ongoing by Tim Bray · Bye, Twitter
I don’t like making unpaid contributions to a for-profit publisher whose proprietor is an alt-right troll.
Same.
I can see no good arguments for redirecting my voice into anyone else’s for-profit venture-funded algorithm-driven engagement-maximizing wet dream.
Mastodon is a gateway | Andy Bell
I’ve been very guilty of putting all my eggs in the Twitter basket over the last couple of years, especially, and all of that has been destroyed by one bellend billionaire. I’m determined not to make that mistake again and even more determined to make my little home on the internet—this website—as lovely and sustainable as I can make it.
How to Weave the Artisan Web | Whatever
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a site that’s not run by an amoral billionaire chaos engine, or algorithmically designed to keep you doomscrolling in a state of fear and anger, or is essentially spyware for governments and/or corporations? Wouldn’t it be nice not to have ads shoved in your face every time you open an app to see what your friends are up to? Wouldn’t it be nice to know that when your friends post something, you’ll actually see it without a social media platform deciding whether to shove it down your feed and pump that feed full of stuff you didn’t ask for?
Wouldn’t that be great?
ooh.directory
A directory of blogs, all nicely categorised:
ooh.directory is a place to find good blogs that interest you.
Phil gave me a sneak peek at this when he was putting it together and asked me what I thought of it. My response was basically “This is great!”
And of course you can suggest a site to add to the directory.
“You can be a carpenter this time around.” – Lucy Bellwood
A personal website is a lovely thing. Nobody will buy this platform and use it as their personal plaything. No advertisers will boycott and send me scrambling to produce different content. No seed funding will run out overnight.
I can’t recommend @maggie@indieweb.social’s website enough. If you’re into the intersection of design, note taking and digital anthropology, this is a great read.
Ok let's be honest. I like the fediverse because it caters to me. I have huge technical privilege. I've been writing code and making games and building computers and setting up websites and all those sorts of things since I was a child — and I find doing all those things fun. For me I've set up microblog.pub as a single person activitypub/fediverse/mastodon instance because then I can play with it. I spend hours tweaking my css to make the site look how I want. I contribute patches and discussions to the help build, improve, and add features to the microblog.pub software that I use. All of that is a source of joy for me. But that's me.
Most people don't have my technical privilege. Most people just want a social media platform that will do the job of connecting them to their networks and showing them the content they're looking for.
And I can yell and shout about how #indieweb or fedi/masto/AP is better than platforms for this that or the other reason. And I do genuinely believe in those open platforms for those reasons. But those reasons aren't why I love them. I love them because the open systems are empowering to me, specifically, because of my technical privilege and because they provide a space for me to play in the way I like to play.
What sucks, though, is that this is about community. There are plenty of things in life where if you want to do things your weird way that's different to everyone else, you can do that and have your fun and it doesn't actually matter what other people think. But that's not true for social networking. If everyone else has different wants, needs, and priorities from their social network and thus chooses to do something else from what your wants, needs, and priorities direct you to choose, then your experience of doing the thing you choose is lessened by the fact that your communities don't join you.
So I'm left stressed. I deeply love open platforms. I love the web. I want other people to love it too and to come join me playing there. But I also totally understand why the touted benefits of those platforms don't even remotely make up for the poor UX to people who just want the social media to work. It's all well and good to be invested in the community project of building the network but not everyone has the desire or the resources to be part of that kind of project. So I'm anxious because I know that it IS better for most of my friends to use something else. It makes more sense for them to go to a platform that is all owned by and managed by a single legal entity because that is what provides the most value for the least cost (difficulty of use). But then my playground is lessened. And I recognise that that playground was only ever fun for me and not most of my friends, because of that technical privilege,. But it still makes me anxious and it still makes me sad. Cause I want to keep playing.
It takes one person to knock down a silo - daverupert.com
Pour a foundation for your own silo or home.
Word Persons and Web Persons · roytang.net
This resonates with me.
Followed Tim Chambers on indieweb.social
Mastodon is just blogs
Do you still miss Google Reader, almost a decade after it was shut down? It’s back!
A Mastodon server is a feed reader, shared by everyone who uses that server.
I really like Simon’s description of the fediverse:
A Mastodon server (often called an instance) is just a shared blog host. Kind of like putting your personal blog in a folder on a domain on shared hosting with some of your friends.
Want to go it alone? You can do that: run your own dedicated Mastodon instance on your own domain.
This is spot-on:
Mastodon is just blogs and Google Reader, skinned to look like Twitter.
Bird’s-eye View · Paul Robert Lloyd
I love not feeling bound to any particular social network. This website, my website, is the one true home for all the stuff I’ve felt compelled to write down or point a camera at over the years. When a social network disappears, goes out of fashion or becomes inhospitable, I can happily move on with little anguish.