Adam @adam@librem.one

congrats to @conservancy for doing the right thing and standing up a dedicated instance for their organization

They ported PostmarketOS to the nokia 8110 4G... it looks so derpy running XFCE. I guess I found another project

Just discovered #ThickTrunkTuesday on Mastodon, and it’s joyful and wholesome.

Ask your public library if they have any workshops/trainings on Mastodon. They probably don't, and probably should. If you feel comfortable, offer to teach such a workshop. It's one way of thanking all the hard working administrators in the Fediverse.

One of the things that's made it easy to find communities whose discussion I want to see is the linear feed. This is a stark contrast to new social apps I've tried, e.g., Clubhouse, where my feed is dominated by high engagement stuff I don't want.

I understand why companies push that stuff; looking at Twitter's experiments, you get more growth/$ when you switch users who've chosen linear timeline back to ranked timeline.

Fundamentally, this is why most apps don't even offer linear timeline.

I see that #Hive is trending so I tried it and so far it's quite unfinished and suspicious.
- There's no web version (a big no for me)
- The app forbids to use or post media unless you give access to ALL your media on iOS. This is a HUGE red flag to me.

(on iOS, when an app asks for a media, you can give it only a selection of media to avoid hack/download of all your media library (you now, privacy etc). Hive doesn't accept that and asks for all access)

Also no 2FA, no DPO (so not GDPR compliant for privacy)...

Just for you to know.

Did you know that #Mastodon supports #RSS feeds?

That means you can follow your favorite people and topics right inside of Thunderbird!

→ Just add ".rss" to the URL ←

For example, our Mastodon URL "https://mastodon.online/@thunderbird"

becomes

"https://mastodon.online/@thunderbird.rss"

What about #hashtags? YEP!

Let's look at #OpenSource. From our instance, it is: "https://mastodon.online/tags/opensource"

So, we just append .rss and it works!

"https://mastodon.online/tags/opensource.rss"

REALLY useful if you don't want to miss a thing!

It is profoundly intellectually lazy and offensive to the soul to think that the sum total of human expression could ever be mediated by any single entity.

I built the foundations of Twitter with my bare hands and watched in awe and sadness as it grew into a cynical temple of ego.

I delight in its destruction. We're better off here.

Mastodon Day

Friday November 18, 2022 - An Incredible Day In Internet History

You were here.

It started with the Twitter lockout. 10,000 new users an hour. Almost a quarter million migrated to Mastodon in one day. The servers struggled. Remarkably, admins all over the world built up capacity in real time. New users were patient. The system held.

It's running better now. There will be more hard days ahead, but people powered social media has arrived.

#twittermigration #NewUsers #Welcome

woah, have you guys heard of this “Twitter” site? it’s this place where you can look up anyone you know and find out their Mastodon address!

"Mastodon is just like email."
Like email? So I use Microsoft Outlook?
"Use WHAT"

(Tools -> Account Settings -> RSS Feeds -> New -> https://mastodon.social/@Gargron.rss)

Bit of fun this weekend by looking at how Mastodon actually works under the hood. The "federation" part is really interesting, but also highlights how other servers may not be trusted.

Take for example this user (should be cached on infosec.exchange):

@fakexpn

If you click on the user via the web interface, you'll see that the account has insta-influencer status, without all the shit-posting and self-meme'ing..

This is of course is all by design, as part of ActivityPub. When we reference another account on another server, the "federation" part of the protocol kicks in and requests information on the account. This means that on the server we control, we can set as many followers as we want (as well as post count and basically anything else we want) by returning a "totalItems" value of 99999999 in the followers ActivitySteam JSON.

tl;dr, Factor in trust of servers when using Mastodon (and stop using follow count as a metric!)

A fav/like on Mastodon is like sending a personal "Thank you" note to the author. A Boost is like telling all your friends "Look at this!" #FediTips

Evolution doesn’t look how it’s depicted in pop culture. We often picture the famous “March of Progress” illustration where a series of apes stand in line leading to a modern human.

But evolution is not linear. It branches and branches. Divides in some places and recombines in others. #science
Image: @keesey

For those wondering, Mastodon contains no “web3” or crypto technology, and significantly predates any of that. The technology deployed here is primarily ActivityPub, which has roots in tech like RSS and PubSubHubbub.

It is noteworthy that “web3” designs are absent from the Twitter emigration discussion; that’s because it’s a scam and not fit for purpose.

The minute people start talking about adding crypto to the fediverse, run. That’s not what this is about and violates its spirit and design.

Twitter users are all like “I don’t know if I can trust a bunch of career sysadmins and network engineers to run their own Mastodon instances” — meanwhile Elon is just running around the Twitter data center going “what’s this button do?”

A JPG file dissection (new version)
https://github.com/corkami/pics

I don't want to just be posting about numbers like a clock, but the 2 million mark of monthly active users across the network is a pretty big deal. This is going big numbers! Shout out to all the server operators who are absorbing this wave.