Members of Congress on Mastodon
The Washington Post's @cristianolima has an excellent story about (some) Members of Congress moving to Mastodon, why they're doing so, and what that means for decentralized and centralized social media.
I am amused that SignalApp joined mastodon.
The fediverse is everything they stand against.
- federation instead of centralization
- open, community driven protocol
- using pseudonyms
- multiple implementations of client and server software
Not sure what I mean, check out their blog post on these topics: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/
As for the multiple implementations, Signal denied a request to have a 100% open source fork of their app in F-droid. See for yourself:
https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/9966#issuecomment-681943985
PSA: Do Not Use Services That Hate The Internet. As you look around for a new social media platform, I implore you, only use one that is a part of the World Wide Web. tl;dr avoid Hive and Post. If posts in a social media app do not have URLs that can...
https://jwz.org/b/yj62
The founder of Post said today that the company is explicitly *not* focused on accessibility. Disappointing to read something like this in 2022
#tech #technology #Disability #twitter #postnews #twittermigration
Who owns your tweets? I think you do, even if Elon Musk has possession. The question of archiving Twitter’s past has some urgency. https://activehistory.ca/2022/11/archiving-twitter-during-the-upheaval/
I'm proud and excited to announce that Mastodon Canada has partnered with @cira to help develop our community!
Thank you to @spencer for all of your help in securing this incredible opportunity.
Read more: https://news.mstdn.ca/cira-teams-up-with-mastodon-canada-to-support-canadian-digital-communities/
People of #ontario should be up in arms about this massive #taxpayer subsidy to already lucrative residential developments and extremely wealthy #developers. The #greenbelt sell-off is such obvious #corruption that this developer fee hand out is not getting much attention, but Guelph and Hamilton both already projected big property tax hikes in response to #Bill23 #onpoli
Reminder that American tech companies put profits over democracy, every single time:
From Quartz: “Anti-government protests flared in several Chinese cities and on college campuses over the weekend. But the country’s most widespread show of public dissent in decades will have to manage without a crucial communication tool, because Apple restricted its use in China earlier this month.”
When I turned 70, I thought, “Well, that’s it. I’ve had a great career, but it’s winding down.”
Boy, was I wrong. I found social media, and then a second wind at my sails in my 70s! I made my Broadway debut at 78, and I’ll make my London debut at 85.
Life is truly wonderful and magical.
If you’re in London, come see me in Allegiance starting in January. Tix here: https://allegiancemusical.com
OK, so this is interesting. Some major organizations have now set up their own Mastodon instances:
European Union: EU Voice >>> https://social.network.europa.eu/explore
German gov: Explore social.bund.de >>> https://social.bund.de/explore
Internet Archive: Explore Internet Archive >>> https://mastodon.archive.org/explore
as sad as i am about the rapid destruction of twitter, the (re)surge in blogs and newsletters has been lovely
back to the #indieweb!
Having run my own test mastodon server, I can tell you that boosting is REALLY important. That's how posts propagate between servers that are not federated together.
I may get a bit technical, and it can be hard to describe but it's something like this:
Let's say that you have 2 servers, A and B that are not connected. They have their own federated timelines that is vastly different.
let's assume they have their users @a@A and @b@B that are mutuals. If user @a@A sees something interesting on theirs federated timeline and boosts it, user @b@B will see that on their own home page. But more importantly server B will now know about and download that post, and everyone else on B server will be able to see that post on their own federated timeline!
And that's why you boost, guys! It helps posts to spread.
@marcelias I recommend movetodon.org to see who among your Twitter flock exhibits mastodon addresses. Here are lists of academics hereabouts; journalists also in there. https://github.com/nathanlesage/academics-on-mastodon
Hopefully someone else can fill in the details but if I remember correctly, 20 or 25 years back there was a short-lived plan to create a federally-funded citation database along the lines of the Web of Science.
Under fierce lobbying pressure from ISI and other informatics providers, the project was scrapped. We are still presuming for that short-sightedness today.
Is there much Markey can do here, especially given the composition of the House in the next Congress? I'm also not sure there's much Markey can do to regulate a privately owned website, and I'm not sure the government should even have that degree of power.
I think #Congress and other government agencies should start up their own #Mastodon or other #ActivityPub based servers if they are serious about addressing this issue, as that would actually help address it. Complaining to Musk (who won't listen anyway) and grandstanding about doing things they cannot and should not do, on the other hand, does nothing.
Mathematics Ph.D. Likes hanging out with almost everyone regardless of political views or anything else.
Akkoma: @ML2