@Wen Yeah, we’re good, he isn’t allowed to consume them. (His thing is shredding them into tiny pieces and eating just a couple shreds but we still don’t let him gobble away.)

@jwarlander omg yes, they’d get along extremely well, Bee’s run is astounding

@momo Half golden half NZ Sheep Heading Dog which is…mostly border collie. Intense sheepdog vibes but also a goof.

@smellsofbikes oh nooo

@stepheneb She is so floof! This is entire scene is very Bee except that he would only manage it for five seconds before jackknifing back and forth at high speed and then levitating and trying to steal my sleeve. Golden/herd dog crosses are such goobers.

If you imagine a noise halfway between Marge Simpson and a sick cow, that is the noise Bee makes when he looks under the couch and sees his toys on the other side. Which he could just walk to.

The moon remains his enemy, along with its terrible winged avatars (the chickens).

@nirak 🤩🤩🤩

@jasonsantamaria I have to give his feet little haircuts so he can walk on floors

First year with Beowulf. He is like living with a fluffy hunk of dynamite that adores you and also barks at its own reflection and lives to steal and eat kleenex.

@EllenJS (I don't have a Threads account and can't speak to that.)

@EllenJS On the whole, Mastodon is also much easier for me to use in ways that aren't connected to The US News and Culture Topic of the Day, which I treasure because I don't want to get my news from social media. I like the shape of the network, and I like the depth of many of the conversations.

But if I mention race or gender here I will have to spend days fielding replies from people who don't think they're a factor, or not a factor outside the US, like it was the internet circa 2003.

@EllenJS Bluesky is currently Twitter with a strong immune response against right-wing politics. People mostly get my dumb jokes without explaining them back to me. It's a place I can ask for advice on kids' books or, rarely, clothing, and get useful responses.

On Mastodon, I can talk about network stuff and get a ton of interesting, thoughtful, and generative responses, both agreeing and disagreeing (along with people letting me know I'm dumb and/or evil).

@brianleroux Yeah I was more picking up Marco's points than assuming you were scolding! It's a very widely expressed set of feelings, I think.

@evan I was offline all weekend, so I have no opinions at this time.

@jaz @chefraven @evan It's all anecdata right now, but a full-on qualitative user study is really high on my wishlist for 2025. Can't do better until we know for sure what "better" means—and for whom, since it's obviously very heterogeneous across communities.

@evan Yeah, I think it's mostly communities that made homes on Twitter that went to Bluesky, at this point. (I met a lot of my friends on Twitter around 2007-2013.)

Bluesky is one of the networks I'm studying, so I opened an account there right away. (I don't bridge, because I write different things in culturally different places, but most people I know who use both Bluesky and a fedi service either bridge or cross-post. That's a small sample, though.)

@Dubikan That said, I don't think fedi becomes a billion-user network unless governments break up the mega-platforms or Meta starts actually federating for real and doing it on their flagship platforms, in which case the fediverse becomes mostly just Meta—but with continued revision and improvement, I think fedi *could* become a sturdy, livable alternative for an order of magnitude more people than are here now.

@Dubikan Bluesky started from zero and is at 12M and counting, so they caught a ton of people out of Twitter migrations, almost entirely by word of mouth. (This was the original context of my posts, via the quoted post at the top.)

There are always people leaving the biggest platforms for non-technical reasons, and I would like fediverse services to be nice enough to be a good home for many more of them, you know?

@chefraven @evan But I also came out of a gigantic fediverse governance research project feeling very sure that the fediverse has enormous and mostly untapped potential to be a lot better for a lot more people.

Fediverse Governance Drop - Erin Kissane's small internet website

After a few months of prepping and conducting interviews and then many more months of analyzing and writing up what we found, we’re

(erinkissane.com)

But there's a ton of work to do, which I have made into my problem, against my better judgment!

@chefraven

Halfass and unscientific notes on what I heard from strangers here: https://erinkissane.com/mastodon-is-easy-and-fun-except-when-it-isnt

My own notes about the affordance problems and why they have such huge culture-shaping effects: https://erinkissane.com/the-affordance-loop

@evan