As the Med Twitter was imploding in 2023-4, and we weren’t sure which direction to take, the Fediverse - specifically Mastodon, seemed like a solution. A federated system, which no billionaire could buy and trample all over. It requires instances to join - and Nick Marks set up one, med-mastodon.com. However, Mastodon (like Linux?) remained a bit clunky and not many people jumped over. As we have seen over the years, most medtwitter users just quit social media (or use Meta products for personal connections). Many of us are on BlueSky, some are carrying on bravely (or foolhardily) on Twitter/X, while others are exploring other gated products.

But a new development is that med-mastodon no longer is supported, and is likely to be shut down. It seems Nick Marks is unable to maintain it - for the last little while, Ryan Wild has been running this. See their blog post from January with more details. Ryan has tried to contact Nick Marks (and so have I) to transfer ‘ownership’ with no response, and Ryan will be shutting down Med-Mastodon soon.

Many of you may just shrug. But for those of you who have a med-mastodon account and don’t want to walk away - there is an option. You can switch instances. The simple way is:

Create an account on another instance (I went to mastodon.social , Ryan Wild runs Universeodon.com)
Create an ‘alias’ there via preferences>Account settings, and enter your med-mastodon handle
Go to your med-mastodon account and Preference>Account>export and follow those steps
Voila, your followers will come over.
There are ways to do a more sophisticated move e.g. here

Not everything moves - see this excellent blog for more on what you lose and more advice

Swap (now at @hswapnil@mastodon.social)

Header image from the AMNH