Alek @tarkowski@101010.pl

A post about https://assemblag.es led me to HomeTown, a fork of Mastodon tweaked by @darius for a more localized experience.

It’s refreshing to see someone experiment with Mastodon functionalities. Darius says the fork is still “99.99% Mastodon" but the 0.01% feels like a valuable difference.

And now I'm curious - is there a place where server functionality designers hang out and talk shop? In other words, where does #Mastodon innovation happen?

Here's HomeTown:

https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown

I still don't understand why there are no previous on #Mastodon, the chopped links look disfunctional and unfriendly…

"With the mass decentralization of culture, even while platforms are becoming increasingly centralized, there’s no way for a sane person to keep up" - Terry Nguyen on trends (and their death, of sorts - at the hand of TikTok).

https://www.vox.com/the-goods/23065462/trends-death-subcultures-style?r=hbmw

I like the idea that cultural decentralization fuels centralization at the platform layer. Smart observation. Trends are the new fuel for platform capitalism.

Interesting also because it shifts the conversation from one focused purely on data - and there's a lot of talk about platform capitalism and our data.

Finally, if it's not just TikTok, but also #Mastodon / #Fediverse that get's fueled by trends, then what are the #Feditrends? It seems to me they are all self-referential with regard to the technology, and deep into #CoderCulture. What trends do you see in your part of the Fediverse?

If #indieweb was a counterculture, then which one would it be?

Can we think of it as punk or rave? Or is it just a group of coders crafting alternatives on Git*?

I think we could think that way, but few / rarely do. If you’re into indieweb as a culture, or know someone who does, please ping / toot / whatever

'Legibility is disastrous at scale, and the internet is always at scale' - Gordon Brander
on digital identity. relevant for my #aicommons work, where the issue can be seen as that of harmful legibility, made possible by open licensing of photos of faces.

https://subconscious.substack.com/p/soulbinding-like-a-state

Prototype Fund has a new funding round. And more importantly, it’s a great example of public support and funding for #opensource #infrastructures, done in a smart way

https://mastodon.social/@PrototypeFund/108746445745437825

Quick update on moving accounts in Mastodon:
- the alias+move option worked this time, hard to say why it did not work the first time
- the bug that I submitted 5 days ago did not get any attention

Anyway, the jump is complete, I'm on the new instance. Unfortunately feels exactly the same. I was advised that local feeds offer an interesting "local flavour" stream, but having looked at a few, I don't see reasons to get excited about local.

Which made me wonder: there does not seem to be much innovation (or maybe there is actually none?) in terms of functionalities offered by the different servers.

I get it that this comes from the federated nature of mastodon, where you want the functionalities determined by the protocol that ensures interoperability between the instances.

But there is always an option to add a feature that goes beyond the interoperable core of features. And also the protocol could be updated to include a new feature. Who decides whether that happens?

So basically more questions, more things to find out. If you have any leads please let me know, also in terms of hashtags because #mastodon feels to general, #interoperability too technical and #feditips is a bit mysterious.

So there actually is a more advanced migration function built into #mastodon. Seems that someone forgot to update the FAQ.

Still... it does not work for me! Which will be a nice opportunity to try out how submitting a bug works.

"Orbital re-insertion completed" - is it OK to think of #mastodon instances as orbits?

Also happy to see my char count per post quadrupled, who would have expected! So instances have some mysteries after all.

THis was for me the first opportunity ever to practice data portability in practice. High time!
#interoperability
#dataportability
Turns out, It's quirky thing.

For example, it seems that #Mastodon has not managed yet to get a fully fledged system of notifying followers, something an admin promised two years ago. #EveningEmpires

Also, posts can be downloaded easily from an instance, but not uploaded to a new one. If you want to learn more about it, there's a huge technical thread on Mastodon's GitHub. And that's it.
I might try to have a nice evening read next week.
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12423