One of the ways they feel safe about passing this shit is watching NO! responses fall as they keep trying. So we have to keep it up, and that means every time.
Should I keep posting excerpts over for Federation, or would it be better if I just federated entire posts?
This isn’t Patreon I’m not getting paid and there isn’t any exclusive content. (Tho’ I do maintain a Patreon, sorta, if anyone wants to throw me money, and a few people do and I very much appreciate that, thank you!)
How the hell does anyone use the WordPress block editor? I’m running Firefox (latest) on MacOS (latest), against WordPress (latest), which I’d think should be fine. But it’s unstable as hell, well into the realm of destroying work.
Major bugfix: This should be the first post everyone actually sees in ages!
If you can see this from any Federation instance (Mastodon, Misskey, Firefish, Akkoma, etc), please take a moment to hit the reply button! I want to see if posts are getting out properly again. I can’t see likes from this side (yet), so those won’t work, sorry – they actually have to be replies.
I just saw a post on Mastodon that made me realise the importance of something I should’ve realised months ago:
Unlike on Twitter or Facebook, you don’t have to make your posts performative in some way to trick an algorithm into showing them to your own followers.
Yes, that’s a thing that actually happens. Some or most of your followers are never shown your posts on Facebook or on Twitter, or if they are shown them, it’s later and out of order. If you want it to happen, if you want it to be sooner, you have to find some way to make the algorithm decide it’s worth immediate visibility to those who are already following you.
But that’s not a thing on Mastodon, or anywhere else in the Federation. Your followers will see your posts every time, since it’s just a chronological feed by intention and design.
You don’t have to write for advertisers or for engagement optimisation or gods know what else just to have your toots be shown to your own friends.
You can just write whatever the hell you want. You can write for you, or you can write for them, or both, and that visibility will happen every time.
And that means it’s not just the ads or the owner’s political agenda that’s different between Twitter and the Fediverse.
What’s different is that you don’t have to perform for the machine.
I mean, I knew I needed to perform back when I first got onto Twitter in 2011. I was a working musician at the time, so I was fully aware that, just to get my music out there. But that’s not the same thing at all as having to perform to a set of corporate expectations in order to talk to your friends. And I think that difference is really, really corrupting.
Even not trying to perform, people will pick up on which of their posts do get seen by their friends and followers and which don’t, right? Consciously or subconsciously, they’ll pick up on it. They’ll learn over time – again, even passively – how to make posts which do get seen by more of their friends. And that shaping will be guided by whatever “the algorithm” decides best serves the company, because they’re going to spend their resources on what is best for the company.
Not for you, or for your friends. For the company.
And one fact I picked up was that Twitter in particular really, really liked my posts that make people mad.
It didn’t give fuckall for anything else I put up, particularly not music. Those were invisible.
But a post that made people angry? It’d show that to everybody. That’s what it reliably picked.
I think that’s corrosive. The more I think about it, the more corrosive it feels.
This is as, again, opposed to Mastodon (et al), which doesn’t pick. It just shows your posts to the people who asked to see them.
I think that’s a really – even critically – important difference.
And I think it’s really nice not to have to entertain a corporate machine in order to be seen by your friends.