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 […]
I’ve recently had the honor of contributing to an open source project called ephemetoot. It’s a project by Hugh Rundle that auto-deletes your old Mastodon posts. I’ve wanted to contribute more to open source projects for a while now, but finding the right project is surprisingly hard to do. Hugh’s project appealed to me for […]
I made a Mastodon bot this past weekend. It’s called Why, and it tries to answer the perennial question “Why?” with responses from public domain texts from Project Gutenberg. I built this for Mastodon, rather for Twitter, for a couple of reasons: I was curious about the Mastodon API and the tools that are available […]
