David Chapman @Meaningness@mastodon.social

My friends! I wrote about my experiences on the Fediverse so far :)

https://robek.world/internet/a-newcomer-to-the-fediverse/

"I don't accept the assumption that my placement on the political compass should determine who I'm allowed to communicate with."

thanks @rw / @rwdigest for having me, and for creating the cool header

I'd like to say that I really appreciate that the "write something" prompt on a.weirder.earth is "Remember: people never forget how you made them feel."

There is a lot to be said for the efficacy of social affordances in preventing problems.

Fascinating dynamic unfolding across Mastodon: instances are dividing into two ideological factions: safe speech, and free speech.

The safe speech instances are likely to start sharing domain-level blocklists (like Adblock but for speech) in the near future, to "curb harassment".

The free speech instances legitimately don't seem to care, and so far, have held much more interesting, substantive and intellectual conversations than the safe speech zones.

What can you expect from me? Free speech.

I need a captcha on my computer, but for cats. When someone starts entering gibberish on my keyboard I need it to be like "You appear to be a cat's butt, please enter the following to prove you're human".

#catpcha :cat2:

We're now observing the emergence of local instances, e.g. https://toot.berlin/ Interesting potential, but it seems to suggest the weakness of the community == instance == administrative policy == source of identity model. There are *many* possible communities I might participate in simultaneously, and even be interested in seeing, e.g., the local TL for that particular community.

Why should my identity and social graph position be tied to one, though?

Tired: silently blocking half the fediverse.

Wired: There is no legitimate reason for instance admins not to be transparent about what instances they're blocking.

Woke: With good enough user-level blocking tools, there is no legitimate reason for instance-level blocking, regardless of transparency.

De-immanentize the eschaton

Remember when #Twitter had #RSS / #Atom feeds for all users? Wasn't that great? Well, #Mastodon and any other #Fediverse server has that too. And it's here to stay, since the protocol is based on this.

Here's mine, for example: https://mastodon.social/users/rysiek.atom

Now you can use your favorite RSS reader to read my toots. I know, right?

#KeepCalmAndFederate

Heheh...out of order delivery ftw

@junglestrike @lambadalambda @sonya Yeah, but the whole social model embedded in the technical model is that you migrate to an instance that shares your value, freedom of association style. But when migrating servers means rebuilding your entire social graph.... that doesn't really work.

Curious to see how this #mastodon instance holds up with scaling.

I'm also bummed that it isn't easy to transfer your account between instances. I think that discourages people from creating new instances as they're already investing in one profile that's stuck on an instance. Would also probably help a lot with decentralized scaling. An instance gets slow and you start a new one or join a more stable one. These are some serious problems imo.

@Meaningness @puellavulnerata
> everyone got used to "the web is free" and thinks it's a moral affront to be asked to pay for it.

IMO this is the wrong way of thinking about it. It's more that if someone can be offered for free and monetized through advertising, it will be, and social networking needs super low friction to scale.

@Meaningness subscription-model services are conceivable; the alternative to advertisers paying for platforms is users paying for them