My second post following my personal #twittermigration: "the other users on your instance create its collective intelligence — the nearest thing you have to a content discovery algorithm".Not that I like algorithms, but "Apart from hashtags, ,,, your server’s Local and Federated timelines [are your] primary discovery channels when y…

"It’s never felt more plausible that the age of social media might end—and soon."Provocative article, looking at the past 20 years as social networking evolved into social media - as I put it back in 2016, the evolution from social media (social as adjective) to social media, where the emphasis is on the noun."A social network is an…

Mastodon is "subtly designed to reduce the huge, viral surges of attention we see on Twitter" and others, which have "deformed people’s behavior... coaxed people to constantly try to hack the attentional marketplace... incessantly making posts ... operatically theatrical... enrage ... [other] high-voltage reaction".Hence “antiv…

"I wanted a way to add any bookmarks I make there into a 'Read later' category in my RSS reader ... I create a PHP file that gets the latest 20 bookmarks... and takes an access token from your mastodon 'development' admin page. Then I can give this URL to my RSS reader: https://neil.mckillop.org/stuff/mastodon_bookmarks.rs…

"Welcome To Mastodon Welcome to Mastodon, and The Fediverse! This is a living document with some tips and Frequently Asked Questions about Mastodon and the Fediverse..."Pretty complete-looking

convert any RSS feed to an ActivityPub

Awesome hot take open letter to Elon Musk: "You fucked up real good, kiddo... no possible way to grow ... without ... compromises that will ultimately destroy your reputation and possibly cause grievous damage to your other companies... the problems with Twitter are not engineering problems. They are political problems... absolute monarchs u…

Those who've read Doctorow's books and blogs on the collective action problem stopping people leave the established social media walled gardens may not find anything new, except for the quite brilliant link he makes with "the 1971 film adaptation of Fiddler on the Roof ... the Anatevkans can’t just pack up and leave: they are being …

The story on Gab and Mastodon:"After crowdfunding millions of dollars... Gab abandoned its own code and switched to ... Mastodon software in early 2019 as a way of circumventing Google’s and Apple’s ban..."Mastodon's AGPLv3 opensource license allows this, of course, but there are conditions, which Gab then broke until JoinMastodon &…

a "how-to guide ... through an online survey of Blind / low vision / visually impaired people."Discovered via Mastodon, where the culture is not to boost any toot containing non-accessible images, but applicable to all online publishing. "alt text and image descriptions are ... not actually the same thing. Alt text refers to the tex…

A very funny round up from week 2 of the twitter migration: "It hasn’t even been two weeks since Elon Musk officially took over Twitter, and things look like they’re going about as well as a Cybertruck demonstration... one response to Musk’s tenure has seemed to really get under his skin: the verified impersonators."Funny, but the number…

"a guide & a general backgrounder/crash course on data protection law... primarily targeted at Mastodon instance owners ... and users, but much of the elements will likely also apply to other #fediverse services" by "an External Data Protection Consultant, researcher, and general buzzkill who focuses on helping organisations and…

Why is it important to choose your Mastodon home wisely? Because "You can move your user account from one instance to another, but you have to follow a special procedure which can be quite long... create another account on a new instance and import three lists... your followers, ... the accounts you have blocked [and] have muted".[note: …

how "Mastodon fits into the much larger concept of the Fediverse... visualisation ... many different use-cases and benefits of different services".Good intro to the Fediverse as a whole, plus the visualisation in png & pdf, and some Q&As covering multiple accounts ("a user preference"), Nextcloud (adding ActivityPub end…

... or Why Small is Beautiful when it comes to our homes online:"a concept – and a vision for the future of our species in the digital and networked age –... The Small Web.... [By comparison:] The Big Web has “users” – a term Silicon Valley has borrowed from drug dealers to describe the people they addict ... farm users in server farms... you…

4 ways Mastodon doesn't optimise for enragement.On Mastodon’s "home timeline... posts don’t have metrics ... you have to click through ... makes you judge a post first by its content, rather than the score attached to it... the whole dynamic [being "ratioed"] doesn’t exist... leads to more thoughtful engagement rather than ... …

JJ "explore some of the opportunities afforded by the likes of Bluesky, Scuttlebutt, the Fediverse, and Indieweb — not to mention good, old, reliable RSS".Most of the mastodon tips I knew, except: "enable the advanced web interface (it’s like Tweetdeck)" - I didn't know that existed so moved to Tusky and spent my first wee…

search the people you follow, are followed by, blocked & muted on Twitter, as well as the lists you maintain and follow, for possible Mastodon/Fediverse accounts. Provides graphs of which instances they're on, too, so useful for identifying which server to join.

I discovered the Fediverse as I kicked MyHub.ai’s shiny new tyres in early 2020, and I’m kicking myself now for not diving in then.

Writing a chapter for a book on Personal Knowledge Graphs made me rethink MyHub.ai, and led to a new collective intelligence pilot project with the founders of massive.wiki.

Memorium for a friend: "In late October Richard Medic caught meningitis in Bosnia and died at the age of 50. The only way I can try to process that is to write this."He died just at the time (I thought) when "large M-shaped cracks (Metaverse, Musk) started forming in the walled gardens’ walls ... we just might see a return to the op…

An interview by massive.wiki cog-founder [[Peter Kaminski]] with [[Jerry Michalski]] about [[Rel8]] and "the Big Fungus":"Rel8 tries to answer the question, “What kind of organization(s) would it take to stand up a shared memory for?”". Whereas Wikipedia is a single site running one software on one (set of) servers with a speci…

After covering the "bullet train" trip (hubbed elsewhere), this provides a detailed elucidation of all the issues you need to address on "The road from Roam ... to Obsidian.md" by summarising and linking to dozens of other posts, threads etc., creating "one place to look and minimize the pain of flipping through numerous p…

we could, and should, be better at collective memory, collective thinking, and collective intelligence... level up from an oral culture that thinks big thoughts but doesn't do much else together

Firstly, 3 reasons to make the switch:privacy: Obsidian is local, Roam's on the cloud, simple as thatdurability: Obsidian is local markdown, Roam is it's own special blend of markdown. "If Obsidian was gone tomorrow, you would still be able to access your notes"portability: same logic - if you choose to switch apps, "Roa…

NvdH's complete overview of her usage of Obsidian. My first step in transitioning from Roam is to Hub this with my thoughts (PS she has a video):Setupmultiple Obsidian vaults, each version-controlled Git repository on GitHub.plus main Obsidian vault in a Dropbox for extra version control and backup"Just for overkill" Obsidian Sync a…

A new app and protocol to give "people full control over their interest graphs ... there was no standard, decentralized repository for online media and its derivatives... culture that is readily available for anyone to annotate, remix, compile, create new editions of or link together in archives. Mediagraph [protocol] will let developers buil…

Summarising Clive Thompson's How I Take Notes When I’m Doing Research: "It’s the reframing of material into summaries or marginalia that adds value and meaning for the researcher", which is precisely why I'm paraphrasing and describing what I curate, and how it relates to my own experience and plans, rather than just simply co…

Met Marc-Antoine parent via FotL, who's focused on "design of new tools and approaches to aid collective decision making", particularly under the following conditions:deadline: a course of action must be developed and implemented in a certain amount of timecomplexity: issues are too complex to be well understood by a small group of …

Marc-Antoine Parent's project: HyperKnowledge.