Adam @adam@librem.one

Today was a wild day on #Twitter

@nibus

I'm done mourning Twitter.

Now I want to help build the actual future of social media.

And there is no future of social media without the Fediverse.

For years I had such a hard time explaining to *anyone* why this ActivityPub spec we were working so hard on mattered

When you think about it Elon paid 44 billion just to advertise the importance of the fediverse, gotta give that guy some credit, real generous of him

Today I had another play with the #MastodonAPI:

My @Raspberry_Pi Zero W is connected to a #Pimoroni Inky Developer E Ink display.

A #Python script then grabs the latest media posts either from my own, or from the public timeline.

The image is then displayed inside the TV, while its ALT description is scaled in size to be shown inside the speech bubble.

The buttons allow to navigate between posts and media attachments.

#RaspberryPi #MicroPython #making #MyMakes

If you’re wondering how much it costs to host a mastodon server:

$6 per month for ~5 users
$18 per month for ~100 users
$89 per month for ~2000 users

https://masto.host/pricing/

It’s cheaper to host your own personal server, which essentially guarantees verification, than it is to get “verified” on the bird site

If you download your Twitter archive it arrives wrapped as a static HTML page, which is not very useful for doing anything with, and worse: it requires the original account to be still active to do useful things like enlarge the images since they use t.co links.

So here's a Python script to convert a Twitter archive to markdown or other formats: https://github.com/timhutton/twitter-archive-parser

Now you can archive your tweets in any way you want.

Important tusk news of a different variety: the oldest sentence in alphabetical writing has been discovered on a 3700 y.o. ivory comb, an invocation against lice! From the New York Times. #archaeology #writing #histodons #history

"Is Web3 bullshit?"
My talk on the Crypto stage at Web Summit 2022.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGsllEF7w_g

#WebSummit #WebSummit2022

RT @JackMLawrence
It took me less than 25 minutes to set up a fake anonymous Apple ID using a VPN and disposable email, attach a masked debit card to it (with the address being Twitter's HQ), and get a verified account for a prominent figure. Just think what a nation-state or bad actor could do...

Now @Raspberry_Pi has its own @Mastodon instance, and because we’re committed to supporting platforms that support us, we’re putting our money where our mouth is. We have become a platinum sponsor of #Mastodon. In case you don't know Mastodon is a non-profit corporation based in Germany supported by both its sponsors and patreons. #TwitterMigration https://joinmastodon.org/sponsors

ITS CALLED MASTODON AND ITS LIKE IF TWITTER WAS A BUNCH OF MINECRAFT SERVERS BUT THEYRE ALL CONNECTED WITH PORTALS BETWEEN THEM

Whoa whoa whoa...

Whoa.

You mean to tell me that #Mastodon has *zero* algorithms deciding what I should read, and that the vast majority of instances banish Nazis into their own shadowrealm instead of tolerating them in the name of EnGaGeMenT?

Hah! Next you'll tell me there are no advertisers wielding influence over feature design so they get more marketing eyeballs!

Wait, what??!

The only thing that can stop a bad guy with an eternal september is a good guy with an eternal september

The biggest mistake web devs ever made was focusing on corporate-owned APIs instead of on new and innovative open protocols.

I don't care how all-encompassing Big Social become -- or whether Google or Apple can keep their market valuations ongoing.

Those "critical" APIs can be yoinked at any moment.

However, SMTP and HTTP have now been used for decades. So why not build on the next generation of open protocols?

When it came time to reckon with social media’s failings, nobody ran to the “web3” platforms. Nobody asked “can I get paid per message”? Nobody asked about the blockchain. The community of people who’ve been quietly doing this work for years (decades!) ended up being the ones who welcomed everyone over, as always.

I'm really not worried about Mastodon scaling issues at all.

When I left Twitter in 2008, we had roughly twice as many users as the current combined Mastodon network, all running on one MySQL server that had the same specs as a high-end 2013 MacBook Pro, plus roughly 10 web servers and 5 queue servers.

To be fair, growth wasn't as rapid, and we had local-infra advantages over federated systems, but these problems are solvable and I have no doubt will be fixed soon.

*Hugops to all admins!*