mastodon

Moving away from Mastodon 1

This entry was posted in Personal and tagged mastodon on by

For several years I’ve had an account on Liberdon, a Mastodon instance. Recently they announced that only paid accounts, at a minimum of $3 per month, will be allowed, starting in December 2025. That’s perfectly reasonable, but it’s not worth it to me. Expect my posts to disappear soon.

I could move to another instance. However, I haven’t been getting much value out of Mastodon. Most of the people I personally know and follow haven’t been active for a long time. What’s left of my feed is mostly organizations. Discovery between different instances is awkward. If I find an instance I really like, I might move there. Suggestions in the comments are welcome. My account is archived to keep my options open.

This doesn’t affect the Fediverse feed of this blog or my Filknews account. They’ll stay active for the foreseeable future.

Follow this blog with ActivityPub

This entry was posted in Administrative and tagged mastodon on by

Just this post, and I should be done for today. A benefit of the migration is that the ActivityPub plugin now works. You can follow this blog from Mastodon or similar services by subscribing to “@blog@garymcgath.com” just as you’d subscribe to any other account. It might not be available on servers that allow only short-form posts.

This is the first post I’ve made since installing ActivityPub, so it serves as a test and means the feed isn’t empty.

Mastodon blues 2

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged Internet mastodon on by

Mastodon was supposed to be the answer to many social media problems. Instead of being one site under the control of one group of people, it’s many independent instances. If administrators on one became troublesome, you could move to another. You could find an instance that reflected your values and had the kind of people you like. It’s become something different.

Eugen Rochko, the founder of Mastodon, recently boasted:

I’d like to get it out there that the onboarding experience changed a fair bit this year. We don’t force people to choose a server anymore, so getting started shouldn’t be any more complicated than on any other site.

In the strict sense, no one was ever forced to choose a server. As far as I know, no court has ever ordered anyone to get a Mastodon account. But everyone who uses Mastodon has to choose one, and that hasn’t changed. It’s just that people now are herded into the big servers and have to make an extra effort to pick any of the others. That’s a step backward, toward monolithic social media.
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ActivityPub access to this blog

This entry was posted in Administrative and tagged mastodon on by

Theoretically, you can now follow this blog on ActivityPub compatible services such as Mastodon. The handle to follow is @gmcgath@garymcgath.com.

So far I can’t follow myself, but a propagation delay may be responsible. Let me know if you can or can’t use it.

Update:The WebFinger URL was returning a 404. I installed the WebFinger plugin. It’s still returning a 404. I’m going to deactivate them both and look into this later. Sorry.

Kafka’s Mastodon

This entry was posted in Censorship Commentary and tagged censorship Internet mastodon on by

I run the Filk News account on Mastodon, providing information about concerts, filksings, and other items of interest for the filk music community. Normally I don’t write much about filk here, but the story has relevance to anyone who uses Mastodon to distribute or gather information or just to connect with friends.

The first part of the story is in my earlier post, “The petty tyrants of Mastodon.” You may want to read it first if you haven’t already. Since then I’ve gotten no satisfaction from indieweb.social and found it necessary to move Filk News to liberal.city, which I think will be a better home for it. (Another post which I made, “The impending strangulation of Mastodon,” reflected a user error on my part, so I’ve removed it from public view.)

As I said in “Petty Tyrants,” my personal account is on Liberdon, which is included on a “Tier 0 Blocklist”. It simply lists domains to block without giving reasons. When I noticed trouble interacting with Indieweb from Liberdon, I reported the issue to Indieweb’s admin, Tim Chambers. He said he had changed Liberdon’s status from “blocked” to the less restrictive “silenced” while looking into the issue.
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