Sven Slootweg (🔜 WHY2025) @joepie91@pixie.town

hello venture capitalists, why don’t you ‘venture’ directly into the center of the sun

I find the hashtag Twitter refugee disgusting, very white-western mindset. Guys, it’s a social network that’s collapsing, not your human rights in danger, your freedom, or your life. You moved your account from a platform to another one to gain a certain amount of freedom of speech that the other space was censoring. That’s it. Refugees are living a totally different experience. Please… please.

Seeing lots of excitement about the #MIT instance (@mastodon.mit.edu) and ppl wanting to set up their own university instances. but very important--the MIT instance is entirely volunteer run and is NOT associated with uni admin. universities are massive PR machines (literally hedge funds with a bunch of academics attached) and will not hesitate to co-opt a grass-roots community associated with their brand. If you want to start your own uni instance, DO NOT let uni admin get involved!!

#twittermigration #meta

ok I have seen a lot of people posting introductions to mastodon and how-tos and #feditips, and they've all probably explained it better than I could

but a thing I have not really seen said directly is just that... this isn't twitter, not only in terms of social stuff and general vibe, but in terms of the software and how it works and what the experience of using it will be like, and *that's okay*.

Like. I am Internet Old so I have been through a bunch of social media migrations and sites closing down. adjusting to the new place can be weird and kind of suck sometimes. way back in the day I hung out on message boards most of the time, and when people started to migrate over to using sites like Livejournal, I hated the idea - how could you have proper conversations with people on a *blog*? It would never work, fandom and discussion could never thrive there, right? But as it turned out, even though it was a different experience, it thrived pretty well because people used the threaded comments to hold conversations, and it was actually kind of nice having a space where you could curate your own experience a bit more, and I got used to it.

Also, on livejournal you used to have a choice of 6 (or like 20, if you paid for them) different avatars, and you could choose which one to use for each individual post or comment, and I loved that. So did basically everyone else. Making cool LJ icons was a THING. And when Livejournal decided to jump the shark and I moved over to a new service, I was like what the *fuck*, you just get one icon for everything forever? I hate this and it will never catch on and it's broken and it sucks.

But actually I did get used to it (I mean, ngl, I still think it was an awesome feature and I'd love if it made a comeback somehow, but I did) and it turned out that despite not having multiple icon choices, the new place had a bunch of good stuff about it that Livejournal hadn't had. And then I got used to Tumblr and various similar blogging sites, and even though I missed icons and threaded comments, I loved how easy it suddenly was to find cool art and photography and fandom stuff and other people who liked the things I liked.

And then tumblr jumped the shark and I came over here and I was like, huh this is confusingly different to tumblr and I can't write longform stuff because it's a microblogging platform and cws work differently to readmores and I can't quote-respond to people and that's weird. And, again, turned out that even though the fediverse lacks some stuff I liked, it has its own stuff that makes it awesome.

There is definitely kind of a learning curve to using fedi, but there is when you're getting used to any new site. And I absolutely get that people are missing specific things that they liked on twitter. But I think that maybe sometimes it is helpful to look at it as "Mastodon does stuff differently to Twitter", instead of "Mastodon is FAILING as a Twitter replacement".

The cat just shoved open the bathroom door, smacked me with it, then walked away

infosec bros when u scrape a publicly accessible website by a megacorporation: WTF no stop that !!! that's evil and bad and will be bad for enconomy 😡😡😡😤

infosec bros when u scrape a federated social media site primarily used by marginalized people: wtf this is the best idea ever keep it up 👍👍👍

#fediblock cryptodon.lol

crypto enthusiasts not wanting to respect the community. Expect nothing good from them.

So if a major company does end up adding support for ActivityPub or other fediverse features I would be very hesitant about actually federating with them. As long as they DO connect to the larger network they'll siphon off the user base, and we KNOW that they will turn on it. Corps cannot make promises, cannot be trustworthy, cannot guarantee they won't betray principles. They are structurally incapable of it, no matter what their humans say.

#mastodon (2/2)

A discussion about distributed federated systems else-network did bring up some concerning history that we should keep in mind:

#XMPP was, briefly, the dominant messaging system on the Internet. It was fully federated allowing hosting anywhere. Major extensions were being done by major companies (Apple adding voice and video for example). And it all fell apart because the three big providers (Apple, Google, Facebook) ditched it to have more control.

#mastodon (1/2)