Dr. Guillermo Power @gpowerf@social.cleverlibre.org

comments on reviews are like "you should only get the thing i got so that i can feel better about the choices i made for myself"

Twitter was special. But it's time to leave

https://www.pwnallthethings.com/p/twitter-was-special-but-its-time

Moving Mastodon accounts be like #retrocomputing

The #fediverse is one of the most hopeful aspects of the internet, since it tries to bring it back to its decentralized, federated roots. In my opinion, there is no other way to guarantee free communication.

However, it is not without its challenges. Looking ahead, it's easy to identify some of them:

1. Centralization is an emergent phenomena. We can see this happening with the distribution of instance sizes, and the clear “rich get richer” dynamics that take place. This is not due to bad actors, it is simply how people tend to behave.

2. Commercialization is yet to hit this platform, but if it becomes popular, it will undoubtedly happen. Instances that serve ads, promotes content, etc, will appear at some point.

3. Related to point 2, it is possible that Google and/or Microsoft will seise the opportunity to try once more to move into the social media domain, and make services that connects to the #fediverse. This will be sold as an adoption of the federation, and hence progress. But to see how that goes, we need only to remember what happened with google chat and the open Jabber protocol — they abandoned it as soon as their service became popular enough. Bait and switch.

4. Legal intimidation of smaller instances is a real menace. The push to force Facebook/Twitter/etc to be liable for what users post will backfire, and render every instance admin responsible for what every single user posts. Note that it does not matter one bit if the content is actually problematic — a single cease or desist letter from a lawyer will terrify most admins out there.

These are not problems without solution, but it's unclear how things will unfold.

7,300,855 accounts
+4,066 in the last hour
+92,347 in the last day
+610,309 in the last week

I ran into a new member of a choir I sing with on the bus last night. We hadn't interacted much up till then. We got chatting (she is lovely!) and when there was a silence, without a word she produced the most perfect round orange I've ever seen from her handbag and gave it to me. Just complete unexpected orange. I gratefully accepted it and I've just eaten it. It was delicious. I'm not sure what the moral of this story is, but when life gives you oranges, it's a good day 🍊

I just realized that I can pin multiple posts on my profile!!!

I have three on there now. One each on #Science, #Cooking and #Academia

How cool is this?

#Mastodon #FediTips

Early (very early) days, but I’ve managed to setup communication between Home Assistant and HyperCard running on a Power Macintosh G3 running Mac OS 9.2.

All this via an ESP8266 device running ESPhome over a serial and wifi connection 🤯.

#homeassistant #macintosh

Bye bye #birdsite. You know why...

There seems to be a lot of misconceptions about how to set up Mastodon.

1. You do not have to sacrifice a duck. Any waterfowl will do.
2. The bit about dancing around naked in a forest glade? While dancing is fun, you may just walk.
3. When the demon appears, you needn’t chant in Latin. It is fluent in all languages.

The rest of the guide is correct.

Introducing the first alpha release of Mastodon 3.11 for Workgroups!

Available for Windows 95

Your Twitter handle can be registered by anyone 30 days after deactivation. If impersonation is in your threat model, lock your account and park it.