• 4 Posts
  • 78 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 24th, 2023

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  • I know a lot of people are cranky about digital IDs, but realistically there’s no avoiding it at this point: we need real, government-backed, links-to-a-specific-human-with-a-birth-certificate unique digital IDs. Then service providers can (optionally) demand it in order to register, and can prevent you from creating multiple accounts, and can ban you from their service permanently, and can vouch for you to other services that you are indeed a Real Unique Human Being.



  • I have my own shopping list of Mastodon features that i watched languish in PRs on GitHub. I like Rochko, but he completely failed to meet the moment of Twitter’s explosion and make the massive flood of excitement about Mastodon into the real permanent gains that were up for grabs.

    Most of my wish list have nothing to do with safety because I’m a straight cis white guy and so my experience of Mastodon is that its userbase is painfully anodyne.

    But the point stands that a hard fork with a focus on development velocity is long overdue.










  • Part of it is just today’s polarized political climate, especially since the popularity of the Fediverse is partially a backlash to reactionaries taking over Twitter and the corporate enshittification of Facebook and Reddit.

    Everything is a war now, and solidarity and boycotts are basically the only weapons that small, independent actors have. So people apply “don’t cross the picket line” thinking to everything, even where it doesn’t make sense.

    Want to act properly? Contribute money and labour towards your instances. Help them build better moderation tools so they can handle the flood of crap from Threads, and onboarding tools and better UX so they can steal away the Threads users.


  • Dumb. Federation is how we escape from every cloud-based service being a dictatorship of the person who owns the platform. That includes federating with privately own orgs to provide them an exit.

    By all means make good tools to allow individual users to block Threads (or other private instances ruled by amoral coporations), but doing it at instance level is just dumb.

    edit: also, number of instances doesn’t matter. Number of daily active users matters. Most users are on mastodon.social, mastodon.cloud, lemmy.world, hachyderm.io, lemmy.world, etc. And all of those are federating. The only large instance that is not federating with threads is mas.to