mastodon

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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The petty tyrants of Mastodon

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

Having a federated system like Mastodon guarantees that no voices can be completely suppressed. Intolerant people can still try to silence others within their sphere, though, and some have wider influence than others. There are blocklists that many Mastodon sites use, and certainly some sites deserve to be blocked. They spew intentional falsehoods, advocate violence, or dump pornography on those who don’t want it. But once the lists get acceptance, their managers can start adding sites which they simply don’t like.

My personal Mastodon account is on Liberdon, a libertarian-oriented server. Its policy says:

Liberdon’s community adopts a “good neighbor” policy, as one of our goals is outreach to the other communities. As such, “ostracizable” (non-tolerated) behavior includes spamming, scamming, nudity* / pornographic / sexual / graphic / NSFW content, advocacy of the initiation of violence, ethnic/racial/homophobic slurs, harassment, or other content/activity that could get this site shut down by state agents with guns. Offending content will need to be removed by the user, and repeat offenders will be banned from the community.

Even with these limits, much of what is posted on Liberdon (including my own posts) will outrage many on both the right and the left. That’s why I like it. However, some people express their outrage in blocklists. At some point, Liberdon got put on a “Tier 0 blocklist” which seems to be widely used. As I’m typing this, it includes 417 servers. There’s no explanation of why they’re listed, only a claim that the list is “a combined blocklist of only the worst actors, and it exists to provide one blocklist to which surely no one can object as a baseline for others.”
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The WordPress ActivityPub plugin

This entry was posted in Administrative and tagged Fediverse mastodon WordPress on by

The ActivityPub protocol, best known as a key element of Mastodon, is catching on for multiple uses. There’s an ActivityPub plugin for WordPress, which makes a site’s feed available through ActivityPub. When you add it to your site, people with Mastodon accounts can use them to read your blog. (Some Mastodon sites put limitations on reading long posts.)

The current version is in beta and has limitations. The WordPress site has to be in your root directory. Because of the way I set this site up a long time ago, that locks me out. But recently Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, has taken over development of the plugin. The result should be faster development and fewer limitations. Matthias Pfefferle, the plugin’s developer, will continue to work on it (and hopefully get better paid for it).
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A brief introduction to Mastodon

This entry was posted in Tools Writing and tagged Internet mastodon on by

Originally I wrote this piece, in a slightly different form, for a non-public journal. If you’re a writer who’s looking to add Mastodon to your communication and publicity resources, you might find it useful.

Mastodon is a federated system for making brief, usually public posts. Unlike Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok, the system doesn’t belong to any one owner. Anyone can set up a server (also called an instance), and it’s fairly easy and cheap if you have a little tech knowledge. It’s like FidoNet from the days of BBSes, before the Internet was open to the public, or like Usenet.

Mastodon is built on open-source software and is part of a larger system called the Fediverse. There’s a video sharing system of sorts, but it hasn’t really caught on. Hosting video is much more daunting than hosting messages and images.
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