Emile Snyder @esnyder@mastodon.social

Saw Boy Erased with the 13yo last night and it kind of wrecked me. Still pondering meta questions. Who was the intended audience? How do I feel about art-as-performative-consumable-pain?

Trying out a new platform gives me all sorts of feels about creating an account under my given name. Trying to decide how much of what I would actually like to say I'm comfortable being publicly associated with. Maybe time for a new alter ego.

Especially since trust is not a static property that an org/server has; it evolves over time. Who I trust today is not likely to be the same as who I trust in 5 or 10 years. And if my social network/identity is impossible to move, then what has all this hard work gained me, at the end of the day?

As an end user, I expect that to mean something like "when the org/entity that shuts down the instance your account is on decides to shut it down, your account/data/history is safe/recoverable, and easy to move somewhere else."

But it doesn't seem like that is the case now, and the README gives no indication at all if that is actually the long term goal or not.

I really wish the Mastadon README had some more discussion about what exact problem the system is designed to solve. Closest I can find is "A decentralized solution to commercial platforms, it avoids the risks of a single company monopolizing your communication."

Which is great and all, but... what does that mean exactly?

OK, so, I guess "federated" doesn't actually mean "can easily move my account from one instance to another" yet? :( https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/177

I am getting the feeling that I'm not going to understand this platform until I go spelunking on github.