It is getting to be time for my annual post about the Thanksgiving Challenge. Previous editions of this post can be found here, here, and here. Basically, the challenge is to spend the entire Thanksgiving long weekend coding by yourself. I’ve already covered the questionable productivity benefits (and very real mental health downsides) of doing […]
Fediverse relays have historically been a bit of a dodgy undertaking. In the past, when I’ve tested a relay, it was a largely unmoderated firehose of random stuff from the network. Unmoderated fedi is often particularly unpleasant; so much so that I could never really stomach it for more than a few days. But I […]
I’ve created a new linkblog on Mastodon, which is to be a feed of interesting things I’ve found on the web. There’s not much there yet, as I only started it, uh, an hour ago; so please be patient. But the point is that I come across tons of interesting stuff in my RSS reader, […]
November came and went on Mastodon, without almost any mention in my timeline of the anniversary of the previous year’s Eternal September. It was such a non-event, I’m only getting around to posting about it now. I’m not sure why the anniversary was passed over in silence; it seems strange. Perhaps no one really wants […]
One thing I appreciate about Mastodon (and the Fediverse) is the desire among some users to not be legible. Some users don’t want to be seen, understood, or to have any “reach”. There’s a desire to not be visible, to not be widely understood, and to basically be baffling to outsiders. I’m taking this idea […]
Last night, I tried to start a post about the current state of Mastodon, but I couldn’t really formulate anything that wasn’t overly emotive. I tapped out a few words, looked at the screen for about an hour, and then gave up and went to bed. Others have done much better than I could: Hugh […]
Dramatic news about Twitter, like we’ve seen in the past week, always drives a big influx of people to Mastodon. Mastodon, part of a larger decentralized federation of communities called the fediverse, is my social medium of choice. On a superficial level, Mastodon is very Twitter-like. The culture though, is very different. New arrivals to […]
I’ve created a mastodon bot that can keep you updated on new posts.
Joining Mastodon in 2017 turned out to be a positive change for me. Twitter had been making me depressed and anxious, and I needed a way out. At that point Mastodon – an open source social network – was unfamiliar to me and seemed rough around the edges. But the people I found there were […]
I recently made a Mastodon bot that didn’t really turn out how I expected. My goal was for it to be a bit cheeky, by being a bot who poses as a scholar. That’s not how it comes across. Rather, it presents itself as pedantic and over-confident. I suppose I could tweak it to make […]
