When Facebook started, they bootstrapped networks by downloading & matching contacts from email. Twitter, and everyone else, did the same.

Threads is blowing up because Facebook is using their monopoly on the social graph. Legislation to guarantee easy, fast access to your own contact lists for use in non-billionaire-owned media would help level the playing field, because Zuck & co sure aren't going to give the connections they stole back to us otherwise.

Snow Day! #CatsOfMastodon

Going straight to the heart of Mastodon here with this combo #mosstodon #catsofmastodon pic.

Someone should set up a third-party tool that mastodon/fediverse users can report abuse to. It should be staffed by people who are skilled at evaluating this stuff and who are paid to do it.

Recommendations/instructions to block instances/individuals could then be sent out to instance admins or even individual users (in an automated way), either as a collective or by subscription.

Or, rather, is anyone doing this already? #federatemoderation

While everyone's being nostalgic about what Twitter means to them, I may as well add my two cents.

I didn't give birth to Twitter – that was Jack and Florian. But I was its midwife and adoptive mother; for two months in early 2007, I was the code's sole guardian and caretaker.

I was also the first person to hate Twitter; back when it was SMS-only, I did the math and realized that my immigrant prepaid phone plan would charge me $2000/year to send and receive even a 2006-era number of tweets. 🧵

The media has been reporting a lot on mastodon, but often reports as though mastodon is the fediverse. I saw a well-intentioned article today that the platform started six years ago, but this erases the immense amount of work that many put into ActivityPub.

Having done standards work myself and learning that I am unable to manage the immense social pressures of coordinating divergent goals and stay happy, my hat's off to the dedicated folks who made the fediverse happen.

@cwebber 👏