My kickstarter ran through all November, finishing with just under 200 people pledging just under 12k between them. Meanwhile, it all kicked off on Twitter, so Mastodon had to expand to three times the size to accommodate all the newbies.
Still not turned the heating on. Turns out of you use some strong clothes-pegs you can turn a furry blanket into a great shawl/housecoat.
Me
Some stuff from my diary on the fediverse:
My Kickstarter ran all month, so I made a long thread about what I learned. The most surprising thing is that there seems to be an audience of people on Kickstarter, and they seem to have been most of the pledges.
The kickstarter involved reviewers on youtube, and mentions in the b3ta newsletter and detailed blog reviews and lots of shows addressing traditional tarot questions. It finished with a final note and reading on what’s next.
Meanwhile in the UK, The Supreme Court decided Scotland is a vassal state which may not itself vote to leave without permission of the proper country that rules it. Some thoughts about that.
And I also did a brief rant about uk politics as Labour for some reason refuses to proudly support striking workers. What is it with that party? I explain.
The Twitter exodus continues, no sign of the end of the massive influx of users caused by Elon taking over Twitter in sight. Over eight million accounts now and still counting. Cohort and Tumblr and Hive and PostNews got lots of new users too, but not nearly as many, and they each have issues. I looked at Cohost in particular, what it is, what problems is has and doesn’t have. At least it’s not post.news!
Yet still people complain picking an instance is too hard, so here’s my running thread of similarly difficult tasks like picking which flavour of crisps to buy. There are so many. I just want to eat crisps, not pick a flavour. Crisps will never catch on with such a poor user experience.
I also looked at Calckey, which is some other software similar to and compatible with Mastodon/Activitypub. It’s really cool. Shame there’s no way to really migrate a server from Mastodon.
Tumblr might add AcitivtyPub support, which would make them easily the biggest entity on the network. People worry mastodon.social is too big? Tumbler is like 100 times bigger!
OpenAI released their new chat-based GPT language tool. I spent some time with it, collaborating together to write a fairy story in which the battle between the fairys and the unicorns is a Marxist allegory for the struggle between the capital and the workers.
Reading
Choke Point Capitalism
Cory Doctorow is great. He’s a writer, campaigner, digital rights activist, explainer.
His latest book co-authored with Rebecca Giblin is an in-depth exploration of the problems caused by monopolies, and the fact the monopolies and mergers authorities are asleep at the wheel.
The big companies get between the workers and the customers and ruthlessly exploit both, hurting society and the economy and the people even if the economies of scale still keep prices down.
Brilliant, if a bit exasperating.
Watching
Wednesday
Netflix and Tim Burton have a spin-off from the Adams Family in which Wednesday is shipped off to boarding school with Thing.
Very tropey, filled with cliche and hugely indebted to Harry Potter etc. But if the writing is sometimes lazy, it’s still beautiful and brilliantly acted and shot. Great TV.
Links
* It’s not about the money – Stumbling And Mumbling People get confused when they talk about the economy saying things like “We don’t have the money to do that” but in fact we have as much money as we can print. It’s labour and resources we are restrained by.
* Thee hours of Scott Aaronson talking about quantum computing. He’s probably the most famous quantum computing mathematician in the world, and he knows how to debunk the stupid things people say about it.
* Techdirt on Twitter’s government agreements. Twitter got hacked once. Well. Many times. They have signed agreements with the government about data security and stuff. Does anyone still working there remember that? Does Elon understand what the company he has bought is obliged to do?
Mastodon Stuff
* Wired on getting started using Masto
* Really great long article on why Fedi is greater than just Mastodon
* Cory Doctorow on the collapse of Big Old Corporate Social Media
more…
That’s just the highlights this month, remember you can always see my full public bookmarks at my website and/or follow my link-bot on the fediverse or my RSS feed of interesting links
Around The Fediverse
The federation continues to swell massively.
Celebs are joining. A bit worrying really. Will they ruin the network?
You may know:
* Scientist and Author Ben Goldacre
* Actor and comedian Kathy Griffen
* Actor and Director Alex Winter
* Comedian and Crossword-Puzzler Dave Gorman
* Actor and National Treasure Stephen Fry
* actress and producer Felicia Day
* Scientist and TV Presenter Brian Cox
* Sci-Fi Author and Mathematician Greg Egan
* Game-Dev and Sheep-Keeper Jeff Minter
* Economist and BBC radio presenter Tim Harford
* Satirical Collage Artist Cold War Steve
* Cartoon animator and artist HappyToast
And many more. Seeing George go from curious about what Mastodon is into just getting it and campaigning for media decentralization has been a joy.
He’s more than eighty years old people. It’s not hard.
* Rochard Littler shows us a painting they X-Rayed. It has hidden skulls! It’s so weird.
* Dan Fixes Coinops has a great long thread about forum moderation and federation He’s funny, and been doing this for decades. He mocks the new people, and has lots of good advice.
* Blane reminisces about trying to build Twitter and where it went wrong He was very early working at Twitter, came to hate it, helped build the Fediverse.
* Aral Balkan links to his talk on Data Privacy and Surveillance Capitalism He calls them People Farmers. They farm people. Capture their digital souls.
* Cosmic Rami shows us his papers about Pulsar Timing arrays. We can map with them. We can get down to the 100 nanosecond scale, like knowing the relative distance to about 30 metres between us and the pulsar.
* AJ Sadauskas complains that Twitter isn’t featureful enough to be a Mastodon replacement. There’s no way to set up your own instance, and you’re basically stuck on a single instance of Twitter.
* Rev Stang announces a new book! An autobiography by Kelly Thornley, one of the founders of the Discordian church.
* BrittleStar has a short tune about Mastodon. Reminds me of Vic Reeves.
* Michal Wozniak reminds us that the Fediverse was built by neurodivergent queers. That’s why it’s culture is what it is, why Content Warnings are a thing, why privacy matters here.
* HappyToast mocks Elon with 1984 imagary Comedy has always been Legal on Twitter.
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