- I’m playing again on Mastodon, mostly because Twitter is starting to feel more broken than ever. I’m not altogether happy about it, mind. I think a big part of it is that all the things that Mastodon wants to fix in Twitter, I don’t have a problem with. I just want Twitter, but not run by some techbozo.
- I have an account on the mastodon.social server (that I even need to say this highlights a problem for mass adoption of Mastodon) while Mark says it’s actually better to just run your own (ditto). I suspect the biggest problem I have is the size of my network (76 following, 45 followers on Mastodon vs 7,076 and 7,693 on Twitter) which is going to take time and effort to build up.
- Bluesky is apparently another Twitter replacement that has some momentum, but is currently invite only and I’m not invited. The fact that it describes itself as a "protocol for public conversation" worries me. Most people don’t want a Twitter like service to be portable and federated. They just want it to not suck.
- Dave Winer keeps on working on these things
- Maybe as I type these notes into my text editor I ought to be copy and pasting them individually across Twitter and Mastodon too… or maybe I ought to look into rigging something up so it all kind of works automagically.
- "a comprehensive guide to the story of mel" – I can remember obsessing over bits of hacker folklore like this when I first discovered the internet and this particular bit of its subculture
- This from Matt Mullenweg, ruminating on the 20th anniversary of WordPress, struck a chord with me: "That’s what is beautiful about blogging. It’s too bad the advertising and social media platforms got us all caught up in status games for the past 15 years…All you need is one view, one like, one comment, to change your life."
- Mimestream looks an interesting Gmail client for Mac
- Carl has started a new blog
- The Theranos story is one of the most interesting chunks of Silicon Valley hubris in recent times. I really enjoyed reading Bad Blood by John Carreyrou which documented the story, although was published before the legal process completed. This Guardian article is a useful primer
- Mike Bracken on innovating digital public services
An online notebook