Just David Blue's Toots
@DavidBlue@mastodon.social on JustMyToots
Current thoughts on social media
My view on the state of social media in late 2023
Annual Report 2022
The 2022 Annual Report is now available for download! As a non-profit organization supported exclusively by donations, we like to keep our community updated on our yearly progress, and 2022 was an interesting year to say the least.
Last Week in the Fediverse – episode 31 – The Fediverse Report
Mastodon's Mastodon'ts
There are a few fundamentally broken things about how Mastodon posts work that are terrible vectors for abuse, as well as being bad for basic usability. Maybe they are fixable, I don't know. To be clear: I am a fan of Mastodon. I have been enjoying my time there much more than I ever enjoyed Twitter or Facebook or Instagram. And I am 100% in the "I won't touch anything Jack Dorsey has ...
Child Safety on Federated Social Media
The Fediverse, a decentralized social network with interconnected spaces that are each independently managed with unique rules and cultural norms, has seen a surge in popularity. Decentralization h...
Digesting the "Child Safety on Federated Social Media" Report
An in-depth report reveals an ugly truth about isolated, unmoderated parts of the Fediverse. It's a solvable problem, with challenges.
The BBC on Mastodon: experimenting with distributed and decentralised social media
Trialling ActivityPub and the federated model for social media and it's possibilities for the BBC.
Last Week in the Fediverse – episode 29
The BBC sets up their own Mastodon server. A W3C meeting about CSAM and Mastodon. Mastodon on your watch?
Looks Like New: How did open social media platforms originate?
In the aftermath of a chaotic Twitter takeover, many people have moved away from centralized social media platforms to a new set of social platforms that are open-source, decentralized, and user-ce…
The Fediverse has a Mental Health Problem
Over the past year the Fediverse has experienced significant growth, and this comes at a very real cost: Mental Health.
Mastodon monoculture problem
Recent moves by Eugen Rochko (known as Gargron on fedi), the CEO of Mastodon-the-non-profit and lead developer of Mastodon-the-software, got some people worried about the outsized influence Mastodon (
Mastodon is easy and fun except when it isn’t - Erin Kissane's small internet website
my goal here isn’t to plonk down a big pristine block of research, but to offer a conversational glimpse into what real humans—who were motivated to try not one, but at least two alternatives to Twitter—actually report about their unsatisfactory experiences on Mastodon.
In my experience, building cultural norms into the tooling is much more effective and less alienating than chiding.
Constantly being told I was somewhat dim because I didn’t understand how to do things or what the unwritten rules were.
This, I particularly hate and hope desperately I did not contribute to.
A lot of people in the responding group found the process of picking an instance, signing up, and getting set up genuinely confusing.
The Own Your Experience school doesn’t really grapple with the genuinely terrifying dynamics of mass-scale complex systems.
Last Week in the Fediverse – episode 25
Chaos at Reddit and Twitter have a direct impact on the fediverse. Growth at Lemmy and Kbin. The server database of kolektive.social gets seized by the FBI.
Can Mastodon be a Twitter refuge for marginalized groups?
The Twitter implosion has brought a flood of people seeking a safer, less-toxic environment. The results have been mixed.
Erin Kissane
Straight out of undergrad, I applied to a bookselling job and didn’t get it, so I started working in tech. By the end of my first year there, I was
Even most of the emergent gestures in our interfaces are tweaks on tech-first features
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Bluesky is now integrated with Flipboard, with Pixelfed coming soon - The Verge
Ivory for Mac Review: Tapbots' Superb Mastodon Client Comes to Apple Desktops and Laptops - MacStories
Exploring your fediverse connections | Stefan Bohacek
Copy and Kill: The Ex-Tweeps Hatching a Plan to Knock Off Twitter
On the day Sarah Oh got laid off from Twitter last November, her friend Gabor Cselle called with his condolences. Then he made her an offer: Would she help him build a better Twitter? Cselle wasn’t trying to reinvent the social media wheel. He just wanted to return to a simpler time on the ...
Six Months In: Thoughts On The Current Post-Twitter Diaspora Options
Today is six months since Elon took over Twitter and began this bizarre speedrun of the content moderation learning curve in which he seems to repeatedly… not learn a damn thing. Over and over agai…
The Post-Platform Internet
We don't know where to go online now.
reb00ted | Growing the Fediverse
News outlets, Twitter, and the fediverse
The news cycle is talking about NPR leaving Twitter. This is a good moment to look at a case study of Heise, a big German news outlet, and what joining Mastodon actually means in terms of numbers and engagement.
The case for native handling of Fediverse actions | Jeremy Herve
A few weeks ago, I wrote about a new feature we added to the Jetpack plugin: a “Share to Mastodon” button. Nice, right? Mastodon is getting more and more popular, and it makes sense to …
![[Draft:] Follow anyone — Open Indie](https://rdl.ink/render/https%3A%2F%2Fglobal-uploads.webflow.com%2F5fadb14c46b287ad224b60b9%2F60faf7fb1c29fd3a00abd0c5_Google%2520Inbox%2520UX.png?width=350&height=&ar=16:9&mode=crop&format=avif&dpr=2)
[Draft:] Follow anyone — Open Indie
The all too common firehose stream has never worked for me. It’s undoubtedly a big reason why I never got properly into Twitter. I gener...
The Shit Show • furbo.org
Well, it happened. We knew it was coming. A prick pulled the plug. And what bothers me most about it is how Space Karen did it. My mom passed away just before Christmas. Her decline was something everyone in the family saw coming and we prepared for her demise. It still hurts like hell, but […]
Why Internet decentralization? - HedgeDoc
# Why Internet decentralization? 
Mastodon creator Eugen Rochko talks funding and how to build the anti-Twitter
Mastodon’s success has somewhat taken its creator Eugen Rochko by surprise, but he's steadfast on maintaining its nonprofit nature.
Journalists want to re-create Twitter on Mastodon. Mastodon is not into it.
pEver since Elon Musk completed his $45 billion takeover of Twitter last month, there has been a steady stream of users, including a number of journalists, signing up for Mastodon, an open-source alternative. No one controls Mastodon—or rather, everyone controls their own version of it. There are thousands of servers running the software, and each […]/p