@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.
Absolutely wild to me that there is a book called "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck" where the censored word seems to imply the author does, in fact, extremely give a fuck especially about their relationship to their publisher and to their book's ability to be carried in stores
@mhoye@b0rk This thread from the internet-history email list has some interesting insight, particularly this post from a guy who has been trying for many years to find cold hard facts about the issue and come up empty.
These days my go-to example of "you cannot bet on having access to better technology as time progresses" is "I used to have an app on my phone that could predict the next hour of weather with startling accuracy and that is no longer an option"
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