Mastodon is the world's biggest community of people who deeply love computers and also think that the world would probably be better off without computers

I tried eating fruit but the onboarding was confusing. I have to choose from apple, banana, orange? How is a normal user supposed to navigate this complexity

Seeing people post positively about Substack now that it's challenging Twitter.

Reminder: Substack is also centralised. Worse, the business model is basically to take what would once have been blogs and paywall them as premium 'newsletters'.

Substack is not a friend of the open web.

People worry a lot about losing knowledge — about "burned-down libraries".

Comparatively few people seem to worry about what happens if you take a billion books full of auto-generated, often-untrue junk text and *add* them all to the library.

In theory, nothing is lost. In reality, everything is lost, because nothing useful can now be found.

There was once a dream of a decentralised web.

As recently as a decade ago we had a still very active blogosphere, connected via blogrolls and RSS. Specialised web forums were still mainstream and messenger apps could largely interoperate.

Centralised social media slowly ate that dream. It had plenty of positives, but it pulled more and more people away from the open web and into corporate walled gardens.

Some people kept the dream of decentralisation alive. And now you are here.