#mastodon

But I think this discussion also opens up another, related question: Do we need to live in a world where every network is the biggest thing ever? Can you have a thriving community without your primary platform being a zeitgeist machine? Gruber’s framing on the issue seems to suggest that Twitter circa 2009 is the ideal. But what if that moment has genuinely passed? The Threads algorithm that Gruber points to specifically goes out of its way to discourage the very kinds of interactions that a 2009 Twitter once allowed. The fediverse’s server-oriented setup favors interactions in smaller communities even if, in practice, people still tend to favor the larger ones.

See, what makes Mastodon less worse than something like Twitter or Bluesky or, god forbid, fucking Threads, is that it has escape hatches. You may not like being told “go find another instance,” but you can go find another instance, and that is fucking spectacular. Twitter started going into the shitter even before Elon Seig Heil Musk painted a big “X” on it with his dick, but did you all just say “sucks, man,” and fuck off to another Twitter instance? No! Why not? Because there were no other fucking Twitter instances!

Well, I had this idea. A new bot that would post one bookmark per day to a Mastodon account.

Built a Mastodon observability stack over the weekend for toot.community: Grafana dashboards (web/sidekiq/streaming/edge), VictoriaMetrics rules, SLOs & alerts. The ultimate goal was to get meaningful symptom (user-facing) alerts and to learn about Jsonnet and Grafonnet.

After nearly 10 years, I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon and transferring my ownership of the trademark and other assets to the Mastodon non-profit. Over the course of my time at Mastodon, I have centered myself less and less in our outward communications, and to some degree, this is the culmination of that trend. Mastodon is bigger than me, and though the technology we develop on is itself decentralized—with heaps of alternative fediverse projects demonstrating that participation in this ecosystem is possible without our involvement—it benefits our community to ensure that the project itself which so many people have come to love and depend on remains true to its values. There are too many examples of founder egos sabotaging thriving communities, and while I’d like to think myself an exception, I understand why people would prefer better guardrails.

If Bluesky and Mastodon were "on the web" they would already interop because friends that's what the freaking web does. They behave like closed off silos, and until that changes, they can't claim to be on the web. Don't sell out the web so cheap. It really means something to be on the web.#

It is very, very unlikely that in the Mastodon universe, Sarah Kendzior’s account would suddenly have globally vanished. It is quite likely that the shot-a-man post would have been edited appropriately, and possible that it would have just vanished.

Contribute to lmorchard/feed-to-mastodon development by creating an account on GitHub.

A bot that posts questions without context.

How will these smaller groups of happier people be monetized? This is a tough question for the billionaires. Happy people, the kind who eat sandwiches together, are boring. They don’t buy much. Their smartphones are six versions behind and have badly cracked screens. They fix bicycles, then they talk about fixing bicycles, then they show their friend, who just came over for no reason, how they fixed their bicycle, and their friend says, “Wow, good job,” and they make tea. That doesn’t seem like enough to build a town square on.

welcome to the fedibot club! we can help you make fun and cool bots!

Build Your Own Timeline Algorithm

Today, I learned that PyScript exists. PyScript is, at its core, some rigging to make Pyodide, a WebAssembly port of the CPython Python interpreter, real easy to use as a proper client-side web scripting language. Just include one <script> tag and now <script type="py"> is a valid thing you can have in your website. Put Python code inside of it, interact with the DOM, the works. I think that rules and/or is kind of horrifying, depending. Obviously, for me, the immediate question was: Can this run Mastodon.py? And the answer is: Yes, very competently.

So the fediverse is technically open and culturally anxious about it.

So the problem Bluesky is dealing with is not so much a problem with Bluesky itself or its architecture, but one that’s inherent to the web itself and the nature of building these training datasets based on publicly-available data. Van Strien’s original act clearly showed the difference in culture between AI and open social web communities: on the former it’s commonplace to grab data if it can be read publicly (or even sometimes if it’s not), regardless of licensing or author consent, while on open social networks consent and authors’ rights are central community norms.

So what's it like to set up your own GotoSocial server? Well, I can walk you thru what I used for my setup. Yours might be different; that's OK! I made these up-front choices to simplify the operational overhead because I didn't want this to be a hassle and I don't need the extra engineering that comes from trying for nine nines of uptime:

Bluesky is built by good people who care, and it is providing something that people desperately want and need. If you are looking for a Twitter replacement, you can find it in Bluesky today. However, I stand by my assertions that Bluesky is not meaningfully decentralized and that it is certainly not federated according to any technical definition of federation we have had in a decentralized social network context previously. To claim that Bluesky is decentralized or federated in its current form moves the goalposts of both of those terms, which I find unacceptable. However, "credible exit" is a reasonable term to describe what Bluesky is aiming for. It is Bluesky's term, and I think Bluesky should embrace that term fully in all contexts and work that they can.

I built Sill because I value the people in my social network, and I believe I can learn the most about the world by reading what they read and hearing what they have to say. Sill listens to them at scale and helps me understand the conversation. In the month or so I’ve been using it myself, Sill has completely changed my relationship to my social network.

Find the most popular links from your Mastodon/Bluesky networks

Free software can’t solve the power imbalance between users and software makers alone by giving to the former the possibility to run, study, and distribute both original and modified copies. Such approach fails to acknowledge that the problems we face with proprietary software go beyond technological aspects, and that is possible to easily reproduce toxic patterns within open projects. Collaborative efforts take a lot more than just making the code available to anyone, being primarily based on human interactions and emotional labor.

But I do know that the energy on Bluesky is exciting, that the app and website are very usable, and that, as a journalist, I appreciate a platform that does not and says it will not punish links in any algorithm and which mostly operates in reverse chronological order. I think that the “Starter Packs” that let you follow tons of people at once according to your interests have made the onboarding process really easy. What’s happening on Bluesky right now feels organic and it feels real in a way no other Twitter replacement has felt so far, and it feels better than X.com has been ever since Elon Musk took over. If the masses are going to move off Twitter, we can do much better than Threads. And we could do much worse than Bluesky.

All this to say: the Bluesky team seems like they’re earnestly working toward a decentralized platform, but they have a lot of work ahead of them. Years of effort, in my estimation. In the meantime, Bluesky is slightly more decentralized than, say, Facebook — but not by much. Yes, you can host your own data. Yes, you can scrape all of the content on the network. But you can’t do anything with it unless you’re attached to the Bluesky service. I believe this will change with time, but it will be prohibitively expensive and we’re not there yet.

If they’re motivated, tooled up, and plugged into communities of support fediverse server teams can provide context-sensitive, high-touch local moderation for their members—while also connecting to a broad landscape of other well-governed servers. But can new fediverse members find them?

On Saturday 8 July 2023, user accounts started disappearing from the Vivaldi Social Mastodon instance. What was going on, how did this happen, and what were the consequences?

On Saturday 8 July 2023, user accounts started disappearing from the Vivaldi Social Mastodon instance. What was going on, how did this happen, and what were the consequences?

Here are my personal thoughts about how we could handle Trust & Safety features in Mastodon software.

Here are my personal thoughts about how we could handle Trust & Safety features in Mastodon software.

Relay List is a site that indexes and tracks various ActivityPub relays that have been shared with the public or with the creator. Each relay is checked every 30 minutes, updating the number of participating servers, the registration status, and if the relay is online. This information is useful for server administrators when considering adding a relay to their instance.

Relay List is a site that indexes and tracks various ActivityPub relays that have been shared with the public or with the creator. Each relay is checked every 30 minutes, updating the number of participating servers, the registration status, and if the relay is online. This information is useful for server administrators when considering adding a relay to their instance.

The tech industry is abuzz about a new standard for social networking that is more open, more user-centric, and potentially more powerful than Twitter and Facebook. But we’ve been here before.

Then I realized Home Assistant has all the parts I need. Specifically it has an RSS integration called Feedreader and a notification integration for Mastodon. All that I needed to do was configure them, per their docs, and create an automation to post new RSS items. Here’s the automation I initially came up with:

Then I realized Home Assistant has all the parts I need. Specifically it has an RSS integration called Feedreader and a notification integration for Mastodon. All that I needed to do was configure them, per their docs, and create an automation to post new RSS items. Here’s the automation I initially came up with:

Follow, react and publish across your Mastodon instance

Follow, react and publish across your Mastodon instance

Tootski is a browser extension that allows you to boost, follow, or favorite from outside your home Mastodon server, and instantly share any non-Mastodon page you might be reading.

Tootski is a browser extension that allows you to boost, follow, or favorite from outside your home Mastodon server, and instantly share any non-Mastodon page you might be reading.

I wrote recently about how you can use Mastodon’s API to make bots that post random images and make data charts, but you don’t have to automate just bots. Let me show you a few fun things you can do with your own profile.

I wrote recently about how you can use Mastodon’s API to make bots that post random images and make data charts, but you don’t have to automate just bots. Let me show you a few fun things you can do with your own profile.

The purpose of this document is to provide an overview of the infrastructure used to operate the Mastodon instance, and ancillary services, that make up vmst.io.

The purpose of this document is to provide an overview of the infrastructure used to operate the Mastodon instance, and ancillary services, that make up vmst.io.

Toot is a CLI and TUI tool for interacting with Mastodon instances from the command line.

Toot is a CLI and TUI tool for interacting with Mastodon instances from the command line.

Feed2toot automatically parses rss feeds, identifies new posts and posts them on the Mastodon social network.