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 […]
Category Archives: mastodon
A strange month for Mastodon
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 […]
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Avec le temps
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 […]
Also posted in twitter
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Now you can follow this blog in the fediverse
I’ve created a mastodon bot that can keep you updated on new posts.
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Further into Mastodon
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 […]
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The unpredictability of bots
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 […]
Contributing
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 […]
Also posted in ephemetoot, open source
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Making bots on Mastodon
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 […]
Mapping libraries and archives on Mastodon
I’ve enjoyed being on Mastodon for the past year. It reminds me of how Twitter was in the early days. But Mastodon’s decentralized structure means that I find it hard to wrap my head around the entirety of the fediverse. For better or worse, I only see the parts that are adjacent to my instance. […]
