put some effort to follow interesting accounts.

The ability to control what I see (e.g. exclude boosts, no personalized timeline etc.) made me realize how much more engaging it was compared to, let's say, Twitter. It was pretty refreshing to see a no-nonsense timeline and to be able to tailor the interface to my needs (I used the 3-column layout).

I haven't been on Twitter for a while, but I think I'll give Mastodon a try as a replacement.