Sonya Mann @sonya@mastodon.social

ah yes the political spectrum https://mastodon.social/media/wSBEUVxCv4-6Dtd9vQQ

*slow realization that I should've just started my own mastodon instance to dodge the inevitable need to change instances sometime in the future*

@sonya your federated timeline is every user followed by every user on your instance. The larger an instance gets the more it's federated timeline grows. Afaik this is how t works on gnusocial too just their nodes have had more time to reach out and link up with more users. Some even have bots that follow every user they find to link up the instances faster

PSA if you're on a small instance follow tonnes of people that aren't on your instance so the federated timeline is better populated.

Per @kodo's discussion with Gargron, a person's posts only make it to the federated timeline if someone on your instance is following that person. IMO this is a design flaw — it encourages centralization on one big instance (so that you can see entire conversations and find new people easily) even more than it encourages cross-instance links.

@maiyannah @kodo I have mixed feelings. I like that communities have autonomy... but I would prefer if it were a user-based choice. like I could choose to not see a given instance's posts on .social if I wanted to, instead of .social making that decision for me

@maiyannah @sonya @kodo Just now realizing the extent of how much was cordoned
off on the masto social instance

@chaotic_signals @kodo @sonya @maiyannah This seems like "I can't read Twitter conversations because Twitter has decided half the participants are 'low-quality'" all over again.

I care about decentralization but I also am already worried about trying to move my account over to another instance even though I've literally only invested a couple days in it and have less than two dozen followers

Getting a new Mastodon account on a different instance seems about as painful as switching email addresses. You can import your address book, but realistically you'll probably need to monitor the old account for a long time.

Today: the French invade Mastodon
Tomorrow: stone age Carthaginians invade *on* Mastodons

Meanwhile, at @Gargron's house... https://mastodon.social/media/tvF8Lqij4tFo8-Dys5I

Nature does not have rules and scoffs at decency. Nature is limitless in its horrors.

This is ultimately where Lovecraft was wrong -- our world is not besieged on all sides by nameless uncanny horrors from beyond time. It is _made of_ horrors.

We are blinded to them by familiarity.

^^^ From my recent IM history; I was talking about feet.

The hardest part of decentralized systems - making users, especially nontechnical ones, give a shit about decentralization