Kev Quirk has been talking about firing up a small-scale Mastodon instance as a sort of counter to the behemoth that Fosstodon has become. Today, he introduced 500 Social, "The deliberately small online community". I love the idea of smaller communities, so of course I signed up immediately.

I'm @jack on 500.social. I went with @jack because I think it emphasizes the smallness of the instance. Like we're on first-name basis with each other. The handle is a little risky, because of that other @jack that no one likes any more, but he's faded a bit, and no one I want to follow uses his old platform now, anyway.

I don't yet know how I'll use the new account. Maybe I'll migrate from social.lol/@jbaty but that seems like more of the same. What I'm thinking is that I'll keep the new account separate and interact primarily with others on the instance. That feels a bit like going against the federation grain, so we'll see.