@evan for me it depends on the conversation! Sometimes yes I'm replying 1:1 to a person but the conversation is, in addition to every other function it has, a performance for public consumption and the public record
@evan I think there can be signals like favorites from people reading along that need to be read, too, not just replies. But yes as a person doing this kind of thing you need to ask yourself if it's just an ego trip or it's actually a public service of some kind. (It usually is an ego trip)
The framing of what a Threads account *is* strikes me as a funny thing.
Meta is saying "Threads is the fastest growing app in history with 100M users in five days". This doesn't make a lot of sense when you consider that a Threads account *is* an Instagram account.
If you accept that Instagram has 2 billion active non-EU users, the story could easily be "Only 5% of eligible Instagram users opted in to Threads in five days".
@technomancy it created an entire genre! also I would call it very light satire if at all... you might be confounding it with Cow Clicker, which was definitely satire?
I have been playing a new-to-me incremental game (think Cookie Clicker) on mobile. It's called Magic Research and it is very good. It's available on both the Google Play and iOS app stores, and it costs a one-time fee of $4. There's a free demo on Android too. And a Steam version!
Since I'm seeing a new wave of people saying they plan to leave Twitter, you may like my browser tool that takes the zip file of your Twitter export and returns a zip file of a web site that lets people browse and search your tweets. You can just upload the files wherever you normally host html and it'll work just fine.
Hello again #hometown admins -- there was a bug in Mastodon's security patch that caused issues in the admin panel when viewing remote accounts. They released a fix about 15 minutes ago and I am working to get a Hometown release with that fix very soon.
I'll have a backport for people running the older Hometown version 1.0.8+3.5.5 later today when I'm not stuck on my phone at an airport. Thank you @jasmin and @misty for your help!!
Doing a little victory dance because today #Hometown's "exclusive lists" feature was merged into Mastodon. Which means once it is part of a release, that is one less thing for me to maintain. Everything is going according to plan :AngelDevil:
@trochee I enjoyed the reply "I assure you that Noam Chomsky does not now, and did not ever, need to do empirical work to support his claims about language."
@fediversereport "The events at Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter reinforces this feeling for a lot of people, as it shows them the risk of what happens when there is a single CEO that controls a platform."
I have an essay forthcoming discussing (among other things) that Mastodon is not a platform (individual servers are) and that people need to be very careful applying hard-won platform-informed wisdom to something that isn't a platform.
I find myself saying "community-owned independent social media sites" rather than "fediverse" in mixed company because it gets a much better reaction (active interest rather than blank stares)
I realize that the venn diagram of the two does not overlap perfectly but the overlap is precisely the stuff I actually care about and I'd rather be inaccurate in a way that garners interest than similarly-inaccurate in a way that doesn't
I've been talking with an academic researcher who is interested in speaking with people who have shut down their fediverse servers, for any reason.
I know it's a touchy subject so I didn't want to just refer her directly to people, but if you are seeing this message and you're interested, please DM me and I will give you her email. I did a 1-hour interview with her on more general topics and really enjoyed the experience.
I'm the administrator of this server. https://tinysubversions.com is where most of my stuff lives. I make Hometown along with a bunch of other fediverse software (see pinned posts). I'm trying to fix the internet, and some people say I'm at least kind of succeeding. Based in Portland, Oregon, USA. he/him