masto

It’s Mastodon, it’s Threads, it’s the future, and it’s extremely confusing

archived 20 Dec 2023 11:06:10 UTC

Block Meta or "trust but verify"?

A hopefully more approachable explanation of the Mastodon configuration settings Authorized Fetch and Disallow Unauthenticated API Access

Just as social media has become ubiquitous in academia, its established formats and dynamics have been brought into doubt. Björn Brembs argues that learned societies concerned with their core missi…

Repasamos la semana sobre temas de software libre, soberanía digital, comportamientos digitales, ecologismo, solarpunk, derechos laborales, justicia social, ... Staff: Fanta y Aurora Los sábados a las 12:00

Mastodon is interoperable, decentralized, operated by a nonprofit, lively, and, ACTUALLY, isn't hard to use. So why is everyone championing Threads as the main Twitter alternative?

Decentralized social networks may be the new model for social media, but their lack of a central moderation function make it more difficult to combat online abuse.

In a couple days, I head to Philadelphia for the 2023 version of the Association of Internet Researchers conference. It’s my favorite conference. And to give AOIR even more credit, they were one of the first professional academic organizations to set up their own Mastodon instance (I participate in that project by helping run the instance). While there, I will present a paper about the creation of ActivityPub, the protocol that allows the contemporary fediverse to run. Titled “The Non-Standard Standard: A Critical Genealogy of ActivityPub,” I will argue that ActivityPub is a very unusual standard. While it was created by a W3C working group, the Social Web Working Group during a W3C standard process, there were many non-standard aspects to its creation. In this post, I’ll sum up my findings, arguing that there are four ways in which ActivityPub is a non-standard standard. This work is informed by reading the Social Web Working Group (SocialWG) meeting minutes, interviews with SocialWG members, and a study of historical documents. Comments are very welcome, since this is going to be a chapter in my forthcoming book about the fediverse, Move Slowly and Build Bridges.

An unofficial guide to using Mastodon and the Fediverse

Open source and decentralized social network Mastodon has more users than it thought. The service, which competes with X (formerly Twitter) and other

ActivityPub is an open, distributed social network protocol standardized by the World Wide Web

With an increasingly fragmented social media landscape, Twitter’s decline, data privacy concerns and a huge creator economy, the promise of cross-platform communication has sparked curiosity.

Find people to follow on Mastodon by expanding your follow graph.

A comment on a Hacker News thread inspired me to contemplate why Mastodon is everything we loved about social media before…

Twitter is in turmoil and the scholarly community on the platform is once again starting to migrate. As with the early internet, scholarly organizations are at the forefront of developing and implementing a decentralized alternative to Twitter, Mastodon. ...

3 Posts, 4 Following, 6 Followers · Originator and sysadmin of Collapsible. This account will be used primarily for the project. Currently training up my co-sysadmin (resilience, right?)

A few days ago I posted an article on LinkedIn entitled “8 Really Good Reasons to Try Mastodon,”so I figured it made sense to follow that up with a quick start guide based on my own exp…

“Thousands of scientists are cutting back on Twitter, seeding angst and uncertainty.” And Mastodon was the most common destination if they opened…

Find people to follow on Mastodon by expanding your follow graph.

Social media is dying after the implosion of Twitter. Threads, Bluesky and Mastodon are trying to replace X but are coming up short. Maybe that's OK.

After my last long post, I got into some frustrating conversations, among them one in which an open-source guy repeatedly scoffed at the idea of

A guidebook for Cutie City and the wider Fediverse.

A slew of bad internet bills are being pushed through the US Legislature. Can we look to the Fediverse to carry activist causes?

The communities that call Twitter home might decide to pack their bags. If they do, they are unlikely to be able to completely reconstitute themselves elsewhere.