Notices by blaine (blaine@mastodon.social), page 5

Hello Fediverse!

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:

https://slocanstatement.org/

I call it the #slocanstatement, and I'm sharing it here first, in public, in the spirit of the Fediverse.

I hope you'll read it, share it if you think it's a valuable statement, and comment and revise it towards building consensus across the Fediverse.

1200 days in a row with the Búho Verde. ??

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/

(Via rahaeli@twitter.com)

It is profoundly intellectually lazy and offensive to the soul to think that the sum total of human expression could ever be mediated by any single entity.

I built the foundations of Twitter with my bare hands and watched in awe and sadness as it grew into a cynical temple of ego.

I delight in its destruction.
We're better off here.

@shengokai ?

Similarly, I discussed a few options to make this better today. (https://mastodon.social/@blaine/109349477242394640) Very little resistance observed! Some people are lukewarm, but most seemed happy with the idea that they could opt out of seeing QTs, which seems fair.

The elephant in the room is that it's totally unreasonable and unsustainable for Eugen to be the effective sole arbiter here.

@trwnh @mralanorth @shengokai really good insights. ❤️

I think we collectively need a map of fracture lines in the Fediverse. Not as an oppositional thing, but as a way to navigate intent.

For me, those are strongly related to medium; e.g. the lines between pixelfed and mastodon are clear, even though it is possible to boost between them, it's a bit weird.

Mastodon's "sin" is that it tied communities to instances, rather than making communities more like mailing lists, things that you can join

@erincandescent @trwnh @mralanorth @shengokai ☝️☝️☝️

The model where everyone gets a new identity for every community they join (1) largely defeats the purpose of federation (2) does not scale as people have *many* communities of interest and (3) doesn't map to our natural conception of identity.

I *hope* it's fixable. May take some convincing of Eugen, which seems hard from this vantage point.

@evan oooh! Recipe?

@mattl @anildash we all want the same things, I think. A nice place to sit. I'm in the forest these days, blog deliveries by Canada Post, but lmk if you ever want to visit a nice lake in the mountains of British Columbia!

@mattl this might (re: probably will) fade, but @anildash was just commenting that this has that same wild feeling. Honestly, if the potential ahead is as big as Facebook et al got, things are going to be extremely great and so terrible (but hopefully mostly extremely great, at least compared to the trainwreck of the past 10-15 years).

@mattl I kind of like tweet, though apparently I coined it so I'm biased. ?

(https://furbo.org/2013/06/28/the-origin-of-tweet/)

While everyone's being nostalgic about what Twitter means to them, I may as well add my two cents.

I didn't give birth to Twitter – that was Jack and Florian. But I was its midwife and adoptive mother; for two months in early 2007, I was the code's sole guardian and caretaker.

I was also the first person to hate Twitter; back when it was SMS-only, I did the math and realized that my immigrant prepaid phone plan would charge me $2000/year to send and receive even a 2006-era number of tweets. ?

I've been thinking about the Fediverse for a looooong time, since before it was called the Fediverse. I'll admit my thinking hasn't evolved much for much of that time. The basic structure of it has been clear for nearly 15 years.

But today (so far - it's only 8:30 AM here!) I've learned *three* new perspectives that have changed/improved the way I think about the Fediverse/Mastodon in subtle but important ways.

So. Much. Gratitude. ?❤️

Since a number of folks asked what I learned yesterday, I wanted to pick this back up and share with the community that's giving me so much right now. So, a few brief threads (apologies to folks who don't like threads) of things I learned on the Fediverse yesterday: ?????

TIL?2/3: Many have said it, I'm going to say it, too: I miss Quote Tweets. I appreciate the thoughtful justification for not implementing them, but also disagree. My ideal would be

a quote tweet that points up ?☝️
rather than Twitter's pointing down ??

because I think sometimes it's really important to contextualize or emphasize why you're boosting someone's post.

I think Quotations are coming, and I hope and believe that ultimately, the call isn't @Gargron's alone to make. @scottjenson has been advocating for designers & UX folk to take part, and I hope that structures emerge to make that not just possible, but pervasive.

In the meantime, @amirouche pointed me at this lovely pattern:
https://social.hyper.dev/@amirouche/109343002733668741

Basically, instead of QTing something, on Mastodon it's possible to reply to a post and then boost your reply.

That way, the visibility is the same as a Quote would have been, but with the interesting property that the OP doesn't get silenced/steamrolled, but the original post is still easily visible. More conversational, less adversarial.

Everyone: The Fediverse calling them toots was a bad idea, but I'm having fun!

Absolutely no-one: I remember the original Twitter logo, which was totally normal and not off-putting to potential users AT ALL.