Nothing too bad happens. The email, wounded but not dead, skulks off into the shadows to recover. I continue on my merry way, but am dreading the rolls I’ll have to make against a growling pack of LLMs in the next town.
In 2009, I join Twitter. I make friends there. I can see their posts.
Twitter has a Nazi problem. I pre-emptively join Mastodon. But I don’t really use it yet.
Elon Musk buys Twitter. My friends start leaving. I no longer see their posts.
I want to see my friends’ posts.
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I find my friends again on Mastodon. Now I have two apps to keep track of. But I can see my friends’ posts again.
My instance admins get in a fight. Friends’ instances defederate from mine. I can no longer follow them, nor they me. I am told about this by a friend who noticed. There is no indication given by the software. I am not notified of the connections I’ve lost.
I want to see my friends’ posts.
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A friend invites me to their instance. I accept, and migrate my profile across. I re-follow missing friends I can remember. And I can see my friends’ posts again.
A friend posts photos on her instance. But those photos are not visible on mine. Her profile appears, to me, devoid of images. My new instance seemingly media-blocks hers. There is no indication given by the software.
@luna Reminds me of a social media idea I had lying around in the back of my head when I considered this problem. It involved clients managing their own local feed and then passing it to either an 'aggregator' to coalesce it with others for ease of discovery by other clients (matching the purpose of an 'instance', but without having to have your account there and deal with migration when you want to leave), and/or 'relays' for direct comms between two mutual parties (in order to allow people with the ability to manage servers to contribute to keeping the network running without having to resort to *everyone* having to be a sysadmin). When you don't want someone or somewhere to see your posts, you just, well, don't send 'em.
... Considering this is effectively just RSS with extra steps, though, I get the feeling that's probably what's gonna happen. Someone makes a specialized RSS client with good microblog social media UX and a couple infrastructure bundles anyone can set up, and markets it like a new platform, bam. they win.
@luna Reminds me of a social media idea I had lying around in the back of my head when I considered this problem. It involved clients managing their own local feed and then passing it to either an 'aggregator' to coalesce it with others for ease of discovery by other clients (matching the purpose of an 'instance', but without having to have your account there and deal with migration when you want to leave), and/or 'relays' for direct comms between two mutual parties (in order to allow people with...
@luna I wonder how hard it would be to make a software able to handle a few mastodon account that can run from a raspberry pi zero. Like blog sized inatance, for oneself and maybe a friend or two
Gregory's Server
@luna three
@luna Nat 20. I cast FIREBALL
@luna @irina
15.
Nothing too bad happens. The email, wounded but not dead, skulks off into the shadows to recover. I continue on my merry way, but am dreading the rolls I’ll have to make against a growling pack of LLMs in the next town.