Mike Agg @countingquoll@social.cleverlibre.org

One thing that was super common on Mastodon / Fediverse prior to this mass migration was adding image descriptions to help be accessible to our many blind and partially sighted users here. Many people won't boost posts without them.
Please consider adding alt text to your images when you can.

I keep hearing that #Mastodon is not likely to replace #Twitter. To that I say: so what?
I've been contributing to the #Linux desktop for the last 15 years not because it's likely to replace #Windows, but because providing people with free desktop is the right thing to do.
I use and support Mastodon not because it's likely to replace Twitter, but because it's a social network done right.

The smaller scale of Mastodon is interesting

It puts me in mind of a 2010 column I wrote for Wired about "the virtue of obscurity": https://www.wired.com/2010/01/st-thompson-obscurity/

Back then, Twitter was still new. A "big" followership was like 4,000 people. A huuuuuge celebrity like Oprah had 1.5 million

I kept hearing from people in the middle of the pack, who slipped from "a few hundred mostly friends" to "10,000 strangers/randos"

They didn't always like it

Five best book recommendations on the #neuroscience of consciousness: https://fivebooks.com/category/philosophy/philosophy-of-mind/ +p

Did you know that the first scientist to show that changes in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could affect the Earth’s temperature was a woman?

In 1856!

Eunice Foote broke scientific ground that remains more relevant than ever but history overlooked her.

https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/pt.6.4.20210823a/full/

#globalwarming #womeninscience #ScienceMastodon

Huge if true

This morning I posted on Twitter some thoughts about how seriously we should regard the dismantling of that site. I’m re-posting my thoughts here in what I hope will be a thread (if those exist here!).

Ok, Mastadon is officially a lot more awesome than I had realised. There's a federated server for everyone who's really into bitcoin, and, yes, it is full of people who are as awful as you can imagine. But, with one click, you can block the entire domain! 12.8k thousand crypto weirdos filtered out in a click. Amazing.

Ladies and gentlemen, @GreatDismal is in the building.

I'm going to try to post more puzzles (one of my favorite parts of twitter and not quite here yet)

Interesting fact of the day: The same effect that cuased light in a prism to split up into different colors is what ultimately caused the first transatlantic telegraphic wire in 1858 to fail.

Morse code is transmitted as on-off signals, effectively square waves. Square waves are in fact made up of many different frequencies. Like in a prism different frequencies move at different speeds through a wire. Therefore as the on-off pulses traveled through the transatlantic telegraph wire the signal spread out like it does in a prism and ultimately the pulses would overlap and be indistinguishable.

The effect was so extreme that it took a message of only 98 words (the first message sent) over 67 minutes to send one way and a whopping 16 hours to confirm the message.

Whitehouse, a doctor with little mathematical understanding, thought he could solve the problem by increasing voltage, which we now know was a futile effort. He increased the voltage to the point he managed to short out the cable entirely and made it useless. However Lord Kelvin had already warned of the problem as was ignored and he came up with the law of squares to describe the problem which later was refined to give us the telegraphers equation. The telegraphers equation is still used today to model feedlines in radio transmitters and receivers.

#Science #STEM #Physics #History @Science #QOTOJournal

When I joined #mastodon, I just wanted an open-source #twitter clone.

I got more than that. Subtle design differences made for healthier conversations in ways I wasn't expecting.

Here's a blog post to try to capture those differences and why they matter. https://scott.mn/2022/10/29/twitter_features_mastodon_is_better_without/