Ivory as my main mobile Mastodon app for a while now and I'm enjoying it more than the official app. It's great to have so many options.
Nice intro to Mastodon here. And speaking of apps, I have been using "The most remarkable aspect of the project is that Meta plans for the network to be decentralized. While the company would not elaborate beyond its statement, in a decentralized network individual users are typically able to set up their own, independent servers and set server-specific rules for how content is moderated."Using ActivityPub, no less! I did not foresee a pivot from metaverse to fediverse. Text updates? In this economy?!
"How will these smaller groups of happier people be monetized? This is a tough question for the billionaires. Happy people, the kind who eat sandwiches together, are boring. They don’t buy much. Their smartphones are six versions behind and have badly cracked screens. They fix bicycles, then they talk about fixing bicycles, then they show their friend, who just came over for no reason, how they fixed their bicycle, and their friend says, “Wow, good job,” and they make tea. That doesn’t seem like enough to build a town square on."That sounds delightful, but doesn't scale. I would like to quote every sentence in this piece by Paul Ford. The scattering!
"Stanford’s communicative infrastructure cannot depend on the judgment of social media companies or volunteer maintainers of servers, and social media is too important for our university to leave on the hands of profit-making enterprises or well-meaning nonprofits."I think all institutions should be considering this if they believe social media is an important way to communicate.
"Mastodon, a decentralized social media platform that many are turning to as a Twitter alternative, saw its userbase skyrocket from about 300,000 monthly active users to 2.5 million between October and November, Mastodon’s CEO, founder, and lead developer Eugen Rochko said in a new blog post."Heh, flocked. That's a lot of people who are suddenly active on an ad-free network. They might get used to that! I'm volunteering a monthly amount to my Mastodon instance admins and I hope enough of that kind of direct support can keep the alternative social media lights on.
"The post-Twitter platforms like Mastodon and Tumblr are E2E platforms, designed around the idea that if someone asks to hear what you have to say, they should hear it. Rather than developing algorithms to override your decisions, these platforms have extensive tooling to let you fine-tune what you see."History is repeating in the social media world and Cory Doctorow provides the context. Chokepoint capitalism is a good term for something I didn't have a term for before.
"I’m not sure yet where I personally lie on the spectrum between the fediverse view and my default of learned helplessness in the face of unrelenting capitalism, but exposure to Mastodon changed my thinking about this project. I stopped referring to the people who would fork my repository as “users” and started calling them “participants”—a term which assigns them more agency and a sense of belonging to a collective whole."Thoughtful essay by Liza Daly about how the existence of an alternative way of being online helped inform decisions about protecting people online.
"Even if the attention of the world were to move away from [Mastodon] it will absolutely sustain itself because it only requires a bunch of committed people to say, 'hey I want to do this'. Things like that are very robust."Brooke Gladstone interviewing Clive Thompson about what Mastodon is and why anyone should care.
"I'd like to advance the notion that software does not have to scale, and in fact software can be better if it is not built to scale."I think his vision of thousands of small communities that federate would be a better future for social media.