❤️ Twitterlike is a Bad Shape Notes
Like: Twitterlike is a Bad Shape
As I’ve been saying for years, the problem with Twitter isn’t that it’s centralized, but that it’s Twitter.
This post goes into some great details about what that means.
Stuff and happenings fluffy rambles
I’ve been accepted into Furality’s Dealer’s Den as a musician! I have a month to get my booth together and I’ve already got it like 90% done. It’s actually in an acceptable state already but there’s some more little things I want to do with the background video, and I’m learning so much DaVinci Resolve stuff to do it.
I also have a show on Sunday, at around 4:30 PM PDT. I hope folks can make it!
Taking another Mastodon break fluffy rambles
It’s way too easy to get heated while in the thick of things and for bad-faith interpretations to take over from the point anyone’s trying to make, and that is absolutely a two-way street.1
For now I’ve removed Toot! from my phone and DNS-blocked plush.city from my home network, so hopefully any posts I make to Mastodon are just from my automatic crossposter (like this one). I’ll still (eventually) see replies to my blog posts that come in as Webmentions, but hopefully not being Always So Online will be better for my mental health, which hasn’t been great as of late and I’m definitely lashing out at others much more than I would like.
❤️ Publishers on social media are between a rock and a hard place Notes
Like: Publishers on social media are between a rock and a hard place
Pretty good overview of the current social media landscape, especially with how it relates to journalism.
❝ This moment isn’t about decentralization Notes
Quoted: This moment isn’t about decentralization
The core need being expressed by millions of users isn’t “get me a decentralized protocol that nobody owns where I can have my choice of algorithms and apps”. It’s “get me a platform that works consistently, with less abuse”. Sometimes it’s also appended with, “where I can build a following for me / my brand / my employer and measure my progress.”
[…]
Many of us have been wanting decentralized social networking for a long time — I’ve been a part of these conversations for around twenty years. It’s tempting to feel like people finally get it. But that’s a trap and a mistake. As always, quite rightly, most people want something that works for them.
Reminder that Usenet has been around since the 80s and was a toxic hellhole even then. Decentralization isn’t the answer to social media problems, it’s just an implementation detail.
Or, as I keep on saying: The problem with Twitter isn’t that it’s centralized, but that it’s Twitter.
What is the IndieWeb? General Articles
Over the past several years, you’ve probably heard me or other web geeks talk about the IndieWeb, but just hearing about it doesn’t necessarily tell you what it actually is, exactly. The reality is that it’s both sort of complicated but also, at its core, really simple! If you do anything online with other people it’s definitely worth understanding and knowing more about.
At its core, the idea of the IndieWeb is that rather than participating in the public web on sites owned and operated by others, you do it on your own website, managed using whatever mechanisms you are most comfortable with, with some fairly-simple protocols for sites to then communicate with one another.
It’s not really any one specific thing, so much as a set of ethics and standards to follow to give people control over their own experience online. It’s people driving practices, which inform protocols. There is no one specific piece of IndieWeb software that you must run in order to participate; instead it’s a set of loose agreements about how to participate, with some simple, mostly-optional protocols to make it work better.
But I know that’s extremely vague and unhelpful, so here’s my attempt at writing a practical guide for what the IndieWeb is and how you can participate in it!
Warning signs with social media platforms fluffy rambles
In the aftermath of the issues with the major social media platforms, there have been a number of initiatives to reclaim social networking in a way that makes sense for people, with safety and personal control being at the forefront of a lot of peoples' minds.
However, many of these initiatives which have often showed up out of the blue have a bunch of red flags, and somehow people aren’t noticing them when they decide to commit wholeheartedly to a new platform. I think it’s worth sharing some of those warning signs, as someone who’s been around the block a few times.
⭐️ The fediverse and the indieweb
Twitter extrication fluffy rambles
Today was my last day using Twitter, unless something changes entirely. I have done the following, and suggest others do the same:
- Went through all of my connected applications to make sure that everything that I was using Twitter to log into now has a username/password login; the only two things I couldn’t fix on my own were Webtoon (which I don’t care about) and Imgur (which I hardly ever use), so hopefully I can get their respective support folks to help me out
- Disabled my ifttt Twitter autopost stuff, so this blog entry will not show up there
- Disabled my Mastodon-Twitter Crossposter connection
- Folded my indieweb.social account into my actual Mastodon account, since there were a bunch of people following me on one but not the other, and the only reason I had the indieweb.social one was for Twitter-crossposting purposes
- Discovered I had literally hundreds of pending follow requests from mastodon.social, mostly spammers or thrown-away “just checking out Mastodon” posts from a year or two ago, gah
- Posted a transitional post to my #novembeat thread which moves my remaining posts over there; however I’m not sure if this will actually work, because of how Mastodon threads work, and I might have to just start a new thread or something
⭐️ Why is Queer Discourse so Toxic? Notes
Bookmarked: Why is Queer Discourse so Toxic?
A conversation of sorts about how modern social media helps to amplify some of the worst aspects of toxic discourse. Possibly educational for straight allies, too.