@shanselman Nice to see you here Scott! It's now been 8 years since @Beantin and I talked to you on @uxpodcast 😅
https://uxpodcast.com/81-hybridconf-stockholm-2014-interviews/
Thanks. 😊 If you want to have a look at my own posts around Mastodon/Fediverse they are all tagged fediverse on my blog:
Right, but this is about long term strategy and vision, not necessarily what is happening amidst current confusion.
That is: do we want to avoid centralisation or not? If we do, we should design to support that vision.
The short term suggestion of limiting number of people per instance is appealing, and does not mean most people have to run their own instance.
Yet 😉
This is a very important read if you are interested in the building blocks of decentralised social media. Currently, the design decisions around Mastodon incentivise centralisation rather than decentralisation.
As @aral writes:
"Mastodon instances should be limited from growing beyond a certain size. Instances that are already too large should have ways of encouraging people to migrate to smaller ones."
Thanks. Would I be correct in assuming that" following a hashtag shows all the posts in the federated timeline also in the home timeline if they are tagged with that hashtag and even if you are not following the original poster"?
@shaun put together this great list of resources (and yes, a couple of my posts are in there as well 😊). Particularly the "10 tips" one talks about instances.
Thank you Shaun 🙏
@shaun Fantastic work Shaun. I've written som guides and other articles on Mastodon and the fediverse that I've received positive feedback on.
If you want to consider them for inclusion you can find them all under the same tag on my blog :)
⚠️ Escape from Birdsite
When "deleting" them yourself, you're likely right. Here's an article about making an erasure request under EU law:
⚠️ Escape from Birdsite
Advice coming from different sources to download archive, delete your DMs but also: remove #Twitter for single sign-on.
On some websites, you may be using your Twitter account as a login method.
This isn't necessarily unsafe, but creates a dependency to a platform that is in risk of suffering outages and already has broken 2FA.
If you want to make sure you can keep logging in to these services without interruption, remove that dependency.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/stop-using-twitter-to-log-in-to-other-websites/ by @sjvn
@troed Fair question. I honestly haven't given it much thought yet. Just saw that argument and realised I haven't taken steps one way or the other.
I guess in the end I also don't trust all search engines to obey the indexing rules. But at least I can block unauthenticated users from public timelines I realised now.
Experimenting with some webfinger redirects. You should now be able to enter axbom@axbom.com into the search box on Mastodon and find this account.
I love playing around with this stuff.
I've also found an interesting argument to actually not host Mastodon on my regular domain (the address above).
Some servers on the fediverse emit questionable or illegal content. The idea is to not risk the reputation of a primary domain in search engines if questionable files are inadvertently cached.
If you're curious about how to accomplish this, this is the post by @johnmu that helped me out:
https://johnmu.com/2022-mastodon-for-your-domain/
Creating this type of redirect for a username is a way to increase what I've started calling online resilience.
So when I write my fediverse username I can use this "primary domain alias" that will redirect to where the current account is. .
If for any reason I migrate to another instance I can redirect that primary domain alias to the new account, and people can still find me using the same address. No need to edit username in X locations.
About online resilience:
https://axbom.com/25y/
One interesting aspect of the way I now implemented Webfinger on my primary domain(s) is that you can search my email address in the Mastodon search box and find my Mastodon account.
Obviously not for everyone, but when it comes to verification and findability, the Webfinger method can be helpful.
I chose social.<name>.<tld>
But the important point for me is that the other two options have weaknesses. Anyone can register <name>.social before the organisation gets there, so you really want the domain name you already are on, for purposes of trust.
When it comes to Mastodon, you don't know that is the software you will necessarily always be using. So that one's out. 😁
But when it comes to which subdomain, not as important, Though I obviously like the one (social) you suggested 😉
@evan This is what my confirmation email looked like in 2017. I gather this is the default email template from back then.
In my case I found the email but the instance doesn't exist anymore 😅
Almost. As I am a single-user instance (even though I have a few accounts) I can say that:
* boosts show in the home timeline when it is boosted, but in the federated timeline the boosted toots instead show at their own real timestamp, not as boosted
* if someone I follow sets their toot to followers only I only see it in Home.
* Replies between people I follow I only see in Home.
The federated timeline is the same for everyone on your instance.
Subtle differences.
@prosumer Ah I need to clarify this. I didn't realise the pro plan was needed for html widgets. Could be the case you can add a link href in the header instead. Can check this later today.
@prosumer As it turns out, the Pro plan ($19/year) is needed for both types of link verifications.
Sorry about that, will make it more clear in the post.
Hehe, I know the feeling. And today I really should have talked to you before I published my first musing at breakfast. 😅
On the other hand, it gave reason to talk to a lot of people, which was fun.
I'm excited about Mastodon but also keep seeing small problems all over the place.
Feel like it's important to address them and talk about them. You always do a fantastic job at this.