While watching the implosion of Twitter in real-time over the past week, I noticed more and more people in my Twitter feed sharing links to their Mastodon accounts.

During that time, https://instances.social was posted to Hacker News as a tool to help people find a Mastodon instance to register with. My initial experience with this was quite poor.

Later in the week, a thread was started in the Rust subreddit titled “Rustaceans worth following on Mastodon?” and saw that quite a lot of people were registered on the Hachyderm Mastodon instance. After spending so long playing with the filters on https://instances.social to try to find an instance and coming away empty-handed, I decided to just bite the bullet and register an account on Hachyderm.

I don’t think I’m alone in having consumed more documentaries on cults between the years of 2020 and 2022 than I had ever before in my entire life. There were many great documentaries, but the one that sticks out in my mind even today is The Vow: A NXIVM Story.

Every time I watch a scene in that or any other documentary about cults in which people are reunited for the first time outside the cult, every muscle in my body feels the reunion that is happening on the screen.