Picking up on a cluster of topics I previously discussed here: https://merveilles.town/@lrhodes/112639145917059317 I still see some people putting politics behind a CW on fedi, but I don't see as many people insisting on it as did once upon a time. The norm is still in practice, but has been largely overwhelmed by norms people brought with them from other platforms. In particular, Twitter—though political discourse isn't as broadly caustic here as it was there. At least, not most of the time.
Posts
-
Picking up on a cluster of topics I previously discussed here: https://merveilles.town/@lrhodes/112639145917059317 I still see some people putting politics behind a CW on fedi, but I don't see as many people insisting on it as did once upon a time. -
It kiiinda undermines the value of putting nice or fun stuff into the fediverse if you end the post with a reference to how doomed we all are.Personally, I avoid that trap by just never posting anything fun or nice.
-
It kiiinda undermines the value of putting nice or fun stuff into the fediverse if you end the post with a reference to how doomed we all are."Fun picture of my cat looking like a total goober. Hope it takes your mind off of how we're sliding inexorably into an authoritarian hellscape!"
Y'know, for a second there, it almost did.
-
It kiiinda undermines the value of putting nice or fun stuff into the fediverse if you end the post with a reference to how doomed we all are.It kiiinda undermines the value of putting nice or fun stuff into the fediverse if you end the post with a reference to how doomed we all are.
You can just post nice stuff every now and then. It doesn't make you a traitor.
-
Oh hey, here's a neat little feature Mastodon is testing, per this post: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/06/trunk-tidbits-may-2024/@jsit Yeah, in the plugin: https://mastodon.social/@pfefferle/112718825186255592
I assume that makes it available to .org users as well (it's been a while since I've run wordpress), though that won't really help with instance-side approvals.
-
Oh hey, here's a neat little feature Mastodon is testing, per this post: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/06/trunk-tidbits-may-2024/@jsit If wordpress.com as a whole gets blanket approval, yes. Automattic has moved quickly to include the fediverse:creator tag, which increases the ease for .com users.
-
Oh hey, here's a neat little feature Mastodon is testing, per this post: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/06/trunk-tidbits-may-2024/@jsit Hopefully not subdomains, though not all centralized platforms place each user on a separate subdomain.
-
Oh hey, here's a neat little feature Mastodon is testing, per this post: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/06/trunk-tidbits-may-2024/If the purpose of the author card is to help people build audiences, but it's easier to show up in author cards if your writing is hosted on a big domains like medium.com or wordpress.com, then doesn't that indirectly encourage people to post their long-form writing to centralized platforms?
-
Oh hey, here's a neat little feature Mastodon is testing, per this post: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/06/trunk-tidbits-may-2024/One perverse result of the decision to start with manual domain approvals is that randos operating sites hosted on wordpress.com for free are more likely to show up in Mastodon author cards than blogs and outlets putting in the time and effort to self-host wordpress under their own, paid domain.
-
Oh hey, here's a neat little feature Mastodon is testing, per this post: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/06/trunk-tidbits-may-2024/According to the PR, the devs implemented it around moderator approval from trends "to be able to launch the feature quickly and start having adoption by publishers." But as @jhpot pointed out, making even trivial template changes is a big undertaking in many professional CMS, and I don't foresee many big publishers taking the trouble when the payoff depends on hundreds or thousands of unaffiliated moderators manually approving your site.
-
Oh hey, here's a neat little feature Mastodon is testing, per this post: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/06/trunk-tidbits-may-2024/And this is sorta inside baseball, but if you go back to the PR: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/30398 there's some debate over whether the namespace for the tag should be mastodon:creator or fediverse:creator, and it strikes me as pretty presumptuous of the LLC to unilaterally declare a fediverse namespace. They should've gone with mastodon:creator and left the more general standard up to the W3C, with plans to accept both once a broader standard is drafted.
-
Oh hey, here's a neat little feature Mastodon is testing, per this post: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/06/trunk-tidbits-may-2024/I'm also really struggling to understand why they made it subject to moderator review, rather than use a version of the verification system already used by Mastodon accounts. It looks like gatekeeping, and even if that wasn't the intent, you can still expect it to function as such in at least two ways:
1. Moderators will deny approval for purely personal and subjective reasons; and
2. Getting approval will be easier for big outlets than it will be for blogs and new outlets.
-
Oh hey, here's a neat little feature Mastodon is testing, per this post: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/06/trunk-tidbits-may-2024/Again, I think it's a cool idea, but the framing in that post makes me wonder how much the implementation was influenced by Threads bridging to the fediverse. Change out some words and this sounds a lot like Bluesky messaging: "Mastodon is the perfect platform to amass a loyal audience that you, as the author, truly own, and can take with you across the fediverse."
I hate—HATE—the notion of "owning an audience," and I'm not sure why the LLC sees catering to that notion as a good idea.
-
Oh hey, here's a neat little feature Mastodon is testing, per this post: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/06/trunk-tidbits-may-2024/Here's the official rollout: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/07/highlighting-journalism-on-mastodon/
As I said before, I think the idea is neat.
I'm not totally sold on the implementation. (Only moderator-approved sources are included.)
And I'm really turned off by this framing. ("Let's make Mastodon the go-to place for journalism!")
-
I'm sure many of you have seen the Threads list of servers they have defederated from.@darius There's some discussion over what "blocked" or "moderated servers" actually means, coming from Meta. The brief interval this morning where mastodon.social appeared on the list doesn't seem to have broken any follows, for example, and Zuckerberg's Threads account appears to be searchable from accounts listed as blocked. So it seems probable that inclusion on that list means something different from defederation as it's used on the fediverse, yeah?
-
So with mastodon.social showing up on Threads `/moderated_servers` list for a few hours but not breaking follow relations with folks it makes me want to understand what exactly that list means. if a server ends up on that list it seems it doesn't sever... -
Strategies not just for navigating social media, but for making social media useful as a tool for navigating a hostile society.Here's a tidied up version of the thread: https://destructured.net/fediverse-politics
-
Strategies not just for navigating social media, but for making social media useful as a tool for navigating a hostile society.That said, the fediverse provides us with a number of different services and tools, and we should be looking for ways of using those to make political discussion more navigable and more useful than it was on other platforms.
I'm sure I'll have more to say about that in the future, but this seems like a pretty good stopping point for now.
-
Strategies not just for navigating social media, but for making social media useful as a tool for navigating a hostile society.So that's part of the answer to the question of what we should do about off-fedi politics, I think. If the fediverse is going to be a kind of home for people, then it has to provide a place for the politics that affect their lives. And since some people have more luxury to compartmentalize those politics than others, our standard for judging that provision has to be how well it provides for the people who don't have that luxury.
-
Strategies not just for navigating social media, but for making social media useful as a tool for navigating a hostile society.After Musk took over Twitter, some people tried to bring Black Twitter to fedi and were rebuffed. Part of that was just undisguised racism, but I think part of it was also an unspoken syllogism: fedi must be protected from politics, and racism is a political topic, ergo…
That drove off a lot of people who might have otherwise made their digital home on the fediverse. And I worry that part of what they heard was, your strategies for community-building and thriving aren't welcome here.