#Enshittification is the process by which a #platform lures in and then captures end users (stage one), who serve as bait for business customers, who are also captured (stage two), whereupon the platform rug-pulls both groups and allocates all the value they generate and exchange to itself (stage three):
I embraced a strategy called #POSSE: #PostOwnSiteSyndicateEverywhere. With POSSE, the permalink and native habitat for your material is a site you control (in my case, a #Wordpress blog with all the telemetry, logging and surveillance disabled). Then you repost that content to other platforms - mostly social media - with links back to your own site:
Zojuist bijgepraat met @tvanelferen, niet alleen over open standaarden en IT bij de gemeente #Nijmegen, maar ook over een gedeeld scoutingverleden, en: l'histoire ce repete! 😃
Ja, want in mijn overtuiging is de #POSSE strategie (Publish on Own Site, Syndicate/Snippets Elsewhere) de enige zuivere methode (zeker voor de publieke zaak) om je communicatie en moderatie in eigen beheer te houden, en toch op social media actief te zijn.
En voor zolang je het dan nodig vindt om op niet gefedereerde #bigtech te blijven, kun je dat prima hanteren door vanaf daar de gebruikers naar je eigen site / #fediverse te wijzen.
Non tanto diaria: sui perché e percome degli aggiornamenti del Wok. Ovvero, perché dovrei scrivere di piú sul Wok, o almeno riportarvi tutto quello che metto su #Mastodon
Technology should exist for our convenience, not for the convenience of anyone who wants to interrupt us.
from #Hyperfocus by #ChrisBailey
This resonates deeply with me. I loathe constant phone buzzing or browser notifications. Sometimes it feels like we’re slaves to the technology instead of us being the boss.
FYI the #book is not aimed at the #neurodiverse at all; my goal in reading it is to find #research-backed information that can help me understand and handle my distractions and maybe - just maybe - he’ll have some #tips that will be useful for my brain.
For example, knowing that it takes 29 minutes to get back on track after distracting ourselves (vs 6 minutes when distracted by someone else) quantifies the consequences of distractions. Thinking that a distraction = losing half an hour feels much more tangible.
It is now painfully clear that no local government, state or federal agency, or other civic institution should be using Twitter for any purpose other than directing people to alternative platforms.
Using the platform for anything other than a last ditch backup for any kind of emergency communication is clearly a disaster waiting to happen.
I'm very glad I left Twitter. But if Twitter was like heroin for me, Mastodon is like methadone. It doesn't give me enough of a high to keep me addicted. But it could be a useful step on my road to recovery!
With not enough people to talk to here, I've been spending less time on general-purpose social media and more time on specialized sites like the nLab and the Category Theory Community Server. I'm getting into more conversations that actually help me with my work, and I hope I'm helping students more. I miss the lively diversity of community, but I don't know what to do about that.
Mind you, I'm very grateful for all the nice replies I get to my posts here! I'm especially happy that some experts are replying to my amateur posts about music theory. But these replies feel few and far between.
To use another analogy: if Twitter felt like an echo chamber, Mastodon feels like an anechoic chamber... or padded cell. That's probably why most of the friends I eagerly welcomed here are gone now:
That was .. enjoyable ... but it's also Not My Usual Fare.
I've long adhered to "be the content you want to see", and STRONGLY encourage people to Fly Their Kink Flag, ESPECIALLY intellectual and hobby kinks.
Much of my resistance to the use of CWs is that people frequently (IMO: mis-) use these to hide their own interests from others. That's ... disappointing.
I try to make a practice of both boosting more-obscure content, even if it's not necessarily of interest to me, and in particular boosting toots for those trying to find their peeps. Again, whether I'm in that group or not.
Boosts and hashtags are largely all that Mastodon has for discovery, though there's some work on both groups and search. In the meantime, use what you've got.
Much of what you write goes over my head. That means it's an opportunity to learn something. Please, please, please keep it up.
(Finding lower-effort ways to do this can help, I'm a fan of Cory Doctorow's "linkblog" genre, or the concept of #POSSE: Post on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.)
The technology is still alive, it's still being actively (and passively) used. Feeds are still being produced by a surprisingly large part of the Internet, and still being consumed, but the general public has been made unaware of this, to push the centralized social network paradigm of the attention economy.
I believe there might be an opportunity now, with the Twitter takeover bringing attention to the #Fediverse and rekindling interest in #POSSE and #PESOS, to reverse the trend.
My vote: an ActivtyPub actor is an activity pub actor....doesn't matter if they were typing directly into a Mastodon form, or using #POSSE in to do it.
That is exactly how the major social media networks all track MAU, and we should do use the same metrics they do for an apples to apple comparison to the social media industry.
And this is by no means a bridge, but @manton at Micro[dot]blog now supports wehre you can write one blog post, and then it syndicates that out to both Mastodon AND bluesky.
As far as I know that is the first example of #POSSE to both Masto and Bluesky.
My latest blog post is up on begin.com/blog. I'm happy with the Enhance plugin I wrote to syndicate an RSS feed to multiple targets. Mastodon, Twitter and Dev.to for now with more planned.
It works seamlessly with our Enhance Blog template, but you can also deploy it as a stand-alone app. Feel free to reach out to me with questions and feature requests.
Doing a study on social engagement for non-Mastodon-content-focused accounts that cross-post almost the same content on both platforms.
(BTW the best practice for doing this to my mind is posting original content HERE and crossposting it THERE, but that's not the point of this exercise)
I want to compare social engagement for big and small accounts and work on a ratio to compare engagement apples to apples.
Does anyone do this, or recommend accounts I look at that do?
🆕 blog! “How do you decentralise emergency alerts?”
Twitter's decision to hobble its API has meant that a number of useful alerting bots might no longer function. Your local subway might not be able to Tweet each morning about delays on the line, nor will a tornado warning be displayed as you scroll through photos of brunch, and forget about …
@Edent Masto makes it harder to find these updates, but once you're following the alert account, you get alerts reliably, correct? It's just a problem if the "single source of truth" is published only on Masto like it is on Twitter.
#posse solves this - if the alert sites post mainly to a blog with an RSS feed, users can find (or make) a Masto account to follow it.
Still doesn't solve the discoverability issue you're trying to solve, but seems workable, no?
BTW, I recently had a trip down #memoryLane and realized that I might technically count as a #publishedAuthor. The story goes like this: a long long time ago in an Internet far far away, there was a social network that started in the best way: as a #POSSE aggregator. The name of the network was #FriendFeed, and apparently it reached its highest reach among users in Italy and Turkey.
(Why? No idea.)