I hear this a lot, Mags, my friend. Permit me this rant as I try to reset what I think is some bad commentary going around about the Fediverse.

To begin, I believe your memory of Twitter is a false memory. A common one, but still false.

Twitter always 1/32 𝙨𝙪𝙘𝙠𝙚𝙙 at keeping up with news.

With nothing but random, often noisy and spammy hashtags (also in the Fediverse, but done better), a terrible search engine that was crippled by design and most never knew how use anyway, we all had to improvise. So we pieced 2/32

So, those who know me know I’ve been advocating for an Internet side road for almost as long as some have been alive. A parallel digital highway that journalists, fact-checkers, academics, scientists, and other “serious people” use to communicate with each other, 1/5 so they can help influence everyone else with serious information, ideas, policy proposals, and authorship. And what attracts them would be having the tools to communicate and share information efficiently, but with real feedback loops that don’t degenerate into 2/5

As some recall, I’ve been “shadowbanned,” on Twitter for years. Not classically, because we don’t know what they actually do, but basically, nothing I post goes beyond people who engage me fairly regularly, and RTs of me are squelched completely by the algorithm. It’s … been this way for over 9 years. But now, without that fake constraints on my account over on Mastodon, I regularly have posts that soar. No one knows or cares what the actual “count” is. But you can see them flying by in notifies. I won’t miss that part of Twitter.

𝗔𝗕𝗢𝗨𝗧 𝗠𝗔𝗦𝗧𝗢𝗗𝗢𝗡
Let me explain what is happening. In just the last week, thanks to Elon Musk’s weird business style, a medium-sized army of branded journalists, academics, entertainers, technologists, activists, and other influencers all descended on … Mastodon in a matter of a few days. At least 6 major newspapers and broadcasters have set up their own servers for their staffs and customers. With the exception of that last part, these are levels and qualities of influencers that took twitter 3 years to acquire, …

I still can’t believe we’re talking about anything other than stopping this terrorism of stupid. And that’s what it is: really ignorant people, with no idea of how anything works, or where their wealth and privilege came from, thinking only THEY know how things should be. If you’re still focused on abortion, or climate change, or nuclear war, or book banning, or trans athletes, or inflation, you’re missing the whole plot. If we don’t stop this anti-democracy movement, ALL those issues will become moot.

Like shingles, fascism doesn’t care.

Thinking about something @mr_electrico said once about looking to scifi for ideas about how we might get out of this mess. But it occurs to me that any fiction will do. We should write hypothetical endings to this awful movie where humanity and the Enlightenment survive. @Mr_Electrico Consider those movies where good people do bad things in order to call attention to far worse things. Well, imagine one of those things happening today, where we all wake up to massive multi-media circus because someone (in a very well-designed and hardened 1/7

Wow. This documentary about the 8th Airforce in WWII makes you feel like it’s happening now, as they present the details of the air war over Germany. Never seen anything like it.
My dad was on some of the missions discussed.

amazon.com/Target-Today-H…. I am serious. I don’t care how many WWII documentaries you think were any good, but this is a whole other level about that war from anything that I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen a lot.

𝗧𝗵𝗿𝗲𝗲 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘀𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗪𝗮𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘁𝗼𝗻 𝗶𝘀 𝗳𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗮𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 @𝗘𝗹𝗼𝗻𝗠𝘂𝘀𝗸 𝗿𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 𝗻𝗼𝘄

politico.com/news/2022/10/0…

You would think we could make this a national priority. Nothing short of threatening terminally ill kittens is going to attract enough attention that average Americans will understand (or care about) just how threatened we are. Not someday. But right now.

https://twitter.com/froomkin/status/1578044078079483905

ICYMI: @Mr_Electrico @bluegal @jayrosen_nyu @airbagmoments @Karoli

𝗧𝗛𝗜𝗦 𝗧𝗛𝗥𝗘𝗔𝗗 𝗜𝗦 𝗔𝗕𝗢𝗨𝗧 𝗬𝗢𝗨.
Ok, maybe it’s about all of us.

When he refused to take the field for the national anthem, Giant’s manager, @gabekapler, like @Kaepernick7 before him, set a standard for how I believe we should all be responding right … @gabekapler @Kaepernick7 now. In huge numbers.

The issue in this case is guns, but they are just one more divisive issue being used by a fascist-level conservative coup that continues to steamroll over America, its media, and its institutions. Especially at the state and local levels.

And …

Most of Twitter is still mired in the attention economy. People assert or share things aiming for those things to get attention in one or more communities. And they often do. But they too often go no farther than that in most cases. No depth of conversation evolves from them. No larger understandings are propagated or advanced. In most cases they aren’t even saved anywhere where they can persist over time and be discovered when needed. It’s really a terribly shallow service and always has been. Primarily because it

It’s been 2.5 years since I popped into the Fediverse to see how things were developing. Now that I’ve spent a couple of weeks there working with developers, and reading some really smart people you’ll rarely see or read on Twitter, I am increasingly convinced it’s be model for the future of social media. But it needs a larger take-off point, and that’s going to require a really easy to use and configure platform the goes beyond what Mastodon can do right now. But the good thing about it, is that all the platforms can

𝗧𝗵𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗱: 𝗔𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗮 𝗣𝗼𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗦𝗼𝗰𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝗠𝗲𝗱𝗶𝗮 𝗙𝘂𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗜𝗻 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗣𝗼𝘀𝘁-𝗠𝘂𝘀𝗸 𝗘𝗿𝗮 (by an “unauthenticated human.”)

Sorry about the length. I didn’t have time to keep it brief.

Okay, so if Jack is on the level with his new-agey ruminations about Musk’s intent, then part of Musk’s global town square rhetoric is probably predicated on @jack’s vision for @bluesky, where Twitter becomes the global utility
“pipeline” that it always should have been, relying on open #fediverse concepts

There is another thing to consider here. @ELonMusk is not wrong that Twitter should be a paragon of free speech. Most sensible people agree with that. He just doesn’t understand yet how hard it is to regulate speech of any kind when there are 100s of millions of @elonmusk users and activity that must “scale.” But by pretending he does, he forces the rest of us to confront just where we are. Has it really been helpful to bifurcate into a red and blue online universe? Or into those “on twitter,” or those banished to fringe (but

I realize this won’t be a popular view, but Musk may be doing humanity a favor. We’ve been largely sidestepping the question of “permissible speech” and how it’s enforced for many years. If we really believe in it, it’s time we define it better, and how we enforce it. As I listen to many liberals, I hear an illiberal shift toward less speech. I personally never thought speech was our problem. It’s private ownership of mass media that can exert significant control over it that matters more than what permissible content is.

I’m thinking about organizing a simple crowd source project. Sort of like #StopRush did, volunteers in 25 markets would record (on one spreadsheet), all the topics covered by the broadcast news networks. We need to see just how bad this news-skew situation really is. When I was younger, and far more naïve, I would think “leave that job to the journalists.”

Chuh, we know better now, eh?

Anyone who watched @MattGaetz snickering at the MTG heading today, must understand that there is no bottom for these Republicans. None. In this respect, they are just like Putin. There is no way they will ever return to “normal” politics, and there is no way we can @mattgaetz survive as a nation with this ongoing level of crazy where pluralistic governance is basically impossible? We are simply no longer a functional Republic. We are pretending that we are. And we are treading water until Republicans return to power and prove that

We’re all enjoying the MTG fails, but saying “I don’t recall” rarely hurts. It’s not going to win this. They need evidence, and while I may have missed something, but I haven’t seen or heard of much that can’t be labeled political speech. I never thought they’d prevail. PS. I really hope I am wrong, but I doubt that will be the case. It’s not that she didn’t want to promote the event. But that doesn’t show intent to engage in insurrection.

Sadly, Greg, as you know, many of us don’t need to hear this. But your boss does, as do the bosses of your peers throughout the media, who , but for some trite sloganeering on their banners, have been ignoring them for years. Until the national morning and local

https://twitter.com/ThePlumLineGS/status/1509914435313360898

TV news start discussing these matters, nothing is going to penetrate the dysfunctional public mind of his foundering country. Until the @LesterHoltNBC’s, @GayleKing’s, and @NorahODonnell’s get green-lighted by their networks to even mention these things more than

.@Alivelshi, sitting here in my hospital room following surgery, I’ve been watching you very intently, admiring how you try to stretch the envelope of learning a little more every day for your many viewers. But a new way you might stretch it is a variable I’d @AliVelshi like to explore here in this thread.

In every show from war-torn Europe, you have featured emotionally empathetic but often unschooled people offering their opinion on what is right and wrong concerning possible escalations and outcomes of this very dangerous

Shit shit.No sooner did the stand-in doctor leave and I told him things felt pretty good, then all of a sudden the “popping” returned. The feeling that some tendon or muscle is snapping in or out of place. Causing an almost shock like jolt. Unpredictable, life-threatening when happen while driving. It was assumed they were caused by the faulty screws or the infection itself, which obviously can’t be dead yet bc they just started treating it. This is really alarming. What if it’s now chronic??