@Gargron like it or not, "Mastodon" isn't just "Mastodon GmbH" or even just the software – it refers to the Fediverse in common usage. That's a tension that's not going away, and I profoundly worry about the your suggestion (understandable, at some level) that your org will exert control over what does and does not constitute "Mastodon."
@Gargron I think your replies there are not great. ?
You and Mastodon GmBH benefit massively from the immense amount of work that the wider fediverse community does.
While I appreciate the perspective that the software != the community, I respectfully disagree. The decisions for the software impact the community, as we heard so profoundly at the Black Twitter Summit. The concern I have is that you often conflate the software and the community when it suits, but reject it when it doesn't.
With posts like this, it's becoming really clear and important that we disentangle "the Fediverse" from "Mastodon."
@Gargron, you've done great work that we're all grateful for, but you're standing on the shoulders of many, many others that you rarely credit or acknowledge.
This attitude isn't what we built the fediverse for. ?
A particularly intense scene in the most recent Last of Us episode was shot in the now-decommissioned hospital where I once spent an emotional summer sitting with my very ill grandmother, and where she died years later while I was an ocean away.
The Last of Us is gut-wrenching enough as it is; I was not prepared for that particular twist.
It was an immense privilege to work with the very fine folks at Ink & Switch on Upwelling, an exploration of writer-focused collaboration tools: https://www.inkandswitch.com/upwelling/
Collaboration tools for software developers (git, etc) have been deeply explored and are rich in diversity and features. Writers' tools: not so much. With Upwelling, we leaned into recent advances in CRDTs to experiment with possible UX patterns for collaboration on prose.
@evan haven't seen the replies, didn't occur as a response to your question, but ... How do you feel about e.g. Ministry for the Future? I haven't read it but my understanding is that it revolves around the idea that inaction on climate change *is* violence (not just ideation) by politicians and capitalists against esp. the global south / BIPOC and that at some point agonism unavoidably turns to antagonism?
Not going to lie, Twitter killing off free API access hits me in the feels. I remember with great affection the flood of creativity that happened after we opened up the API, and it's heartbreaking to see that unceremoniously strangled.
I'm relieved that we've got better alternatives, though. While this is perhaps the final straw for many bots on Twitter, it's been a long time coming and the API has long been hobbled compared to the early days. Open protocols or bust. ✊
Email was the first fediverse app. It's not by chance that Mastodon handles are like email addresses.
But email is broken, and since its creation, technology has come a long way.
It won't be Mastodon, but we have an opportunity to re-make email with Fediverse Tech in a way that could put an end to fractured messaging apps (no more navigating email, Signal, WhatsApp, SMS, Discord, FB Messenger, iMessage, etc just to send a message).
@jeffjarvis@evan@timbray@Michele@kathygriffin in this space, let's be clear, too, that "chronological" is an algorithm. Any sort of automatic moderation (blocking, muting, etc) is an algorithm.
The key thing is that *anyone* here can be in control of the algorithm that affects them. We aren't ever again going to be bound by the whims and anxieties of a bunch of guys looking to make a dollar.
(We do all have to hold ourselves accountable, which is liberating and terrifying, of course!)
@fraying it can help with moderation problems, though, in that when irreconcilable differences occur between groups of moderators, they can agree to disagree without irrevocably fracturing communities.
They can also choose to simply irrevocably fracture communities, which is what the capitalists have been doing for ages. New (old!) tools are sometimes good!
Someone should set up a third-party tool that mastodon/fediverse users can report abuse to. It should be staffed by people who are skilled at evaluating this stuff and who are paid to do it.
Recommendations/instructions to block instances/individuals could then be sent out to instance admins or even individual users (in an automated way), either as a collective or by subscription.
@evan@darius@jesse this is one scenario where Bluesky's and SSB's approach is better in that it makes it obvious where to go looking for the replies (but presumably this is just a matter of doing an eventual-consistency load? cc @cwebber)
Related, the counts on everything (followers, replies, likes, etc) are totally inconsistent across instances. I *think* what's shown is "# of people who liked/boosted this from *this* server"
I'm sharing a thing that I hope can be the beginning for many conversations, and represents for me a statement that is the result of many years of conversation:
To say I struggle with routine is a colossal understatement, so from this ADHDer who can't consistently eat dinner, let alone for 1200 days in a row, thanks for being really pushy, Duo!
"Mastodon sucks because any one of the 5000+ communities can set their own rules and might accidentally deprive people in that community of my witty hot takes for a reason I personally believe to be flippant" isn't the sick burn that the Twitter user with 50k followers thinks it is.
A number of people have asked me if I think that governments should run Mastodon instances for citizens. There may be exceptions, but I don't think governments should be in this business, for a variety of reasons.
However, I do think that *Libraries* would be *amazing* hosts for public federated social media communities. Just sayin'.
Hey, US folks newly running Mastodon instances: do Future You a *huge* favor, mitigate your potential liability, and register with the copyright office and designate an agent to receive DMCA reports *right now*. https://copyright.gov/dmca-directory/