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The Art of Being Social

Posted July 7, 2023

This picture from Andy Allen of all the various Twitter-like apps now fighting for attention, along with Meta’s launch of Threads this week, really made me think about the current state of social media in 2023. As I’ve written on this site many times in the past, I find social media to be a fascinating bit of technology that has had a profound impact on life in the last two decades.

I also don’t really like most of it. Hmm.

When I think back to my primary uses of social media, it’s really been as much to stay informed as it’s been to stay connected to people. Since launching this site back in 2006, I’ve supplemented social media with posts here to keep family and friends updated on personal news (and have often automated connections between those services and this site). It automatically produces RSS feeds and content is now pushed to the Fediverse using the ActivityPub plugin. I also love this site as a way to learn new technologies and skills, such as WordPress, PHP, MySQL, Linux and AWS.

It seems like one by one, my favorite social media companies have done questionable things (Doctorow’s enshittification) that caused me to close up shop: Facebook, Instagram, then Twitter. I miss family from Facebook, restaurants from Instagram and some really awesome people on Twitter. I still keep my LinkedIn open for work reasons (after closing it once) and I’ve really grown to like my Mastodon experience. Was never on TikTok or Snapchat and it seems like I will be on the Bluesky waitlist forever (their new domain revenue model is certainly interesting). Don’t think I will try Threads at this point, given my issues with past Facebook products, but I am cautiously optimistic that the promised interactivity with the Fediverse will happen.

Aside from the time commitment of keeping up with the volume of my Mastodon newsfeed, I’m still a huge fan of the Tapbots team and their Ivory Mastodon client for iOS and macOS. It gives me everything I want: chronological feed of just the accounts I follow, synchronized across all of my devices, with no ads, “promoted” posts or other weird algorithm junk. I’m now following 334 people as of today and I believe the quality of a feed is directly related to how well you curate your follow list. I’ve also found that allowing or muting “boosts” from certain accounts helps a lot too.

So what other supplemental things do I still use outside of social media? Group texts have become much more common with our family and friends. It’s fast and (generally) secure, offering easy ways to share photos and keep in touch across platforms (hello green bubble Android friends). Don’t really email all that much outside of work and other commercial interactions. Currently out of the Teams world, but that may be hard to avoid forever. I still love using NetNewsWire to read RSS feeds, but that volume seems to be dropping a bit lately. Apple News is a part of our Apple One Premier bundle, but it’s always seemed a bit off to me (nice to get around some paywalls, though).

Speaking of paywalls, I do still like to financially support a handful of traditional news websites (Star Tribune, Pioneer Press, Washington Post, New York Times, The Economist and Racket). I use two ad blockers with my primary web browser (Duck Duck Go and Privacy Badger) and have to say that browsing the web now without those is just a disaster. Ads in general are awful: just about all iOS gaming ads, ads on paid streaming services, ads you can’t fast forward, ads embedded in social media feeds. The only good things I can say about ads right now are 1) Mad Men, 2) the Super Bowl and 3) the British Arrows Awards (and the last two really haven’t been all that great post-pandemic, to be honest).

It’s encouraging that really smart people keep talking about new social media advances so that I don’t have to sign up for everything to learn what’s going on. It’s also encouraging to see people like Dear Dara post again on Mastodon after 120 days away. I have to laugh when pundits make definitive statements about new services like Bluesky and Threads when one isn’t open to the general public yet and the other has been live for two days. Things evolve, projects and companies change, people can be jerks. Stay tuned…


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Mastodon June 2023 Update

Posted June 15, 2023

After reading a blog post called “Why did the #TwitterMigration fail?” by Bloonface, I thought, “what kind of name is Bloonface?” Then I thought, I should write an update to my April Mastodon post. So here we are.

To be honest, I haven’t been following user numbers like I did at the beginning, so I can’t verify the “active user numbers have dropped off a cliff” statement. All I know is that a few friends who joined don’t post much and none of my family have created accounts, but WWDC week on Mastodon for me was as busy as any on Twitter. I’m now following 307 accounts and easily see similar daily traffic on Ivory as I did on Tweetbot.

I only have 34 followers, so I’ve never really been exposed to trolls or gatekeepers. As a white male, I also don’t get any of the crap that women and people of color often experience on social media platforms. And since I’m on mastodon.social, I’ve never had any issues with the moderators or their policies and I think the only service issue was spam-related (and addressed quickly).

For me, going back to Twitter is a non-starter. I don’t really care all that much about decentralization or that the platform runs on open source tools, but I do love that my Ivory timeline is just the people I follow, in chronological order, with no ads. Still waiting for my Bluesky invite to do a trial there, but I don’t see that ever being like the Tweetbot/Ivory experience. And what a hype machine they have – all that press and buzz for 100K accounts?

Running an instance is too expensive and has too many issues (in my opinion), so just like with email servers, I’ve decided I will pass on that indefinitely. I don’t currently pay for mastodon.social, but I would (and probably will eventually). Mastodon is my only social media (outside of LinkedIn), so I guess that makes me “weird relative to the rest of the Internet.”

Stay weird, Mastodon, stay weird…


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Link: Mozilla.Social & the Mozilla Manifesto

Linked May 4, 2023


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Three months on Mastodon

Posted April 23, 2023

Tomorrow marks three months since I joined Mastodon. Just like with Twitter and Tweetbot, I don’t use the web interface of the instance I joined (mastodon.social), but have exclusively used the iOS and macOS Ivory clients, published by Tapbots. I love their work (thanks, Paul and Mark!) – the interface is familiar and polished and my timeline syncs well between devices.

Current stats: 110 posts, 26 followers and following 252.

So what are my thoughts on Mastodon after 90 days? I’ve already written a few posts about Mastodon that you can view here, but I thought I’d write a little today about some big picture things.

In general, I’m now probably spending about as much time reading through posts as I did with Twitter. That’s good *and* bad, as my curated follow list is producing quality content I want to read, but gets to be a lot once I get behind. Engagement so far is lower for me, likely due to having fewer followers here than on Twitter (and I don’t reply to a lot of posts). Also following a bunch of people new to me that I don’t know personally. Not hugely different interaction, though.

The “Mastodon culture” that some critics cite hasn’t really impacted my enjoyment of the platform so far. It definitely exists, but it’s been easy for me to filter out. I don’t really understand the debates about some things (Fediverse vs. Mastodon, intro posts when you have bios), while things like getting more people to add alt descriptions to images is a solid cause. I will never love hashtags, but at least I understand the connection between them and the limited search capabilities of Mastodon (hardly ever used hashtags or search on Twitter).

When everything started to go downhill with Musk and Twitter, there were lots of options that popped up: Post News, Spoutible, Bluesky, Nostr and others. I grabbed an account on Post when I got an invite and I thought I asked to be on the notification list for Bluesky, but I don’t think I will do anything other than Mastodon for now. There seems to be growing advocacy for the platform (and for continued feature improvements). I’d love to play around with my own instance (kingsbury.social?), but the learning curve is quite high compared to other things I’ve done online. Hope to get there eventually, though.

Many times when I get excited about new technologies, I sometimes lose empathy of how that technology is viewed and valued by others. This is probably not uncommon – just look at how much has been written about Twitter (which is significantly smaller than the other major social media platforms). The majority of my family never cared about Twitter and none of them have a Mastodon account. Ask a random person on the street about microblogging or the Fediverse and chances are good those things will be unimportant to them.

That said, I want Mastodon to grow and succeed. I don’t want to see bad actions (and bad actors) be rewarded in the market. An open internet is one of the best inventions humans have ever devised – let’s keep it going, no?


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Mastodon and WordPress

Posted April 16, 2023

Next Sunday will be my three month anniversary on Mastodon and I’m liking it more and more each day. I’ve discovered lots of new people to follow and I’m now trying to post more like I did on Twitter. I had been a little hesitant to create a lot of content on Mastodon because there wasn’t a mechanism to capture those posts on my WordPress-based website like I used to do with the Import Tweets as Posts plugin. But that all changed this weekend…

As of today, the WordPress plugin repository has 38 plugins that are tagged with Mastodon, so I thought it was time to take a look at these in more detail. When WordPress.com owner Automattic purchased Matthias Pfefferle’s ActivityPub plugin, I decided to install and activate it here. Out of the box, it allowed me to see 7 Minute Miles posts by following “@dmk @7minutemiles.com” in my Mastodon client (no space). There are a lot of other options with that plugin that I still need to explore, including their list of other recommended ActivityPub-related plugins like Friends and NodeInfo.

The other big find this weekend was Marco Hitschler’s TootPress plugin. I was a little hesitant to test this one, as it showed fewer than ten active installations and had limited documentation. I was also a little scared that it created new tables in my database to store Mastodon posts (instead of the standard post storage method) and did it’s own thing in my uploads folder for storing images from Mastodon. It also required some API setup on the instance side, which actually turned out to be much easier than getting access to the old Twitter APIs.

So what do you get when all of this is set up? 7minutemiles.com/mastodon/

Since each Mastodon post is not a “real” WordPress post, they need to be on a dedicated page and not mixed in on the main page like I had before with tweets. I think I’m OK with that for now – everything else seems to work great (with the exception of pagination, which I’ve asked about on the support forum). There is a cron job that runs every 15 minutes to check for new Mastodon posts and any attached images seem to be handled correctly (including the alt text). It also captures the time stamp and embedded URLs just work. Nicely done, Marco!

UPDATE: pagination is working now, so I’m not sure what was up with that (I didn’t change anything).


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The Business of Mastodon

Posted March 20, 2023

Last month I wrote about the Mastodon tech stack and today I’ll talk about the business of Mastodon: finance, marketing, legal and operations. I’m by no means an expert on any of this, but trying hard to keep in front of a news cycle that seems to get accelerated by the actions of Twitter daily. There is a lot out there to read and digest, so let’s get started.

Background

Mastodon was created by German software developer Eugen Rochko and was first released in October 2016. Five years later, Rochko incorporated Mastodon gGmbH as a German non-profit with him serving as founder and CEO. The Mastodon code is free and open-source software (FOSS) and anyone can download the software from Github and use it to run their own social media site.

There are lots of good introductory Mastodon posts, including the one by Glenn Fleishman that I linked to last month. I won’t go into the specifics of things like the fediverse and the ActivityPub protocol, but people seem to be most interested in Mastodon as a Twitter replacement. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (@eff@mastodon.social) has also published a nice series of posts.

As of today, the instances.social website has current stats on 18,196 instances, the largest of which is run by Mastodon gGmbH (mastodon.social). That is where I currently have my account, along with almost a million others (who have posted more than 53 million times). The Mastodon Users bot shows total Mastodon accounts recently surpassing the ten million mark (hard to tell how many active Twitter users post-Elon, but they had roughly 400 million last year).

Finance

With no ads and an aversion to commercial posts, many Mastodon instances are run by hobbyist volunteers. The time and resources to run a larger instance are not free, however, so groups often turn to crowdfunding sites like Patreon and Open Collective to help facilitate monthly or annual financial support. Mastodon.social, for example, has seven levels on Patreon for individuals ($1/month, $8, $10, $20, $40, $200) and three levels for corporate sponsorship ($100/month, $200, $500). The Patreon side currently has 9,667 patrons, raising $33,147 per month.

While all of the software components of Mastodon are free, the expenses associated with running a small instance include server, bandwidth and storage costs (plus time to learn, troubleshoot and administer your instance). There are also a growing number of service providers that offer managed Mastodon hosting for a monthly fee, some for under $10/month. The main Mastodon documentation has much more information about running your own instance here.

Marketing

Mastodon has a reputation for being hard to join, but there are many efforts to make it easier. The user base is growing, but still relatively small in the traditional social media sense. My personal experience so far has reflected both the technical focus and the smaller universe: I followed 395 various accounts on Twitter and currently follow 150 mostly technical people on Mastodon.

I never used the Twitter website and the same goes for Mastodon. I’ve been a huge fan of third party Twitter clients and was very happy to see many of those same companies jump on Mastodon client development last year. My personal favorite is Tapbots, a two-person Texas company that created the excellent Tweetbot for Twitter and now sells Ivory for Mastodon. Having (synching) clients on both iOS and macOS is key to my enjoyment of these platforms and the Tapbots crew is now taking steps to make joining Mastodon easier for everyone.

When I think about who is using Mastodon now, who should be using it and what the overall demographics look like, it reminds me of my old business school marketing classes. My Gen Z daughters don’t currently use it, very few of the non-tech communities I was a part of on Twitter use it and as I mentioned earlier, brands and other commercial users really don’t use it (and haven’t exactly been welcomed). It will be interesting to see if this platform grows to provide these other user groups with enough value to join and participate. I’d love to see more reporters, musicians, athletes, venues, artists, chefs, restaurants, government agencies and public safety organizations on Mastodon.

Corporate and brand accounts are interesting. I think there was always value in voluntarily following brands on Twitter, but I’m not sure how businesses should approach this. I’ve read some people say businesses should run their own instances and assign accounts like they assign email addresses, but I’m not convinced that is the right approach. I’m also curious to see how people use domain names for this purpose – do you use a subdomain of your brand (mastodon.7minutemiles.com) or register something new (7minutemiles.social)?

Legal

Given all of the recent uncertainty with Section 230 and the Supreme Court, it’s a wonder anyone wants to start up any social media instance these days. The threat of lawsuits is real and the legal landscape of Mastodon includes things like the rights and responsibilities of users and admins, requests from copyright holders and law enforcement, backup, recovery and security responsibilities and moderation of content. Some of these may not be critical roadblocks for small instances, but for larger organizations, it might be harder to justify the risk of entering this space.

Moderation of online content has always been a major issue. In order to be listed on the server page at joinmastodon.org, you must abide by the Mastodon Server Covenant, which has four requirements:

  • Active moderation against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia
  • Daily backups
  • At least one other person with emergency access to the server infrastructure
  • Commitment to give users at least 3 months of advance warning in case of shutting down

The EFF mentioned the Santa Clara Principles on their “don’t screw it up” post, which offers way more guidance on moderation than I ever thought possible. Someone mentioned that Mastodon is like Twitter with HOAs, as every instance administrator sets forth their moderation policies (the “house rules”) and has the ability to ban users and block access to other instances. It remains to be seen whether or not Mastodon admins abuse this power or offer better transparency, due process and accountability than the traditional social media platforms. While you can move your account from one instance to another, it’s not really an easy or complete solution right now.

Operations

In addition to all of the moderation issues mentioned above, the day-to-day operation of a Mastodon instance requires all of the skills of a traditional website: performance tuning, scaling, maintenance, backup and monitoring. Even the large, well-managed instances have been hit with outages and DDoS attacks and the security of the core Mastodon codebase is still somewhat suspect (but like all open source projects, can be reviewed and generally patched quickly).

It’s interesting to see staffing levels on even the largest instances in the Mastodon world (and how this compares to Twitter and the other platforms). There seems to be little redundancy in roles and there are many things that can go wrong (and indeed there have been some recent high profile instances that have shut down). While community support for admins exists, I haven’t seen much outside the managed hosting world in terms of formal support contracts. As user counts grow, however, I’m sure we’ll see more options develop in this space.

Summary

Personally, I love what Mastodon is becoming and how it’s filling the void left by the unfortunate direction Twitter has taken under Elon Musk. If I could make a living running an instance or helping advise others on the Mastodon universe, that would be exciting. Perhaps I will start out with a small, personal instance for our family. Or perhaps I will just try and get more friends to try it out with existing instances. But if it’s good enough for formal Apple support, hopefully Mastodon will continue to grow and be around for a long, long time…


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🫡 Spider Research 🕷️

Posted March 14, 2023

Started following the Entomological Society of America on Mastodon and today I learned 1) there are brown widow spiders in addition to black widow spiders and 2) a Florida study found that the brown widows killed and consumed nearby black widows 80% of the time (!)


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The Mastodon Tech Stack

Posted February 15, 2023

The last three weeks of using Mastodon on Ivory for iOS have been lovely. Today I was able to join the preview of the macOS version and it is also lovely. The scale of everything is smaller than Twitter, but I’m so excited about the future of this project. I’m planning to write a short series of posts here, starting with the tech stack of running a Mastodon server instance, then moving on to finance, marketing, legal and operations.

From my early research, there are many different ways to roll out and optimize a Mastodon server, but there are some core open source technologies common to everything I’ve read:

Also required: an SMTP email server and file storage. Looking at this from my AWS viewpoint, I’d probably use a Linux instance with nginx, Let’s Encrypt, Route 53, Simple Email Service (SES) and Simple Storage Service (S3). Seeing several references to Docker or Kubernetes too, but I don’t know much about how those container technologies really work (yet).

Cloudflare has their new Wildebeest offering and I’m sure there will be more “click and go” options from all of the usual suspects as well. It would be fun to create a small instance as a proof of concept, but I’d also want a design that could scale up without having to rebuild from scratch. Cost management, backup/recovery, load balancing and security are also important factors.

More to come…


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🫡 Inter-device info transfer

Posted February 8, 2023

One of my favorite recent tech discoveries is when I open a web page on my phone (can be Safari or a webview in Ivory or NetNewsWire), then go to the dock on my iMac, Chrome has a second icon on the far right with a phone pic in the middle. Clicking on that icon opens a new tab in Chrome with the URL of the page I was viewing on the phone. Very nice!


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🫡 Nature finds a way

Posted February 4, 2023

With Ivory on iOS and hundreds of people moving to Mastodon every hour, I’m excited about social media again (hello dasharez0ne!). Fun to read some smart voices I haven’t followed in a while, plus more and more migrations from Space Karen’s hell site every time I check. Now I just need that macOS Ivory client and some of my music, food and sports people to make the jump…


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Mastodon Flock

Pic posted February 4, 2023

OK, this interface (and service) is pretty awesome (also liked using Followgraph and Whom to Follow)


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Link: A New Hope for Social Networking

Linked January 27, 2023


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🫡 In anticipation of Ivory, joined Mastodon today

Posted January 24, 2023

You can find me here: mastodon.social/@kingsbury

P.S. – already super impressed with Ivory. Kudos to the Tapbots crew!


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