I welcome everyone to the July twentieth Saint Louis Linux users group meeting. Kind of getting off to a slow start here.
Some people aren't here yet, but. Normally we open the floor. Initially for news.
Technical problems.
Obviously, if it's something related to computers or Linux, you might get some else to chime in, but.
The floor is open. Anybody?
Have any news or problems to talk about? Which.
Before I, before I forget, the next Tuesday is St. Louis. New Linux user group.
Tuesday night. It'll be on a Chichi meeting announcement will be on the page. And they'll be sent out on discuss and announce.
Okay.
And it's also posted up on meet up and etc, etc.
Cool.
Okay, people are.
Dripping and driving in.
I don't.
Everybody besides me see the An announcement from Susie regarding, Enterprise Linux.
Which one?
It said, Since he preserves choice in Enterprise Linux by forking, dot dot dot.
And they're gonna, they're gonna fork.
The Red Hat Enterprise Linux. And support it with a 10 million dollar commitment, which you know, who knows.
Yeah, they.
And so yeah, there's an article under website which kind of lays out the Details of of Staff and post it, but, you can go look at it, you know, your leisure if you want to.
Yeah, I actually saw that a week, you know, a while back. Though, you know, they're getting big in a support business.
They've had this. Suzy liberty here since late last year. And supposedly with liberty you can.
Swap your repos out on No, you now have a supported system again.
It's a commercial product though and what I've been trying to find out for 4 months or 6 months.
What you know what the cost is. I can't. Nobody, nobody's given me a number.
I thought they pulled the plug on that. I thought they didn't actually release, that liberty thing.
I thought they candid before it actually ever went to the market.
It could be, people are still talking about it.
Yeah.
Hello, weird move by Seuss to make a competitor to your main thing, you know. This isn't isn't like their main thing and now they're making a real clone to compete with themselves.
Not really, they're after the support market. You know, but between Real. You know, abandoning products like Central West and
You know, closing your source down. So you gotta buy a license where you can see the source.
The
You know, they're not exactly supporting business practices in the open source arena. So they're trying to capitalize on that.
Hey, started last year with Liberty on the Sento S, but like I say, I've I've got one, we've got one client that uses centralized 7.
And as far as I can tell, I mean, are still getting security updates, but I have no idea how long that's gonna last.
Yeah, I think it might be like a crowded market of Real likes, you know, cause there's rocky, there's Alma, there's Oracle and now Seuss is bringing another one.
And all of these are gonna be you know some different shade of real compatible you know but they might not be like Oracle's announcement said that they're not gonna be like Exactly.
Rail compatible anymore. Like they said they're gonna try to maintain compatibility.
But they might not be able to is the. The thing on their blog post.
Yeah, it's really kind of a weird market right now.
So what do you guys use? Are you a red hat shop?
We, Let's see. Well, yeah, we don't have any.
Yeah, that we have Braille on prem still. Yeah, that's true. The client I work for has real on-prem.
R 7 so
Yeah.
Okay. But we mostly like I mostly work in EKS though so we don't you know who knows what Amazon's using probably their own Linux Amazon Linux.
Under there but we don't have to interface with that.
But I think. So, one interesting thing here, you know, cause like once, one sent us was changed to send to us stream.
Rocky and Alma Linux kind of popped up. And it's just interesting to see the 2 different tax that projects are taking now, right?
Because Basically, it's from my understanding now that, you know, Ral made their source code change.
And what Rocky's gonna try to do is basically.
What rail would consider like abusing the GPL maybe or something so rocky stance is like We're gonna get the source code one way or the other and make an exact bug for bug compatible.
And they're saying this. Like from a position of. We have to be able to get the source code because the GPL guarantees it.
It protects these rights. And that's how the rocky blog post kind of read. And so I wonder if he's gonna start some kind of like.
Cat and mouse or whack-a-mole thing where like Rocky finds a new way to get the source code and then Ralph shuts that down and they find a new way to get it and then Rail shuts that down, you know.
I wonder if we're gonna start some kind of, whack-a-mole thing like that.
And then on the other hand, you have Alma who They're gonna like play ball. They're gonna like They're gonna take the source code from sent to us stream.
And try to make it their own basically distro. It's not gonna, they're not shooting for bug for bug compatibility with Browell.
They're shooting for like ABI compatibility, right? Like compatible enough. And and I think that's the more like That's how Rail wants people to do it, right?
It's like, you know, don't just make a bug for about clone, like actually.
Start from sent to us stream and make your own thing bring your own value to the ecosystem a set of your only value being undercutting route, you know, I mean for support.
So do you, do you, do you know anybody who's been running central S boxes?
And they pulled pulled the trigger and jumped Alma or What do you see?
I don't know. Honestly, I don't. Let's see.
Yeah, I don't know anybody running sent to us. I guess that everyone I know is running.
Real.
Okay.
Like I say, we, we got one client that's, actually sent to us 7 and I can't get a quote from Susie.
I looked at Alma and they and they can't do anything unless you upgrade the Centa as 8 first which they can't do because the repos are gone.
So it's kind of like a big catch 22.
Hmm.
Yeah, let's see. We don't have a speaker yet. All right, who else has problems that we can solve?
Weave the magic wand and make him go away.
Okay, it looks like you're gonna have to start doing pocket already. Give me a second to, Sign in.
Sorry, I got delayed and so I'm not even signed in yet, but I'll be.
In there in a moment.
I will mention that. There is a red hat user group meeting, the St. Louis chapter.
It is meeting tomorrow starting at 110'clock. I think the actual presentation maybe 1130.
It's meeting, I believe down at the, Microsoft Tech Center in, in, down near St.
Louis you. And I'll have that up in just a second. Well, the first topic is is lunch.
They're gonna put food on the table. So I know that's gonna get a bunch of you going down there.
So. So let's see, how do I do this? You want to share?
But unless you, Well, II got the lug page up here, but I, okay.
They change the calendar. I'm not sure how to get to the everybody. Let's see if I can pull it up here.
Yeah, try to share.
Okay, I apologize for
Just getting logged in here. But I'll be with you all in a moment.
What happened to the calendar?
I was trying to figure out how to put all the entries up there and Gary said I'll do it but he hasn't yet.
Oh.
Oh, I don't think Gary can talk and push buttons at the same time.
Start talking about food.
Yeah, that's what happens when you when you what is it? When you, well, when you're a, sign language guy.
Or if you're Italian, you know, you can't move without or you can't talk about using your hands.
And I don't know why. But it's not letting me share my screen. So. We go ahead.
Are you logged in? I says I am. I mean, I'm seeing me in the meeting.
I don't see you. Or wait a minute. Yes, I do. I do.
Okay, but it's not
Yeah, he's there. Anyway, go ahead and pull up the calendar. Oh, there you go.
And look at, tomorrow at 110'clock. Nothing.
Okay, and well you need to go over over to the where it says agenda up near the top. And on the right in a little triangle.
Yep. I don't see the triangle.
And further over to the right, there should be a.
Okay.
That makes the agenda and here's month.
With that dark mode, I can't see the triangle.
I can't see it light mode either.
What the hell?
This is on the lug page now.
Okay, should I go over the sloop page?
Oh. Or at a sloop page.
Life calendar.
Yeah.
See how Shit, how do you do? How do you pull screen?
Yeah.
Sorry, is there a better way to go in there?
Yeah.
Sort of the account. There we go. Yeah, so 20 first year.
Click on that 110'clock entry, STO red hat.
On the 20 first.
Brainwick Shaloon. Okay, I that's my fault. I didn't change that's an old wear on there so look down further into the content of the meeting.
Just scroll down and it says it's at the Microsoft Technology Center. I'm sorry.
It's not the train wet saloon. I'm disappointed. I'm disappointed.
It's not a train wreck salute. Yeah, sorry. Sorry. So I'll fix that.
Thing I'll fix the the wear statement in a minute or somewhere this evening. Scroll down more so the topic is open shift virtualization.
Oh, I've got to comment, Gary, that your posting is on the calendar suck.
Yeah.
Okay.
When you when you copy and paste something you should paste it without formatting. Cause it takes, it carries over all this garbage.
And it's based on cube. An open source project. For Kubernetes.
No, Yeah.
Thank you. What you wanna do is paste into a text editor first, then paste into that.
Okay.
Cause you can raise over a bunch of HTML garbage and stuff like that. You don't want.
Yeah.
Anybody.
And it was started by Red Hat. Keep going. Roll up.
Scroll up. And there you go. Lunch will be served. Where is that?
You passed it.
Okay, so there's the important thing on that and, yes, you're right.
I probably should be more careful in editing that stuff and getting it formatted correctly for the calendar. On the other hand, all these different things that we're advertising for other people.
They could do well by. Putting it in some sort of a format that we could easily, make a quick copy into the calendar.
So, a little help from the other people be, appreciated.
Couple other odd things on the calendar. On the big picture of the calendar here. Going back to last Sunday you had to click on the individual one and do it hit the headlines.
One thing Macdonald aircraft started, big company here in St. Louis that were Mac Auto.
Came out of on that same day It's the 20 first anniversary of, the big email failure in 97.
Next day, Monday is the thirtieth anniversary of Slackware. And, that was a big event for us Linux folks.
Yesterday another St. Louis thing, the fortieth anniversary of the first 3D CT scan of the fortieth anniversary of the first 3D CT scan of the human head.
It was done here in St. Louis. I believe a slew parks graduate and Wash you medical school team.
So 40 years. It's a it's a it's a techy thing, but it's something that will happen here in St.
Louis. So. Tomorrow, twentieth anniversary of the famous Schoel lawsuit that drug on forever.
And fear uncertainty and doubt always the term we used in those days.
And this coming Sunday. Isn't fifteenth anniversary of the advanced file system being made open source.
So anyway, those are the nifty things on the calendar, obviously other things. If anybody cares to point out anything in particular.
What's
It was a abbreviation for advanced file system. Who use it? I don't know what became of it to be honest.
I mean, it was something that, to be honest. I mean, it was something that originally was started by DEC.
And then with the purchases, Hewlett Packard wound up. Owning it and they decided they were gonna go with where are they gonna go with?
We scroll down a little bit it says.
Conference continued to work. Veritas. So HP wanted to go with the Veritas file system, so they just open source.
ADBFS, you know, what became of all that good stuff that was in embedded in ADVFS.
I'm sure got in into some of the current file systems. That looks like GFS and ButterFS.
Right, got some some of the benefit. There you go. Yeah.
Alright, should we kick it over to Scott? I guess so. Let's see.
I suppose I'll roll a little bit early. So if anybody joins us and is mad that we started early, we'll refer them to the.
To the recording we are recording right With that, I'm gonna turn it over to Scott Granham and Scott is a former vice president of this group.
And frequent frequent speaker. We always appreciate his talks. When he's not slaving away doing stuff for us.
Scott is. Principal at web sanity the company normally works for And he also is a adjunct professor at a couple of the, universities around town.
So, I believe Lyndon Wood. Is that correct, Scott?
Yeah.
No, I've never taught there, but I'd like to. Webster and Saint Charles Community College.
Thank you. Okay. That's why I think it's in. That webster. All right.
So with that I turn it over to you.
All right, thanks a lot. Everyone. Once again, Gary called me a week ago. And said, hey.
Can you do this? It was about a week.
Oh, he actually, he actually gave me that much notice. Hey, be thankful.
I know I am. I was it was shocking. I'm actually like you know, doing pretty good here with this.
Okay.
So. You guys should be able to see my screen right now, right? Social media for techies, right?
Yep, we got it.
Thank you.
Excellent. All right. Let me give him that little zoom thing there. Okay, so.
This is all about social media for techies, meaning that I'm gonna cover some stuff that normal people maybe don't use as much.
I'm gonna talk sometimes about more technical aspects of this stuff. I'm also going to be encouraging some of you guys to try this out.
It's as you're gonna see a very different world than what we've seen for the last 10 or 15 years. In terms of social media.
And one of the real reasons that we see that is because A, the technology underlying it, which I'm going to go into, but B, because these areas are still so small.
And so we don't have millions and millions of people and we don't have, you know, every, you know, hamburger brand and, and influencer and all that garbage.
In these social media services and apps, which is great because you're dealing with, you know, real people that have mostly interesting stuff to say.
So I think you're gonna find a few things that have mostly interesting stuff to say. So I think you're gonna find a few things in what I tell you guys about tonight that you might want to check out on your own.
So as I said, this has been a very weird year. It's been a it's been a weird last 12 months, but 2023 has gotten really weird when it comes to social media.
So to start it all off. The reason we're kind of here today and the reason things have gotten the way they are goes back to Twitter.
Which formally was my favorite so it's really the only one of the only social media sites I use used.
A few months ago, several months ago, I quit using Twitter. Because Elon, banned third party clients.
So prior to that for ever since the beginning of Twitter, anybody could write an app for Twitter and use the API.
And that meant that in fact, a lot of the key functionality we think of when we think of Twitter was actually invented by third party apps.
In fact, Twitter never invented the word tweet. That was invented by a third party app. Called, Oh, I can't remember now.
It's not tweet, but it's the other one. That was famous back then.
Things like hashtags that wasn't invented by Twitter. That was something users thought up and started doing on their own.
Retweets that was something that users came up with. So the all these third party apps really brought the UI features forward, brought new ideas forward.
The thing was, however, they didn't have to show you ads. And so for years, I only used Twitter with a third party client called Tweetbot that was fantastic.
I never saw ads and you know, which was great because I hate ads. So I never saw ads and it had a much better UI, much nicer interface for working with Twitter than anything else.
And then what does Elon do? He decides to ban third party Twitter clients. And so they went away and that day I stopped using Twitter and really have not used it ever since.
So let's go back in time though to what started this all out. So in October, 2022 Elon Musk finally acquired Twitter.
Now 6 months earlier he said he was gonna buy it for 44 billion dollars and then he got cold feet and said he wouldn't.
And Twitter took him to court, was going to take him to court and force the sale to go through.
And at the last minute, before that happened because of some undoubtedly bad stuff is gonna come out on his end.
He just said fine. I'll go through with it and borrowed 12 billion from banks and put up some of his own money and convinced some rich people to put up their money and got the 44 billion dollars together and bought Twitter and immediately began destroying it.
It's he has not done good things to that platform. It's like it's amazing how somebody that's been successful at one thing thinks they know everything about everything else and thinks therefore they're an expert at everything else.
So, sure, he might have done okay with the cars. He might have done okay with SpaceX, but the man does not know how to run a social media network.
As you can see, if you look into this stuff, I'm gonna talk about just a few aspects of it.
Well, on October, 2022, he got it for 44 billion dollars. Well, I, just a few months later, about 8 months later, about 8 months later, about 8 months later, well, I, just a few months later, about 8 months later, fidelity, who was an investor in
Twitter, about 8 months later, Fidelity, who was an investor in Twitter, said that the valuation was now 14.7 5 billion.
In other words, one third of what it was when he bought it. So the he's gone from a company that was valued at 44 billion to 15 billion.
And just 8 months. In fact, in January of 2023 of this year, Twitter's revenue dropped 40%.
After 500 advertisers pause their spending on it because he also got rid of all the moderators.
So moderators that had been in lots of countries around the world were literally gone. There were there were nobody.
There were no people moderating Twitter in all these different areas around the world. He gutted the team in all these different areas around the world.
Question.
He gutted the team in the US. Racist, nasty behavior on Twitter. And, at the same time, prior to that, he, Twitter would give blue checkmarks to, companies, organizations, famous people, reporters as an act of verifying them saying this are celebrities to say this person or this organization
Question. Hello.
is really you they say they are. Well, he got rid of that and said Excuse me? Yes.
Scott? You wanna take questions in line here or you want them saved up?
Oh, okay. What are they?
Tony, you got a question? You got your hand, right?
I just wanted to talk about the valuation. You're saying that it went down to from 44 to 14 billion like I mean, was it, during the time that he was in the process of purchasing and then it went down because of the cause he was finding bots as users instead of real users.
Well, no, that was in May. So this is. 2 months ago is when this happened. So, no, it's not when he was fighting bots.
What was it ever actually worth 44 billion? Like would anybody else have paid 44 billion for it?
I don't think so. Yeah, so.
Oh no, he overpaid for it. He over. Oh yeah. Yep, he screwed up that one real big.
Because he didn't bother to look at any of the normal paperwork and normal. Person with common sense would look at before they spent that much money or pretty much any amount of money.
Before you buy a company, you're gonna go over a lot of stuff and he failed to do so.
So there you go. So,
The result of a question in chat from Sean Tea, a tweet.
Sure. Tweak deck, yeah. Yeah, he's kind of destroyed that too, hasn't he?
In the last couple of weeks as well that was a very very popular app for reading Twitter used by a lot of marketers and professional social media people that was actually made by Twitter and he's done some things, restricted that and change that.
And again, this goes back to his efforts to try to raise money. So instead of Twitter giving blue checkmarks to people that have been and organizations that have been verified, he now says pay $8 and you get a blue check mark.
And the other nice thing for those people is their replies go to the top. So unfortunately, a lot of people have bought blue check marks whose opinions you really don't want at the top of commentary and so people basically in many cases have learned just to scroll down until they get past the blue checkmark people to see what other people have
said. So July fifteenth, this is 5 days ago, must said Twitter's had a 50% drop in ad revenue since he took over.
So that's from the horses mouth. Right there, 50% drop in ad revenue. And, obviously the majority of almost all of this is due to his own actions and in actions that have caused the problem.
And so I really like this quote. There's this website called Twitter's going great. And they chronicled over 300 things that happened at Twitter after he bought it and finally quit in May after doing 300.
And so they said why they explained on May first why they quit, they explained on May first why they quit, diluted billionaire Elon Musk continues to spew stupid ideas that exhausted engineers, to spew stupid ideas that exhausted engineers because he fired 70% of the employees are forced to rush through half baked.
The billionaire Elon Musk continues to spew stupid ideas that exhausted engineers because he fired 70% of the employees are forced to rush through half baked.
The company moves inexorably closer to bankruptcy because he's gonna have enormous payments to make on the interest to the banks that they are going to have a very difficult time making.
Well, white supremacists increasingly dominate everyone's feed because he allowed back on. An amazingly huge number of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, far right, doxing organizations and people and so on.
The few remaining lawyers came instantly to authoritarians to platforms reliability plummets ever downward and we need a break so as a result of Twitter going.
Downhill fast, a lot of people said I'm getting out of here. Me included. Now I've been using, I'm gonna talk about mastodon at length.
I think I signed up for Master in 2018 and what I normally did was I would cross post to Twitter and Mastodon.
But I used an app that allowed me to do that, but I really didn't use Mastodon much at all.
And that's where I went after I left Twitter. I said, fine, because also a lot of the people that I followed on Twitter also went there.
And so for me, it was an easy choice to make. The people I've been following and interacting with on Twitter moved to Mastodon.
I moved to Master Don. I've had a great time there. I'm gonna tell you about that in just a minute because the concept you need to understand behind almost everything that the concept you need to understand behind almost everything that I'm talking about tonight is the So almost every service and app that I'm gonna be talking about with you
guys tonight has to do with the Feder. So what is that? Well, that's a combination of Federation and Universe.
And basically, it's a decentralized that's a big, big feature of this. It's decentralized, enormous group of independent interconnected services called instances in a lot of cases not always used that term that are used for social networking, file hosting, and a variety of other services.
So basically the idea is that users set up an identity, a username on one of these instances.
And then thanks to the Federated nature of them, they can read and share with other instances. Thanks to the Federation.
So that means I'm gonna be talking about mastodon, which is like Twitter. Well, there's also a service called Pixel Fed that I'm going to talk about that's like Instagram.
Well, they both use they they're federated. That means you could only use, they're federated.
That means you could only use pixel fed and share photos with people and share photos with people and comment on them.
However, you can also access pixel fed. Accounts in Mastodon. And you can do vice versa.
I'm gonna show you in just a little bit. And you can do that with a lot of these different services.
So your identity is what's important, but you can use that identity to access and interact with stuff that's on different services, different servers.
Services that might seem like they are very different than the ones you're using, you can actually interconnect with that data.
So it's very, very exciting. One of the nice and right? So it doesn't matter what email service you're using because you can send email to anybody else.
So same concept with the Feder. So same concept with the Federverse. It doesn't matter if you're using a mastodon instance or it doesn't matter if you're using a mastodon instance or pixel fed or some of these others I'm gonna talk about you can interconnect all these different services and access and read
it while your identity stays the same. So these are some of the services that are using that are federating using the protocol I'm going to be talking about in just a moment.
And you probably you might have heard of some of these you probably haven't heard of all of them at all.
Unless you've been kind of following along. Now what's exciting is I know everybody here's heard of WordPress.
Well, WordPress is adding or has it added the ability to be part of the Federbirth by simply installing a plugin and then that makes it possible for your WordPress post to be spread out among the Federverse with anybody else?
And I'm not sure about vice versa though. If you can read stuff or import it into WordPress though.
If you can read stuff or import it into WordPress, I need to look into that more. So what protocol are we talking about?
Well, to understand that, we have to understand who's created it. And that is the World Wide Web Consortium.
So this is the International Standards Organization for the Web. So this is the International Standards Organization for the web.
They used to be one of the main arbiters of HTM So they now kind of oversee the direction of HTML, the W 3 C contributes to that, but they're not in charge of it.
However, the W 3 C is still involved in determining what's cascading style sheets. Waff is a file format that's widely used for fonts on the web.
Xml, which I know most of you have heard of PNG graphics SVG graphics which are one of the most important graphic formats.
On the web or in the world today. So in July, 2014. The W threec said, you know, we need a protocol that's going to kind of fix some of the problems that we've seen with social media over the last 15 years and that's where you get One company like Facebook that completely dominates an entire area
of social media and they can basically do whatever they want. They're in control. So if you decide like I quit using Facebook years ago, well, It I still have the account because every once in a while somebody will post details about a meeting or a reunion and the only place they posted to Facebook, which is
horrifically annoying. So on those occasions I have to log in, look at it, and leave.
Because I don't want Facebook to know what I'm doing. So I don't wanna use Facebook.
I try to block Facebook wherever I can. So the thing is, if I got rid of my Facebook account, I cannot access Facebook at all then.
At that point and people that do that awesome more power to you. In my case I have the account but I just don't ever use it.
But the point is, if, same thing with Instagram, I used to have an Instagram account and then Facebook bought it and I deleted the account.
I got rid of it entirely. Well, I have friends that send me links to Instagram photos all the time, but I can't view them.
Because you have to log into Instagram to look at it. So, oh well, I can't see it.
Well, with the Feder, that's not the case. That's not the case because no one company is in control of everything.
Imagine if Google was email. All email had to go through Gmail. And if you didn't use Gmail, you had no email.
That's where we would be. But we are there with Facebook and Twitter and by the way, Elon Musk as of a week or 2 ago, you used to be able to look at tweets without logging into Twitter now.
You must log into Twitter to look at tweets, which means if you don't have a Twitter account, you can't see the tweets at all.
So one of the things that the W 3 C wanted to do was try to see what they could do to solve this problem.
And so in July, 2,014, they launched the Federated Social Web Working Group.
And 40 years later, there was work by committee. You know how that goes. 4 years later, they publish the activity pub standard.
And so that is the standard. All of these services and softwares that I'm gonna be talking about with one exception.
Are using on the back end so that they are all federated. Now, it does, it does things in really well.
It's got some slight flaws. Like everything does that can be hammered out. But there are aspects to the, the Federb built on top of activity Pub that are odd or different to people coming from other social media.
Well, one of the reasons is Who was behind the development of Activity Pub at the W 3 C and what their concerns were.
So lead author Christine Lemner-lemer Weber notes that the team predominantly identified as queer, which led to features that help users and administrators protect against quote undesired interaction because obviously if you're gay if you're a person of color, if you're other minorities, you would often get
harassed horribly on Twitter and in other social media. And so one of the goals of the people developing activity pub was making it possible, making it much, much, much more difficult for that to happen.
Now, personally, I think that went a little too far in a couple of cases and I'm gonna talk about that with you or I think they and they're working on pulling some of those back and modifying them.
She also notes that the team authoring activity pub had no corporate participation, which is great. So for instance, no ads.
You will not see ads in the Fed because not because you can't, but because as soon as they appeared people would rise up with pitchforks and stop using those services.
So as I said, activity pub is the dominant protocol used in the Feder. Now there are a few others.
As you can see in this chart, there's one called can interrelate with it.
There's one called diaspora. There's one called DFRN and these can all in our work with them to a degree, but not fully.
This is I thought a really cool diagram showing some of the branches that the Feda burst has taken on where there's multimedia.
Social media services built on top of activity pub. We're going to talk about pixel fed and peer tube for instance.
We're gonna talk about next cloud, which is for file storage and sharing. We're gonna talk about, I talked about WordPress, but we're also gonna talk about mastodon very highly, and Lemmy, which are social networking also.
And then there's others as you can see on the side there. But there's a huge variety of services and software with new ones seemingly coming out every other week.
That are all built around the concept of the Feder and all using Activity Pub as the basis.
Now some of you may have heard of GNU Social, that it does not use it that uses one called Oh status, which others used to support.
But for instance, Mastodon used to support O status and it moved Activity Pub once that was published.
And you're seeing that almost everybody doing that. So as I mentioned, the really big deal about the Feder versus decentralization.
No one controls the Federburs and each instance is independent from all the others, but they can be federated and in many cases they are.
So different instances, different services can federate. But not always. So I'm gonna give you an example.
Yeah, yeah.
Hey, Scott. Quick, quick comment here. You real what you just turned the clock back 40 years.
This is exactly what BBS is did back 40 years ago.
Yeah, there is similar. Yeah. Yep. People, you know, what's old is new again, right?
So this is a great example of Better the better verse and moderation in action as far as I'm concerned.
So there was a service, a website. And a app that was very briefly in the Apple app store and the Google Play Store, but it was a website called Gab.
Okay, and it was similar to Twitter. People could leave messages and comment. Well, Wikipedia says widely described as a haven for neo-Nazis, racists, white supremacists, white nationalists, anti-Semites, the all right, supporters of Donald Trump, conservatives.
right libertarians, and believers in conspiracy theories such as Qanon. Gab is attracted users and groups who have been banned from other social media platforms and users seeking alternatives to mainstream social media platforms.
So you would see people that engaged in absolutely heinous behavior on Facebook, Twitter, other services, Reddit, and they would get banned and they would tend to go to GAB.
Because the whole point of get was, hey, free speech. You can say whatever you want. We really don't moderate anything.
Well, there were problems with that because anytime you allow anybody to pee in the pool, that's gonna cause a real problem for people trying to use the pool.
And so in May, the 2017, Gab publicly launched. Well, October, this is an example, but one on October 20 seventh of 2018 Robert Gregory Bowers killed 11 people in an attack on a Pittsburgh synagogue.
He was a heavy gab user with neo-Nazi references in his profile and neo-Nazi references and posts on the site.
And in the following days, as a result of that, PayPal, Godaddy, Joyant, which was their hosting provider, Stripe and Backblaze all dropped gab as clients because they didn't want to be associated with this.
Well, that really hurt Gab. And what happened was they kind of limped along for a little while and then July fourth, 39, Gab said we are now switching to a better infrastructure that we control.
And it's a fork of mastodon. So Gab is available to today. And it's a mastodon for, which we're gonna talk about in just a little bit.
Well, here's the beautiful thing about them doing that. It's great. I'm glad they did it.
Because virtually overnight every other mastodon instance, be federated with GAB, at this as did almost every other service based around Activity Pub.
That means they blocked them. So the Nazis, the racist, the freaks on Gab, they can file their own pool with as much filth as they want but they can't connect with anybody else in the Philippines.
And we can't connect with them. So they can't harass people elsewhere. We don't have to see their garbage.
That's good. That's great. If you if they wanna go and be in their own pit.
Great. Let him go do that. As long as they can interact with everybody else. So that's federation and D.
Federation inaction. And that brings us to next cloud. So I wanna give you a look. Yeah.
A quick question. Of the, so now you still have a pool of dirty water, but now It's part of Mastodon, right?
So.
Yes. No, no, no, no, they're using the activity pub protocol. Right? But nobody really is connecting with it.
Yeah.
They've blocked them. They're using a fork of mastodon. Right, which is by the way what Trump's true social does, they forked Mastodon to make his little social network.
But again, people de-federated with that as well. Yeah.
Okay, and maybe I should wait until you give us the part on mastodon but I guess I'm uncertain as to, you know, all these.
All these groups companies that disassociate it with when they were independent. Oh, no. Now are they going to be?
Well, think of it this way. What if, they had created, an email service called Gab Mail, right?
And, and horrible people could use that, right? Well, what most organizations would do is they put a block in place saying we don't accept mail from Gab Mail.
Yeah.
Right? So they could still email each other. Right? And the few tiny other email services or servers that would enter would allow them to interact with them, but almost every other service would just say we're not gonna interact with them.
Good.
Okay, go on.
They're blocked. That's that's what I'm talking about. Okay, so next cloud and this is dish I'm starting out with with a interesting a weird one to get to the more main more common stuff.
But next cloud is a suite of client server software for creating and using file hosting services. It's basically similar to Dropbox, Office.
3 65 or Google Drive. And you can download the code. It's open source, although there's there's a proprietary closed source implementation as well.
It can be hosted on the cloud or on your premises and you can synchronize your cloud storage with local clients on all the major platforms.
And that's what it looks like. That is the next cloud file manager in action, right? Looks pretty good.
It's supposed to be a really nice little service. Well, in 2018. Next cloud introduced next cloud social, which integrated activity pub so that next cloud servers could federate with mastodon.
And other activity pub services. The idea being if your company or organization is already using next cloud, you could enable next cloud social and then people inside your company could use this as a way to communicate with each other, but also with the outside world and the outside world could communicate with them.
So that's just one simple idea about this one way that's been done. So that's kind of an outlier.
Now though, I wanna talk about what I've been talking about already and that's mastered on.
Let's talk about mastodon here because mastodon is the flagship Feder service.
It's the one people tend to think about when they think about or hear about the Feder. It was first released in 2,016 by Eugene Roch, who was in Germany.
At that time it was using that other protocol. It switched to activity pub a few years later. Basically, it's similar to Twitter.
It's not an exact Twitter clone in many ways, but it is similar to Twitter. It's a micro blogging or micro sharing service.
Currently it has 2.1 million active users and as of yesterday there were 8,900 different servers set up up each independent servers set up up each independent and most federated with each other.
So the code is free and open source as is virtually all the code we're going to be talking about.
I thought you guys would find this interesting. The back end uses Ruby on rails and Nodejs.
And the front end is written with React and Redux and the database is Post-res QQL.
So that's the home page and right off the bat you can see what they want their message to be.
Social networking that's not for sale. Your own feed should be filled with what matters to you most, not what a corporation thinks you should see.
In other words, not what a corporation thinks you should see. In other words, not what a corporation thinks you should see.
In other words, not what we have with Facebook and Twitter. Now it's possible with Twitter to switch to a chronological feed.
But they really push the feed with the algorithm deciding and we all know that's the case with Facebook and that's been the case for years.
And this is a real pain because most of us, I think, would if when they got on Facebook, you did it because you wanted to follow the people that you cared about.
And so early on, that's what you saw. You saw every post people you followed. Well, then they started saying, well, why don't we start putting in posts that we think you'll find interesting.
Or why don't we put in post that people pay us. To shove in front of you.
And now it's to the point where you really can't see. Everything that your friends and family are posting because it shoves so much other topics and things in front of you because they want engagement and what did they discover causes engagement anger.
Outrage. And so consequently things on Facebook that get surfaced and sent out to a lot of people if they're not paid for tend to be things that are often untrue, exaggerated, just flat out wrong because people got pissed off when they saw it and left a bunch of comments and shared it
a million times. And so consequently it did the job for Facebook. They're happy about that.
And in fact, I've seen cases many, many, many cases where people that got on Facebook to try to build on Facebook to try to build a business in terms of letting people know about them, to try to build a business in terms of letting people know about them, letting people know about the kind of knowledge or services they offer.
And Facebook comes along and says, well, you know what, if you paid us, we would make sure it got in front of more people.
So it's a shakedown routine to get people that have started relying on Facebook to pay them money.
In other words, you might subscribe to me for instance on Facebook, but not that I'd use it.
And at that point, I would expect that if I, if I have 500,000 followers and I write a post and hit submit that 500,000 people would have it in their news feed at least.
They might not all see it. They might miss it, but it would be in their newsfeed.
That's not how Facebook operates. Only tens of thousands will see it. If I want more to see it, I have to pony up and pay Facebook and even then they're not gonna give it to everybody.
They're only gonna give it to some of the people. So that's what they're talking about here.
So if you scroll down. This tells you more about the features than mastodon offers. Mastodon supports audio, video, picture posts, accessibility descriptions, and that's really emphasized and stressed unmasked on a lot and that is if you post an image or video, you need to post
a short description of it for accessibility reasons. And there are people on mastodon and it's a not insignificant number that if they follow you and it's a not insignificant number that if they follow you and you start posting and it's a not insignificant number that if they follow you and you start posting multimedia and
don't include a insignificant number that if they follow you and you start posting multimedia and don't include a description, they'll because again, that's one of the aspects, the cultural aspects of the service that is important to a lot of people.
Polls you can do polling on mastodon content warnings which is another big thing they're really big about that if you think somebody might be offended by it.
Or you're posting a spoiler for instance, you can put a content warning on it, right?
And people have to click on it to see it. Now it's possible to turn that off and say, I don't care.
Show me things with content warnings. I don't want to have to click on every single one, but it's completely up to you.
Animated avatars custom emojis thumbnail crop control and more So they have all these features that enable you to search.
I'm sorry to share whatever you pretty much want. And this, no algorithms, no ads.
Michael.
They're based on donations. And organizations giving them money, donating them money. So there are no ads, there are not gonna be any ads.
And as they point out, chronological order, that's what you're gonna get.
You're not gonna get algorithms. Nobody's gonna decide what you see and in what order it's straight up chronological.
Somebody was gonna say something.
So I was got what's crop control in the on the previous slide?
I believe that means you when you upload a thumbnail of yourself you can choose where the cropping goes.
It doesn't just center it.
No, no, no. No.
Oh, okay, we're not talking about farm animals here or something. It was 1984.
Oh boy.
How's the And this is very interesting. Moderating the way it should be because decision-making goes back in your hands and the instance you choose to basically set up shop on.
Because each server creates its own rules and regulations, which are enforced on that server. Not top down.
Now if an instance says great we're gonna allow like like I said, neo-Nazis and people to say whatever they want and docs people and dog pile on them then other instances are going to go great you can do that.
So there are certain things almost every instance says. Right? No racism, no attacking people based on who they are.
No gore on a lot of instances, not everyone, things like that. Well, you can choose the server you want, not everyone, things like that.
Well, you can choose the server you want based on their rules, their regulations, the way they do things.
Right. And mute, but. The instance you choose has controls over who they federate with and who they don't federate with.
So, You can do your own because it's open source software. You could set up your own mastodon server and maybe do it just for you or invite a very small group of people and have them access and use that.
We could set up a slug mastodon instance and anybody that wanted to or maybe people that had to be members of Sloane.
I don't know, whatever we decided would be able to get accounts on that server and then we could be together on that server. And then we could be together on that server.
Now, we could be together on that server. Now, you're gonna see why that's important in the next slide.
I'm gonna explain part of that because keep in mind even if you joined the slug server and got an account there, you could still interact with the rest of the Federation got an account there, you could still interact with the rest of the Feder, you could still interact with the rest of the Fed. It's just your identity and you could have as many identities as you want.
You could but your identity would be, at Scott granneman@sloo.social, let's say.
Right? That would be the identity I would use to access the rest of the Fed. And that meant the people that set it up at slug would be the ones in charge of moderation.
They would set up the rules and be able to So this is gotten to be so. Oh, dog piling.
Dog piling is when bad actors, decide to attack somebody or make their life miserable and they either dox them and expose their address.
Our phone number, our place to work, and people start harassing them. Or people to start spending sending them hundreds if not thousands of disgusting nasty harassing threatening messages.
That's a dog pile. Where you basically sick the mob on somebody. And often that person is a minority, you know, a nobody, things like that.
So as a result of all this excitement over the Federburs, Wikipedia or wiki media rather as of just a few days ago set up its own instance at Wikipedia.
Now, I don't know if it's publicly available right now as you can see there. I took the screenshot a few days ago.
They had 23 users on there. So I don't think they're opening up to everybody yet.
Okay, but it's exciting that they're on the Federb and you can follow them at Wikimedia Foundation at Wikimedia.
Dot com. But, Mozilla. Who makes Firefox has done the same thing.
They set up their own instance, their own server as part of Mastodon to join the Federation at Mozilla.
Social. And I noticed they have a hundred 92 active users, which makes me think they're more open in terms of signing up.
And then I saw on the right there earlier today where it said, trade account and sign in.
So I didn't test it because I've been busy getting this ready but that tells me anybody could join that service at Mozilla.
Social and That's become one of your right if not your identity by the way. Why would it be nice for Slew to create its own instance?
Well, if you look over on the right side of this screenshot you see it says explore local federated.
Okay. Federated, if you clicked on that, you would see posts from every single instance that, Wikipedia has federated with.
In other words, you're gonna see stuff flying by. Okay. Way more than you probably want to see, but you could kind of dip your toe in, maybe find somebody interesting, check their stuff out, decide to follow them.
Local is only people using your server. So if we set up a sloop. Dot social. A person could click on local and we would only see posts that other members of sloop dot social had made.
Which might be a really nice thing. Now, of course, you could also pick and choose who you want to follow and then click on that.
So you would only see the people you're following. In the chronological timeline. So if I if we had a salute dot social and artist started to follow Lee and Stan and Sean and Tony, right?
Only those 4, let's say, because Gary made me mad. Well, when I clicked on that, I would only see those 4, let's say, because Gary made me mad.
Well, when I clicked on that, I would only see post from those 4 people. That would be my feed.
But if I clicked on local, I would see everybody that was posting to Slug Social. And if I clicked on Federated, I would get the fire hose of everybody doing that.
So that's why you want to think about which server you're on because the idea of everybody doing that.
So that's why you want to think about which server you're on because the idea is, hey, you may want to see what other people on that server are posting because you have a shared interest, So turns out, there are plenty of apps, but Mastodon's web interface is very, very
good and a lot of people just use it. So that I logged in earlier today on my iPad that is in the browser.
I am using the browser at that point. And so in the left column, there I am, dead at my profile and I can post in that box over there.
In the middle, those are people that I follow. So I'm seeing the post from the people that the chronological posts that I follow that is the, home, but I can adjust that.
I can change that to say, no, no, no, I can adjust that. I can change that to say, no, no, no. No, I'm on mastodon.
Dot as my server. So I could say, no, no, show me everything on mastodon.
Dot social, which I wouldn't do because it's the largest instance and so I don't wanna see 500,000 people's posts go streaming by.
I have a reason I chose that server though, which I'm gonna address in a moment. Or I could say, show me every post on Mastodon right now that mastered on that social is federated with.
So those are the different ways you could use it now. But if I click on advanced interface, I get this multi column interface, which looks like tweet deck.
So those of you who knows, know that. What tweak deck is, then you can see here that's what it looks like.
It's very, very similar and you control the columns. So the first column is where you post the second column could be your home, which would be the ones you're following, but you could just easily change that, you could just easily change that, show me everything or show me everything on my instance.
The middle column in my case, I have notifications and that's people that have responded to me or people that have followed me or polls that I've interacted with.
And then the final column in this case. And so this is showing me ones that I have done that for, but it doesn't have to be that.
I could change them out. To whatever I want. So in this case, I said, well, let's change what it is.
And so you can see what my choices will be. I could see all my bookmarks. I could see my choices will be. I could see all my bookmarks.
I could see my lists, which I'll talk about in a moment. In fact, There you go.
I'm gonna click on Explorer and as you notice these are posts from across the social web that are gaining traction today, newer posts with more boosts and favorites are ranked higher.
Okay, now if you want to call that an algorithm, I guess you could except it's purely based on what are the popular things that people are interacting with and they're surfacing that because the idea is well you might find some of that interesting it might be a good way to find other people to follow but you have to go to
that. You have to choose to see that. That's not forced. On you.
Or in this case, this is showing me popular hashtags that people are using across Mastodon today.
These are hashtags that are gaining traction. Hashtags that are used by more different people are ranked higher.
And again, I could click on the hashtag and go see all the posts using that hashtag as a way to find more people to follow or learn more about that particular topic.
Yeah.
This is Scott. I lost you. What's a hashtag?
A hashtag is an Which you probably call a pound sign. Followed by a word. That's a hashtag.
And so. Thank you, Watch. So, the idea on Twitter originally was people would they all started when people were at a conference and and somebody said hey everybody that's gonna be at this conference.
And somebody said, hey, everybody that's gonna be at this conference, why don't we all put Octthorpe are again pound sign or hashtag name of the conference.
And then we can, everybody can search for that on Twitter and we can see all the posts from everybody that's at the conference.
And people started doing that and it worked out really well. Well, Twitter noticed that. And over time made them clickable.
So if you saw the hashtag, you could click on it and that would take basically do the search for you and show you all the tweets that had that hashtag.
And on the sidebar of Twitter they showed you the most popular hashtags so you could click on it and see what everybody's talking about on a particular topic using that hashtag.
So Kevin Mitnick died the other day and so you'll notice that hashtag. So Kevin Mitnick died the other day.
And so you'll notice that the third most popular hashtag the day was hashtag Kevin Mitnick.
So if I clicked on that, I would see all the posts. 89 people have used that hashtag in the last 2 days.
So I could see all the posts that people had used with that. Free Kevin going back to the phrase people said when Kevin Mitnick was arrested back in the late nineties and so on.
Yes, it does.
It keyword.
And then, news. These are news stories being shared the most. Newer news stories posted by more different people are ranked higher.
And so there you go again. Again, this is all your decision and it's all very much based on popularity.
Not what the company thinks you should see or what people have paid and so on. So it's great for that for that reason.
Now you can use the web interface. But I use an app called Mona. Which is free but you pay a tiny amount like 5 bucks 8 bucks something like that to one time to get unlocked the whole thing and I use Mona because it's really powerful and it's highly configurable.
So what I recommend that for non nerds. Not really. I would probably recommend ivory to most people.
Or others. There's plenty out there, but I want I'm a person. I'm a nerd.
I like customization. I like power. I like being able to customize and do things and check out stuff and change it.
And so Mona is great for my purposes. So I opened it on my iPad and I went to my home and so these are posts people have made on Mona.
And so I'm looking at them there. By the way, if you look at that second post down, that is in
I don't think that's is that Spanish?
Is that is that something else? I don't know, but if you see those 3 dots at the bottom of that post, if I clicked on that, this menu of options would show up and one of them's translate.
And if I tap that, it will then show me that post translated into English. So I could in fact respond to it if I wanted or at least read it.
And so there you go. I've got 3 posts here. You just go like that to look at the rest.
And so on. Now what I did on Twitter and what I do on Mastodon is lists.
So, when I was using Twitter, I was following something like 800 or 400 500 different people, different groups.
And obviously it was a chore to try to get through stuff and so I started using lists and so basically a list is a topic you come up with and you assign accounts into that list.
And then when you click on the list, you only see those accounts that you've associated with that list.
So as you can see and I duplicated the list I had on Twitter on Mastodon.
So I have a list called Apple and that's people that primarily post about Apple related stuff. I have one about arts where people post about music and movies and arts and books.
I've got one called Essentials. I've got one called Essentials, which are ones I don't want to miss.
So I always look at Essentials, which are ones I don't want to miss. So I always look at Essentials and those are ones I don't want to miss.
So I always look at essentials and those are people drawn from all over the place, but I don't want to miss what they say.
Friends, humor, politics, read, which are posts that recommend things to read.
I've got a St. Louis one. I've got a tech. I've got one for Webd.
You can make as many.
Could a good could it be on more than one list of the same?
Oh yeah, yeah you can post it to more than one list. The only problem is when you go to that list, you'll see it again.
So I try not to do that. But you could. Absolutely. So, I organize things in lists and then I make sure to read the lists.
So for me, if I don't have a lot of time, I'm gonna read Apple Essentials and Tech.
I gotta make sure I read those. And then if I have time, I'll dip, I'll dip into others and look at those.
So, for instance, this is my Apple list and so Michael Sein, Matt Burchler, Daring Fireball, Jeff Johnson.
Those are all Apple people, you know, people that are active in the Apple blogosphere or, you know, posts or developers and so on.
And so I've grouped them all together so I can read everything they have to say about Apple and related matters.
Now, that's an example of what a list is. Again, you make the list. You figure out what you want to do.
You don't have to. It's just that's how I recommend to do it. Now if you're following.
That's just people. It's not topics.
Okay.
Right, that's accounts. Like Wikipedia could have an account that I follow, right?
Right.
And I put, in fact, I do. They're in tech. Right. Rs Technica, the news website, they have an account.
They're in essentials. But Michael Sein, Matt Birchler, Daring Football is a guy named John Gruber and Jeff Johnson.
Those are all individuals, but it could be, you know, whatever an account was set up to be.
Whether it's
So you could have an engineer account. Or a list and he could post it. Oh, I just got a DWI.
Okay.
Alright.
Sure, sure. If you wanted, yeah. So this gives you an idea of the massive settings that are available in Mona.
One of the reasons I really love it. Because this is the top part and then the bottom 3 sections are the additional things.
So you can control and, that's why I started using Mona because it gave you the most control over everything about the app and how you interact with it and how you use it.
So, so Mona is only available for on Apple or
I think it is only available. Let me look.
Let me look.
I know it's obviously available on Apple. Whoops.
One limitation of the Android mastodon app is that you can't follow a tag. At least last time I tried a couple of weeks ago.
You couldn't, I think that feature would be pretty useful.
Yeah. Yep. Yeah, it's weird. It's like, you know, there's a million mark down editors, but there's way more on Apple platforms because it was started by John Gruber and Apple guy.
And it's kind of the same thing with mastodon. I mean, obviously anybody can use it, but like, You guys all know Apple developers, they tend to stick to the conventions and the Apple standards and stuff like that.
And so. You know, they tend to be a little better. Why can't I find the website.
It's it's not in black doors.
It's what? Okay. It's on the play store. Okay, thank you.
It's not in the place or at least for. At least for 11, and 11.
Thanks. Okay, thank you. So, but there's others. I mean, there's others.
There's plenty out there. Okay, so for instance this, so, this is the settings for when I click on that little 3 dots there.
On the right there. So as you can see, this lets me order what's at the bottom of each post.
So I decided, okay, replies first, then repose, then favorite, then I bookmark, then translate.
And then that dot dot dot, well, that would be select text, open in browser, copy, share mute, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And I can enable them by tapping that little green thing to say show it or not and I can reorder it by touching the hamburger menu on the right side and dragging it to reorder.
So I get an enormous amount of possibilities for interacting with, every single post that I see.
And even the buttons on the left. You can control. And so this is the control for those buttons on the left.
So listen notifications. You can't see on the far left because I scroll down a little bit, but you can see search, hashtags, home, communities, messages, So, there you go.
It's very, very, very customizable. It's a really great out. Now, Master, Nothing is there are pain points.
For instance, I'm gonna talk about some of these in depth, but before diving in you got to pick a server well for a lot of normal people that's right there where they go.
What do I have to do? Because obviously if you sign up for Twitter, you don't have to worry about that.
You're on Twitter. Or you're on Facebook or whatever. It's harder to find people trying to follow someone on different instances can be tricky.
You can move to a different instance as long as the first one doesn't disappear. You can only search for hashtags, not words.
There's no sub-posting. I'm gonna talk about that in moderation can be hard.
So let's talk about that. When you join Mastodon. You can go to join Mastodon, but what they say there is, hey, you have to select a server.
An instance. Well, Originally they just showed you a list of a bunch and said here's searches you can use to find others and there's Thousands and it was a little overwhelming because instances can be based on shared interest locations like St.
Louis or Berlin, professions like archaeologists or just be general instances. Say no, work anything.
But and remember, that's a good thing because like I mentioned earlier, each instance has its own code of conduct, terms of service, privacy policy, privacy options, content moderation policies.
So the idea is you can pick the one that meets your needs and interests. But this can also be overwhelming.
So I like what they did here. The, the guy that, run, that invented masses done and oversees it also oversees mastodon.
Social which was already the largest instance. So that is first in the list and that's there to help people if they're like, I don't know what to pick.
Well then pick mastodon. Dot social get started because you can move to another instance. So.
You can move to another instance, but you can only have your your that one ID on that one instance.
No, you could say, I'm no, I had this idea on this instance, but I'm creating a new idea.
And you can go into the settings and anybody that was following that old one will now be following the new one.
Which is nice.
So you can link you can link IDs but they're they're identified by instance and the ID.
Okay.
Correct. That's correct. So if you want mastered on social like to get started and then later you'd like found a FOSS instance, right, focused on free open source software, you could go, I want to go there instead.
Now you could keep your old ID, but you could also say, hey, everybody, my new one that I want everybody to really use and know about is this one.
And do that instead.
So if the instance that you signed up for goes down or is out of service.
That's the problem because if the instance you signed up for disappears, then all the stuff you did on that instance goes away.
Okay, so and that's happened once or twice where, and that goes with moderation is hard.
People were on a smaller instance and the moderator for whatever reason. Just started, screw this. I'm not doing this anymore and just said I'm shutting it down in a week.
Well, at least he gave people a week to move to a new instance. But there have been ones very, very, very few and that's why you got to be careful.
But there have been instances where they shut off one day. The person doing it just you know, who knows what and it just disappeared.
And at that point, you're gonna have a problem. Now, You know, that's why you back stuff up.
Because Yes.
Question about ID. To is it real name ID or do you make us up something like a handle or?
Do whatever the hell you want.
You can call yourself pink plug or fly if you wanted, right?
You know. You could do pink butterfly@mastodon.social. Yep, that's on that's not well.
Let me take that backstand some instances might say you have to use your real name. But I bet most don't.
Okay, but some months.
And, name collisions. Is that a thing? Is that possible?
Oh sure, if you're on that, if you if I'm on an instance as pink butterfly and you get on the same instance and try to be ping butterfly that's not allowed just like an email address.
Right. But if there's a pink butterfly in another instance, that's not gonna collision.
You know. Totally. Totally because it's based on that instance. That's where the collision would be.
Okay.
So a mastodon has a page, but there are plenty of other sites that have done this where you can search instances.
It's just the one on the main mastered on site, but these are some of the topics that it's categorized instances into.
But there's a ton more out there. You can just search. And find it and ask other people.
That's something I see people ask all the time on mastodon. Hey, you know, I'm interested in this topic.
Does anybody know of a good instance that does that? Where people talk about this thing or focus on that and people will recommend it.
So it's really, and that also gives you an opportunity to go look at that instance and find other people you might want to follow, So, here's an example where I said, okay, I want instances in English where the sign up process sometimes you have to be vetted, sometimes it's wide open.
So all means it's both vetted and wide open. Legal structure again, that's how is the community moderated?
Is it moderated by a group of people that are elected. Is it benevolent dictator for life?
And region. So I said, okay, North America, show me anything. And so these are some that came up.
Right? Mastodon dot party, which is widely used. Stranger. Dot social MSTDN plus and I scroll down opal stack dot social for professionals and brands.
I'm gonna mispronounce this horribly. Sakuragima. Mo a non-toxic inclusive mastodon server for anime manga Japanese media fans and content creators.
Tutors.org When you make a post on Mastodon, the original word was Toot, so you would toot and I don't think the guy in Germany realized why that would be kind of funny to English speakers and Americans and those of us who have 10 year old boys still in our heads.
And so they kind of deprecated that and are like, let's make a post, not a tut.
But tutors is queer owned and operated a safe space for LGBTQ people. Beekeeping dot ninja for those interested in gardening beekeeping and the outdoors in general.
Here's another one. Scostodan for sca musicians, artists, fans, rap dot social, sunny dot garden for indie craters who draw paint, sculpt, right, design, play, singer build and mass musician dot social an instance focused on musicians who create player love jazz
rock pop indie classical and all other kinds of music and these are just a few Okay, then I said, okay, let's look at, technical.
So these are technically focused. Instances. INFOSEC exchange is huge. There's a lot of people on there, a lot of people if you follow security you'd know that are on that instance for info and cyber security people.
Hackoderm. I/O is a safe space for Black Lives Matter LGBTQI for tech industry professionals.
Techub dot social for passionate technologist Deathcon for hackers, policy researchers, etc.
VM st. I/O for respectful technologist geeks and nerds of every kind.
A RRR mass dot HP for high performance computing all things tech for those who love all things tech and social and on and on and on.
And again, you can go there, check it out, look at the post, see some of the people that are posting and if it looks like a place you might want to be create an account.
Now again, some of those you have to be vetted. And remember, these are run by normal people a lot of times.
So they often will slow down or shut down the ability to create an account because the server is getting overwhelmed and then they need to add more infrastructure or they need to try to like, you know, keep the lid on and prevent a million people from getting on there.
So it just depends. You have to see what it see what the case is. Now, as I said, what if you don't like the instance?
You can move to a different one. However, if your instance disappears, things can get complicated. That's why you keep backups of followers and who you follow and so on.
Well, that's why I went with mastered on social, the biggest one, stability and longevity.
Cause the guy that does that leads the mastodon project. Overseas mastered on social. I think it has 500,000 people on it or had at least that.
So I'm not worried about it disappear. So that's why I went with that. But again, you don't have to.
It's up to you. This is a
So if you move to another instance, what do you take with you?
The people that were following you
That's what
But if you, but if you follow them for the new instances that Well, I guess what what happened?
What do they see?
Yeah, so I was following a guy and he was like, hey, I'm moving to a new instance.
You don't need to do anything and he took care of it in your profile. You say, oh, pointed people to this one.
And so the next day all of a sudden I was no longer reading him at ABC. Social I was now reading him@xyz.social I didn't have to do anything.
Oh, so you're saying it'll send a push change to your machine if they change host.
That's a good question, Lee. I don't know if it's push. Or if it's more like a forwarding.
I have to find that out. That's a really good question. I don't have the answer that right off top of my head.
I would guess the difference there would be that if it were a Push and the original instance was turned off tomorrow if the push went out tonight.
Right. It would still work. So I'm thinking that must be what happens. I'm thinking that must be what happens, but I'm not sure.
So here's the problem. If you join Twitter or Facebook, they're gonna recommend all these people for you follow, mostly celebrities.
Some news maybe. Right? Well, they don't do that. It's up to you to find people.
Well, how do you find them? There's no algorithm. Well, if you're a Twitter user, look at the people you already follow to see if any of them mentioned mastodon in their profile.
So for instance, I used to be a very heavy Twitter user. Well, one of the first things I did when Elon bought the company was I changed my the name that appears when people looked at my posts, my tweets to say Scott Graneman at Graneman at mastodon.
Social because that way I was letting people know, hey, I'm also on mastodon and so every single tweet I did.
Would have that on there so people knew, oh, he's there. And notice I had 640 followers and I have no idea how many of them came over.
But, a lot of those people, I'm sure some of those people at least also want to mass it on and they knew where to find me because I told them and before Elon There were websites you could go to where you could put in your twiddle and Twitter handle.
And you hit a button and it would then look through all the people you followed to see if any of them had mentioned Mastodon and then create a list for you that in a spreadsheet format that you could then import into mastodon and it would automatically follow all those people for you.
Which was really handy. So I used that several times before Elon decided to remove any access for sites that do that.
Hey Scott, 40 leaders, please explain what you which part of that is your handle.
At Scott Granneman was my Twitter name. That was my Twitter handle, but what appeared above it was my name, which you could change.
It didn't have to say Scott Granneman. It could've said, got, you know, guy with hat on.
Or Linux user, you know, they didn't have a real names policy. It's just I'm like, I'm gonna use my name.
So for years.
No, what is your handle from?
At Granham and@mastodon.social.
Okay, so it's so that it's Yeah.
That's how, thank you, Lee for asking that. All mastered on handles are at your handle at your server.
Okay, thank you.
Yeah, they thank you for making me say that. Right, because obviously if I would just put at Grantham and they're not gonna know what instance that is.
So you always had put the instance too. And that's the format. Yep. So, and I always regretted being at Scott Granham and I was like, why didn't I just do, And so for years after that, whenever I signed up anything else, I always used Gran as my username.
And so. Again, in 2018, I think that's when I joined Mastodon pretty early on.
I made sure I did at Grantham. On that because that's what I want. Now, another way you can find users is by searching for hashtags.
So you can search for hashtags and follow people you see that use those hashtags.
And then it you follow people or other you find other people, check out the people those people follow. Or the people that leave comments on their posts.
So you have to be active. You, you can't just sit there and expect the service to spoon food, spoon feed you a list of.
People to follow and accounts to follow. You have to go find them. If they're a public person, go to their website and see if they mentioned mastodon or just ask other people.
Hey, here's some cool people to follow. Now, one thing about search and this goes back to the people that developed Activity Pub wanting to make sure that they couldn't get harassed and so on is you can only search for hashtags at this time not words.
Because a lot of people were concerned that if you can search for words, then bad people would be able to find them and dog pile them.
Now this is gonna be changed. Because too many people are complaining about this and saying, so if there's an event.
You know, whatever, I can't just search for that event or for words about that event.
I have to hope that people posting about it used hashtags and figure out what they are.
Right? And so, the Eugene, the guy behind Mastodon said, we're working on that one.
And I think what they're gonna do is they're gonna say, it's opt in.
You're gonna have to go into your settings and say, I'm opting in to go into your settings and say, I'm opting in all of my posts so they can be fully indexed and searched.
And I think that'll satisfy people. Right? Because if you're a person like Nope, I don't want people to be able to find my stuff that way, then you don't opt in because again, unlike the big companies, Mastodon's opt-in, not opt out.
In other words, they're not saying, oh, we enabled. So every account by default is search.
You have to go in and turn it off. That's not that's what Facebook does. That's not what Mastodon does.
They do opt in. If you want to do this, you have to go into the settings and enable it.
You know, because I think I don't have a problem. Also, you can't quote post somebody.
So if I see a tweet on Twitter and I wanna put a comment on that tweet, I can click a button and that creates a new tweet with the up the tweet I want to comment on underneath, like embedded in my tweet.
Right? Well, That's not there on Mastodon because again, people thought it was It allowed people to be a rest because a bad actor could see that, Sean had posted something and then, you know, Go to, and then leave, you know, look at this idiot.
Let's all, you know, let him know how stupid he is and then people would pile on to him.
Well, the thing is, That's not really that big a problem when mastodon. And that's causing a problem because people are like, I really want to be able to do this.
And in fact, some of the at Mastodon apps enable you to do it. So Mona, I can do that.
Now that means though if they're on using software that doesn't support that. They don't see it.
They just see a link to the post. They don't actually see it embedded. So you can share links to other posts, but you can't embed the post in yours like you can't embed the post in yours like you can on Twitter.
With your links to other posts, but you can't embed the post in yours like you can on Twitter. This is also, I think, gonna be changed.
And what' If I want. Also, you have to, this goes to moderation. Moderation is difficult.
In fact, you know, I read tremendous amounts about social media and a lot of people have said, you know, the thing you're actually getting when you use a social media service is moderation because you rely on the service to keep child porn Nazis, racists.
You know, bad actors off the service. Right. And again, that's one of the bad things that Elon Musk is done to Twitter because he's decimated the moderation team.
Well, you're relying on the moderators of your instance. And sometimes they can get burned out.
They can make bad decisions. They can ignore problems. They can act with a heavy hand. And that's why it's a good thing that you can move to different instances.
And that's why I decided to use mastodon. Social because Eugene has very clear rules about what's on there and he is Very concerned with blocking bad actors and deaferating from bad actors.
And so I've grown to trust. His level headedness and his decision making. So to wrap up with Master Don, give it a try.
You got me to follow at least. At granthaman@mastodon.social, but you know, it's not gonna cost anything.
It's totally free. And see what you find out there. I think you might just enjoy it.
It's pretty cool. Yep. Okay. Now let's talk about blue sky.
Because this has been something in the news. So.
Can we get gonna just put a question about matched on? So. You mentioned that anybody can do their own instance.
And you mentioned that it's a post-gres, database. So.
That is what
I don't know if it has to be post Chris. I'm not.
Well, I'm just, I'm just, my question is, like, is that database like, Universal, like everybody gets a copy of that database.
How big is that? Like if you do if I do an instance do I get a copy of the full database of all Macedon.
No, you would get ones that you connected to.
So the pose go into that database.
Okay, so that would propagate to Okay, so that would populate onto my database.
That's correct. That's correct. And you can purge things. There's a purge, like you say, You know, purge everything after 30 days or whatever.
I have no idea. I have no idea.
And that's readable at the database level or is that. Encrypted it somehow like or privatized or
No idea.
Well. I don't know why that matter because they'd be public post in the first place.
They use one.
Cause you can, use it, use it to, you know, to this great data.
You know, it's a
But if it's public, you could do that anyway. You see what I'm saying?
Well, I mean, it's a lot easier when you have a database. You don't have to go scrape the web, you know.
Well, I'm saying I'm saying if you're concerned about the data that's in the database, you're getting that from.
Public post that you're following that are going into the database. So it's public anyway. You know what I'm saying?
I don't know. I don't know.
It's just like I can't go on Facebook and like get you know give me download your database I can't go to Facebook and download the full Facebook.
No.
Yeah, but I can't download the full Facebook database. In other words, I can't.
Well, you can download your stuff, of course. From. Course not. You don't control Facebook.
Yeah.
Right, right. But, what, this you're saying, I almost could. Download the whole database.
No.
Right.
If you followed me, my posts are gonna be in your database because you're following. But they're public anyway.
So I don't care. You see what I mean? So.
Oh, yeah, that's also a one reason why you might not want to run your own mass tonight.
So if you federate with somebody and they post child foreign well now you have child point on your server, right?
And you know, you, you didn't want it there. You didn't do anything to make it there, but just by running amass it on federating with someone else and they posted it. Now it's on your server.
So if the authorities look at that somehow then you could you know and I've heard this is like a reason why people don't want to host their own Macedon.
Instance.
I think that's an overblown worry personally. One of the things that most instances do I know is there's an, group of moderators that discuss who the problem instances are and they basically created a block list.
So the second. That there have been problematic instances appear. They are extremely quickly blocked. And then that is shared with everybody, imported into everybody else's and they're blocked immediately too.
Awesome.
So, and the other thing is remember that we're still governed because they haven't destroyed it in Congress yet.
Of the DMCA and that says you know you're not responsible for what other people post as long as when you find it you know you're not responsible for what other people post as long as when you find it you deal with it if you're notified or So you do have a defense there.
Hmm.
By doing. So you have you have a couple of
Do you know anything more about the activity pup? I think you called it a protocol in one of your slides.
So I'm trying to like think about it like. You know, you have like HTTP, HTML.
I'm Martin. Let me look.
Stuff like that is. Is, is activity pub more like HTTP or is it more like HTML or like what would you?
I'd say it's closer to HTTP. Then, yeah, it's a protocol.
Decentralized social network networking protocol.
There you go. Provides a client server API for creating,ating and deleting content as well as a federated server to server API for delivering notifications and content.
So if you go to activity pub. Dot Rocks ROCKS. You can read all about it.
Good question.
So I have a. I keep, this kind of reminds you of IRC a little bit.
Yes.
But like, you know, you see at the next level or something or IRC, you know, evolved.
Well, it's micro block, right? So yeah.
Right. Alright, thanks.
So blue sky, let's talk about that real quick because that's a quote unquote competitor to mastodon.
It was spun out of Twitter in 2,021 by Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and then CEO of the company.
He is in fact on the board of directors of Blue Sky. It is still invite only there's only 300,000 people that even have accounts and from what I've read they're only seeing about 30 to 50,000 people using it.
It is also supposed to be decentralized, but it does not use activity pub. They decided to develop their own protocol, the AT protocol instead.
And so they are basically saying, hey, we're gonna do moderation in a different way. And they certainly are.
There have been growing pains. This is just from a few days ago. July fifteenth turned out blue sky was allowing people to include the N word in their usernames.
They have not blocked that. Out of the box. They had not actually gone in and put that in other awful words in a blacklist that would not allow people to create users names.
You know, oops, you'd think somebody would ahead of time would have said, maybe we should put a blacklist that would not allow people to create usernames.
You know, oops, you'd think somebody would ahead of time would have said maybe we should put a blacklist in here so people can't use horrendous racial and, maybe we should put a blacklist in here so people can't use horrendous racial and other slurs in their names.
You know, and Jack Dorsey's backing blue sky, and other slurs in their names.
You know, and Jack Dorsey's backing blue sky. Oh yeah, and then we remember things like Twitter was researching.
Whether or not white supremacist should be kicked off Twitter or not. Researching, cause you don't know, maybe we should allow white supremacists to stay on Twitter and do their white supremacist thing.
Right. So this is from just a few days ago. How's blue sky doing?
8 million dollars initial funding. They just got 13 million more. They are refusing to hire an actual moderation team.
As a result, we've seen moderation disaster after moderation disaster. People are really upset about this.
They are demanding proper moderation. However, currently moderation is falling onto the back end developers working on blue sky and the total number of people doing that is 2.
So 2 people are not only coding the whole damn thing, they're also responsible for moderation.
And if these guys are developers and programmers first, which I assume they are, I really don't think they should be spending their time doing moderation as well.
A, they've got better things to do. And B, that's not their skill set.
So this is crazy. So we'll see what happens. We will see what happens.
Jamie, use, Shame you can't use chat GPT to moderate.
Well, II wouldn't want to do that either. Yeah, let's see.
Yeah.
So let's talk about threads. This is the new hot one. So on July fifth. Meta entered July fifth.
I mean, fifteenth. No? Yes. Do I get the date wrong?
I think I got the date wrong. Give me one sec.
So.
Well, yeah, July fifth. Okay, God. Seemed a lot shorter. It's been 15 days.
Wow. So on July fifth. Twitter meta rather the company behind Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp introduced threads, a Twitter clone.
And that was just a few days after Elon Musk. Brilliantly announced. That he was going to limit how many tweets people could see.
Free users were only gonna be able to see, I think it was 300 people could see. Free users were only gonna be able to see, I think it was 300 people that could see free users were only gonna be able to see I think it was 300 people that paid could see something like 600 and then other people could
see 900 and of course somebody pointed out on Twitter that they were they were therefore able to go through their entire lot when it tweets in 12 min.
And at that point you had to wait till the next day. And as people pointed out, this is a rather odd thing to do when you are advertising based and want people to see ads and in fact that's why I used to to force people to sign in to see the tweets.
Is also rather odd if you have an advertising based business because you want to make it as easy as possible for people to see your site so they can see the ads are shoving in in front of their face.
So that was the perfect time and Zuckerberg, I don't like the man, but buddy's no fool and Zuckerberg said to his team, we're releasing it now and capitalize on another time.
Elon Musk has tripped over his own feet. And so they introduce threads. Their Twitter clone and within 5 days.
They had a hundred 1 million users. The fastest growing consumer app in history. The one before that was chat GPT, which took a month.
To get it to a hundred 1 million. Right? So, KT took a month. They didn't in 5 days.
And the number of people that used Twitter at its height is around 400 million. So they got one fourth the total number of Twitter users in 5 days.
With this app. Why did it grow? Yes.
I heard yesterday that was up to 150 million.
Oh yeah, no I knew it was it was a hundred 30 like 5 or 7 days later now a hundred 50.
Yeah. Oh yeah. Now I'm not gonna use it. I'm gonna talk about why.
Yeah, it's on my face.
And just a sec, but it's a bad. So why did it grow so fast? Well, people were obviously looking for a Twitter alternative.
But, and this is the brilliant move. Threads is tightly coupled with Instagram when you went and lot 500 million people use Instagram daily.
Well, when you use Instagram on July fifth, a button appeared saying, why don't you try threads?
It's time. And if you do, if you click that and create a threads account, it's gonna use the same handle you have on Instagram.
And anybody you follow on Instagram that's using threads, you're now automatically gonna be following them on threads.
And that gets rid of the problem of who do I follow? Because now if you follow 150 people on Instagram, well, anybody of those 150 that signed up to use threads, you're now gonna be following them on threads as well.
But, but remember it's tightly tied to Instagram. Your threads handle is the same as your Instagram handle.
And in fact, Threads, Meta, Publish and FAQ in which they explain that if you delete your threads account.
Oh, you also delete your Instagram account as well. So it's a it's kind of like Hotel California, right?
You can sign in anytime you want, but you can never leave unless you're willing to completely get rid of.
Your Instagram account as well which I'll obviously a lot of people use and love Instagram Now, maybe the biggest reason of all.
Why threads has done well is because unlike Elon Musk, Zuckerberg and Meta know how and again for good and for evil know how to capitalize on social networks know how to run social networks know that we've got Instagram we're gonna leverage this new app on top of that and that was brilliant.
I love this picture because it's a highly unflattering picture of him on vacation in Hawaii when he put way too much sun screen on his face.
And Gary, you'll appreciate this. Several people thought he looked like data from next generation.
Yeah.
Or the joker or the joker. So threads is really new. I mean it's 15 days old.
So, you know, I can't give you. Hard and fast things about it but a lot of people have signed up it's up to 150 million Let's see how many people are actually gonna continue using it.
That's the real measure, right? Meta says and is sworn it is said over and over again.
It is announced it that it is going to add sport for Activity Pub. But we don't know when.
And they settle it'll take a while and what form will that take? Now, a lot of Fedaverse users are freaking out about this.
And saying, oh my god, we and then a bunch of them have already signed an agreement saying we're gonna de-federate threads the moment it connects the activity pub.
And people are saying crazy stuff that has no basis in reality about, well, they're gonna be able to shove ads in our faces.
No, that is not what they will be able to do. People that use threads, if there's no ads right now, they would be, if there's no ads right now, they would be see it be able to see ads that threads put in there.
If there's no ads right now, they would be see it be able to see ads that threads put in puts in there.
But if I'm following somebody on threads, I'm not gonna see their ads because that's not how it works.
And it's under crazy alarmist stuff like that. You know, Facebook's gonna get your posts.
They're public. I mean, they can already get the post. They're completely public.
It's stuff like that and I have to credit again Eugene Rochco. He actually has a blog post team made the day threads came out that was very level headed very reasonable and he's like, I'm not blocking.
Because I want more people to use this. This is gonna mean more people. Are going to get involved in the Fed averse and they're going to find out about this.
That's a good thing overall. That's where my, that's where I lie as well.
I think it's foolish to just block it for hysterical reasons that there's no basis in reality.
And I say that as a person that really loves Meta as a company and Zuckerberg as a person because the things they could do don't have a basis in reality.
I think it's good for them to get exposed to it. And that brings me to this reason.
You know, the biggest concern. Is. And remember, I refuse to use these is foxes don't change their nature.
And this is why I said I will never use threads. I quit using Facebook. And then Instagram and WhatsApp because Facebook is a data sucking machine and they want it every possible thing they can get from you. Well, I want it every possible thing they can get from you.
Well, I wanna one of the cool things Apple did in iOS, 15 Every app in the app store has to have an app.
Privacy description kind of like the nutrition information you see on food you buy in this country. And the developer has to explain what kind of data they want access to, what they're doing with it and so on.
So that's there's nothing for them to specify because they don't collect any data.
Well, likewise, Mona. On the right there, the developer does not collect any data. Great.
And in fact, yeah, I look at apps before I install them and if they're collecting a huge amount of data, I don't install them.
Right? I mean, I have a choice. I'm not, if you, if you're collecting way too much stuff and trying to tie my account with advertisers, marketers, screw you.
I'm not gonna install your app. Well, I went and looked at the threads app and let's see the data that they're collecting.
Holy shit! Health and fitness, financial info, contact info, user content, browsing history, usage data, diagnostics, purchases, location, contacts.
Search history identifiers sensitive info and I love this and other data. What's left?
As one person I was reading today said the only thing that's missing is you have the right to remain silent and if you cannot afford a lawyer one will be provided to you.
Right? I'm not gonna use this app because this is the same crap that Facebook and Instagram collect as well.
So I'm not gonna help that. I'm not gonna install that out. I'll connect to somebody using threads the day that they build activity pub in.
Because I might wanna follow that person, but I'm not gonna use the app and the service, no way.
So that's the rent. I wanted to talk about yes.
But it if FEDs does use Activity Pub though. Does that mean that they wouldn't be able to do what Twitter did and make it to where you can only see the posts when you're logged in.
Or like what Reddit did where it jacked up the price on its API to kill third party clients because
We don't know. That's why I said we don't know what form it's gonna take.
Yeah.
No, they're talking. The correct things. They're saying the right stuff. Okay.
But does the protocol allow it though? Like is there something in the protocol that would allow them to block it somehow or rate limit it in some way or something like that.
Well, they could they could make the server private, right? Like having to authenticate to see the content.
I don't see why they couldn't. You know.
Yeah, I'll do it only be on activity club like by themselves, right? So. Yeah.
Right. I mean, like I said, they're saying all the right things. Let's see what happens.
And it's gonna be a while. I wanted to talk about Discord very briefly.
I know some of you guys. Don't use it at all or never heard of it. Discord started out as text and voice cap for gamers.
And it's gotten much, much, much bigger than that and really expanded its usage. For old timers think a discord is a modernized IRC.
So here I open Discord today and you can see my list of friends and groups and then on the far left or what they call servers and that's where somebody has created like we've created a server for we could create a slew Discord server that you access from inside Discord, but then inside that server you can have all
these different chat rooms. Right. So I belong to one for an app called Discord. Sorry, not just for D script.
That's the fourth button down there on the far left, the blue D. And when I connect to that, they have all these different rooms for newbies, bud reporting, problems with X, problems with why.
I need help. I want to show off my work and so you can connect to those and start chatting.
With people. I use it to play games and use it for voice chat. So in this screenshot, this is the group of people that I play with when I apply to play co-OP games.
And so I've initiated a phone call and my 4 front my 3, my son, my brother and our friend could join in and then we can all talk to each other while we play our games and normally the quality is excellent.
Which was one of the reasons Discord got popular because there used to be all these other solutions and they sucked.
You never, you know, you'd spend forever trying to get them to work. And they would drop the quality and I remember 1520 years ago, you know, whenever we were gonna play a game we'd spend the first 20 years ago, you know, whenever we were gonna play a game, we'd spend the first 20 min trying to figure out why we
couldn't play a game, we'd spend the first 20 min trying to figure out why we couldn't hear somebody or why nobody could play a game we'd spend the first 20 min trying to figure out why we couldn't hear somebody or why nobody could hear me or you know and And notice you can also do text
chat. As well. So I like Discord for voice chat with family and friends while we're gaming.
It's excellent. I love it. However, it sucks when it comes to a lot of documentation and support.
And so of course, a lot of projects and companies are moving all their support and documentation to Discord.
And that's horrible. That's a bad, bad choice. It's good for what it's good at.
It's bad for other stuff. So this is a quote from a guy named Terrence Eden.
Discord is perfect for ephemeral communications. It is not an effing substitute for documentation.
I can't use search because people don't know how to thread. So I'll see questions and not replies.
You can thread, but you have to do that. It's not the default. When I do find replies, it's hard to know how relevant they are because like IRC everything is just run together.
And so a typical Discord chat would look like. What's the command to go a full screen?
Anyone know how I irrevocably format my disk without confirmation? Oh yeah, it's easy.
Just pass the hyphen F flag. Is that for the first one or the second one?
Right? So you can see the problem. A guy named Gunner, people always forget that Discord is a chat room.
It wasn't meant to replace forums or archives. It was meant for chat and of the moment posting.
Finding any historical information and discord is near impossible because of its search features are garbage and that is absolutely true and that's why it is extremely for us, it is extremely frustrating when you're interested in a project or an app or software and you discover that they're like, oh, need help, go to
Discord. Like that's useless, that is completely next to useless. So why does so many projects use it?
Because the whole point is they don't have to answer. They hope someone else from the community will before they get to it.
And I posted things on this on groups and nobody answers and it disappears so it's now 500 lines up.
Right? And so I have to repost it and hope somebody else sees it before all the other replies push it into oblivion again.
It's it's just not it's not a good solution for that so I wanted to talk about that with you guys so you're aware of it.
Okay, let's talk about Reddit. Steve Huffman, co-founder and CEO of Reddit.
Who's a shaky as a shady guy on June fifteenth. Said long story short.
My takeaway from Twitter and Elon and Twitter is reaffirming we can really build a good business in the space at our scale.
I think one of the not obvious things Elon showed is what I was hoping it'd be true, which is you could run a company with that many users in the ads business and break even with a lot fewer people.
In other words, I think Elon's been great for Twitter. Firing 70% of the workforce was brilliant.
They're doing great. And you look at somebody saying that and you're like. What? Are you in the same world?
That everybody else is because this is nuts. So in 2,008. Read it when it got when it came out introduced a free API.
The developers can access that allowed developers to access posts and make comments. And, that tell people many, many people use Reddit.
Read it later made their own app, but it's garbage. Nobody likes the Reddit app.
It's a terrible app. It doesn't have accessibility features that are needed by people with accessibility.
It's not a good app. So developers, however, were able to use that API and create moderation tools because they're sucked.
And create third party apps that you could use to interact and read Twitter. I'm sorry. Reddit and this has been the case for 15 years.
Well, remember. The Reddit's business. So if you're showing adds. On web pages where the content has been freely generated by the users.
They're not paid. And guess what? The moderators that do thankless jobs and that deal with all sorts of crap.
They're not paid. They're volunteers. So their whole business, they're making money.
Off of free content and free labor that people are giving them. Well, the moderators hated Reddit's built-in tools because they sucked.
And so instead they would use third party apps and tools because they were far better. That was what many of them said allowed them to do their job.
This disabled users hated Red It's app and it's redesign. Because it's not very accessible.
And in fact, Read it, rolled out a redesign years ago of their website and it was so universally loathed and hated that they have kept the original design still in place at old.
Dot com. But that's undoubtedly going away too because Steve Huffman, that's undoubtedly going away too because Steve Huffman is discarded like Twitter to screw run it out.
So a lot of users and moderators hated what Reddit provided. So they use third party apps.
Oh, where's this old?
The most popular one was an app called, Apollo and Apollo was awesome.
It was I used it. That's how I read Twitter. It was great. It was beautifully designed.
He added new features all the time. Apple showcased it over and over. Reddit showcased it and talked about it.
Well, on April eighteenth, Reddit announced we are now going to start charging for API services and he literally said Steve Hubman don't worry we're not gonna do crazy pricing like Twitter did because they jacked their API pricing to ridiculous levels.
Because we're gonna be doing an IPO and we need to grow up and, you know, start making money.
And we need to grow up and you know start making money. Well the prices they charge were astronomical and ridiculous. We need to grow up and you know start making money. Well, the prices they charge were astronomical and ridiculous.
The guy that did Ap Was it a year or a month? A camera which it was but you know crazy Crazy amounts.
And so he said I'm shutting it down. I have to and most other third party apps and services shut it down as well.
Well, that caused a mass protest. By moderators who said if you take away the tools we need to moderate and you're abusing the people that help build your company, then they went black, they turned off access to the rent to the subreddit.
They said some of them said you can only post about certain topics that were wildly off topic and so on and a lot of them quit.
And said we're not doing this anymore and we're inviting everybody to move to other places like Discord, which I was like, no.
Don't do that, but several of them did other websites and one called Lemmy. And I want to talk about, but several of them did other websites and one called Lemmy.
And I want to talk about Lemmy with you as well. And so let's talk about Lemmy.
Lemmy is a free open source Reddit replacement that was created in 2019 and in the last month people using it have gone like that.
It federates with another service like it called, but it federates with everything. But there's another very similar reddit replacement called K bin that it explicitly federates with, but iterates with others.
And so this is the home page of Lemmy. Follow communities anywhere in the world. Lemmy is a self hosted social link aggregation discussion platform completely free and open not controlled by any platform and not controlled by any platform and not controlled by any platform and not controlled by any company rather.
No advertising, no tracking, no algorithms, not controlled by any company rather. No advertising, no tracking, no algorithms, contents organized in the communities like Mastodon.
So there is not one Lemmy. Lemmy is the platform. Anybody can set up a Lemmy server.
And federate with all the others. Or with other activity pub based services, right? Right there. Join a server, run a server.
You can do this yourself. And so I think that's really cool. So now we've got basically a service, a software that lets you create federated reddit clones out there in the world like mastodon with creating federated Twitter similar sites, but all of it's connected.
All of it's connected, cause it's all using activity Pub. Now I thought this was fascinating.
Why did he name it Lemmy? And if you go to the website, you said I had 4 influences as to why I Number one, Lemmy the Motorhead who rock's rest in peace Let me pupa from, Nintendo, a wedding video game and winning and this is where the most famous song is to stay but if you don't like it and you
don't like it and you don't want to turn it off you're way too late.
Is it an awesome kick ass song? Here are some of the features that they advertise about Lenny.
It's all open source. It's fast. It uses rust, diesel, type script.
It's got very powerful moderation tools. Again, just like mastodon, each server sets its own policies and you can host your own And so here are more features.
Easy to deploy via Docker. Good interface. It does have a nice interface. Mobile apps for iOS and Android.
You can vote just like, old Reddit. Feming emojis with autocomplete support, user tagging, image uploading, notifications, internationalization support for over 30 languages.
So, yes.
Question. Is it a server or a client?
Well, it's kind of like mastodon. If you set up an instance of it.
Right? You could then create the little discussion. Topics within it that people could join and access on your server or you could just be you and you could use it to connect with others.
Both, right?
Yeah.
Okay, does it do the, active though? Amsterdam protocol.
Oh yeah, activity pop. It's entirely based on remember everything I'm talking tonight is based on activity public blue sky.
Well, and for at this point, but they're gonna go to activity phones.
Yeah, but that's a non issue.
Right. I agree. Good.
Well, the problem with Lima though to me is that there's There is no, the like the federation between the servers, sure.
But there's no federation between like the subreddits or communities or magazines or whatever they're called, right?
So. So each server can have its own like video games subreddit. So if you wanna see all the close about video games, you have to like find all these different servers and join each one of their little subreddit things, right?
Oh, you're absolutely correct.
I mean, unless I'm misunderstanding that. But it's very decentralized and to me, that's just not nearly as good.
Which is Well, that's the good thing and the bad thing, right? What I've noticed is this.
There might be. 15 video games but if you actually click on them a lot of them will have 0 posts And then like one of them will have hundreds.
And so, and maybe the another one will have. 50, right? And so you kind of go, oh, I see which one everybody's kind of gravitated into.
So I'm not that worried about that. It is the case, but I'm not that worried about it because I think people are gonna gravitate to main ones and that'll just kind of shake out over time.
Because
Is that not the same case on mass or not? If you if you're looking.
Well, you could create and it could create an instance all about Linux or the Linux users group could create an instance all about Linux or the Linux users group could and somebody else about Linux or the Linux users group could and somebody else creates an instance all about Linux or the Linux users group code and somebody else creates an instance all about Linux.
Right. And so in that case, you have 2 different servers focusing on Linux. And so, but the nice thing is, remember, you could join one and then access or follow people on the other.
Hashtags.
Okay, so how would you find you I know you can follow people what about topics Is there a discover topics on a
You can follow. You can follow hashtags. And subscribe to those. So you could subscribe to the Lemmy hashtag on another place and have it show up I believe.
I don't know. I'd have to find out more about that. That's another good question.
Oh.
Yeah, yeah, when you when you search hashtags at least on my app on Android when you search a hashtag you'll get anybody who posts under that hashtag that your server is federated with.
So I see people from other servers. Who post the same hashtag now. Limi is different because it's more like a form.
It's like it's like mastodon and a form combined and the problem is There's a lot of different, there's like several different forms.
Right.
It's not just a hashtag that's the same across all instances like Yeah, anyway, it could be like video underscore games on one server and then it could be video games all together on another server.
You know, so it's like, it's different. I don't know. It's
Well, the reason I ask is, I use Discord all the time because Arch reactor has their main you are in their main information center on there.
Right.
And there's a channel for each topic. There's like 22 up 20 of them. But the channels wouldn't translate to Macedon, correct?
They could? Let me.
Well, I'm saying what if you were looking for a channel metal project, how would you find an
Well, let's say. What was the name of the, server? Arch reactor?
Right.
Yeah, that the that's on Discord.
Right, so they could create an instance called arch reactor. Right. And an instance for, something else all under their control for each of these different groups.
Right so there'd be 20 instances instead of 20 different servers in Discord.
Well, no, a Discord has one server and 20 channels.
Channels, I'm sorry. Thank you. Thank you. Like, got that backwards. You're right.
20, channels. So each channel would be an instance.
Okay, so you'd have to have 20 and instance per channel basically.
I believe so. I could be wrong, but I believe so.
So.
Okay. Yeah, the discord just seems more. You know, II think the structure of Discord is more useful in that type of application.
Whereas the general discussion which is where master down and limit your focus.
It depends, right? Every, you know, different tools suit different purposes totally and no one tool is obviously right for everything.
So let me, as you can see here from these dates has been under very active development. They're working really hard on it.
And again, there is a list of servers that you can check out. And so I just showed you a couple here that are recommended, but I went to their list of, local communities.
And so these are the different communities and you can see the popularity. So the most popular one is technology with about 11,000 users a month.
And if you go to that, there's gonna be a huge variety of different questions and topics and things people are discussing.
And, many of these are coming from Reddit, like shower thoughts, mildly infuriating, you should know.
Those are all straight coming from Reddit over to here. This shows you all communities it knows of.
And so again, you can see the variety there. Some of them are overlapping. Like that and so that's what it might look like.
So this is showing. The local, anything going by on this local Lemmy server. Going by.
I did a search because this is one of the really useful things with Lemmy. You can I search for Linux and this goes to what you were talking about a little earlier.
So you can see there's a Linux memes@lemmy.com. And this goes to what you were talking about a little earlier.
So you can see there's a Linux memes@lemmy.world, Linux gaming at Lemmy.
Dot world Linux at Lemmy. Ml right but if you notice the number of subscribers you can see that, Linux at Lemmy ML has 7,300 subscribers as opposed to the one with 300.
No, I'm not saying the one with 300 is bad. But I'm just saying the one with more people is gonna have more discussion going on and so on.
And so when I predict over time is people are going to gravitate toward the ones that are already larger because they're gonna have more people there.
Hey, what app is that? Cause I'm only being able to search like one server at a time.
How are you searching a bunch of different?
That is that is MIMI for Lemmy.
Okay.
Just came out recently a couple of days ago. I'm using that on my iPad. I don't know if that's available on Android.
In this case, I search for Ubuntu. And so, you know, still started out.
There's not that many. I search for Fox. Well, there you go. Foss at Bihad.
Dot org, 2.7,000 subscribers. Boss droid@social.com. I search for Apple.
I joined Apple Enthusiasts and Apple. And so why? Because they had the most people on.
So I wanted to, I would rather discuss or learn Apple stuff. From 12,500 people than one with you know a hundred 52.
Now again, that doesn't mean Apple Maps is bad. It's just I was more interested in general discussion.
I search for gaming and again retro gaming, gaming at Bihar, gaming at Lemmy MML, PC gaming a cave in dot social.
So you're right. It is spread around, but this gives you the opportunity to click on them, check them out, decide which ones you've got to go with the opportunity to click on them, check them out, decide which ones you've got to go with.
And again, I think people are eventually gonna gravitate toward the bigger ones. And I thought you guys would like this.
I search for Windows. The largest one is 235 people. Which I thought was pretty funny.
Okay.
And the other thing about Lemmy is they have great documentation. Their documentation site is very detailed. Please notice both for users and for administrators.
If you want to install it and configure it and so on. So I wanted to give them kudos for that.
There are new apps appearing every day for let me, in various app stores on iOS.
We have Mimi, which is what I was showing. I'm going to show you to you again in a second.
And Lim just came out on Android, which is what I was showing. I'm gonna show you to you again in a second.
And Lim just came out on Android. Made by Lemmy people, connect.
There was an app called Sync for Reddit that's now migrating to work on Android.
And I'm sure there'll be others. So this is what Mimi looks like. When I use it.
Now I tilted this in landscape so with the screenshot bit better. But obviously this could be.
Normally I use it in in a portrait not landscape. That's ML.
I don't think the design is as good. Yet, but I think he's gonna work on it.
I think for instance, if you look on the left there where it says Apple underscore EMT new line who's That does not look good.
That needs to be fixed. But this app is brand new. So, I know the guys got it out to try to capitalize on the interest in it right now.
So I'm cutting it some slack right now while the guy hopefully works on it and gets some of the UI scrubbed up and looking better.
That's Lenny. I like it a lot. I've been checking it out. Peer too is one I thought you guys would find interesting.
That's a free and open source decentralized video platform built around activity pub and web torrent.
It is an alternative to YouTube and Vimeo. It was released in 2018 very actively developed currently as 600,000 videos on 1,000 they call them as 600,000 videos on 1,000 they call them platforms or servers and again you guys could set up your own. They call them platforms or servers. And again, you guys could set up your own if you wanted and host your own videos.
And again, you guys could set up your own if you want it and host your own if you want it and host your own videos and when people wanted to see them it would use web torrent for you want it and host your own videos and and host your own videos.
And when people wanted to see them, it would use web torrent for them to go get to for them to So that's the Pier Two's website and alternative to big text.
Video platform and it is developed by a French nonprofit. So again, not a company out to make bucks.
This is a nonprofit doing the work on this and you can search for videos. They have a search engine they call sepia search that searches all the different instances they call sepia search that searches all the different instances of pier 2 And so I searched for Linux and it found 10,000 videos.
That you could look at. Or 237 different Linux channels. Or 50 playlists that people created for Linux and I could display more if I wanted there.
So I wanted to bring that to your attention because you know organizations and people are still small but there's putting their videos on here.
I'm nearing the end. So I wanted to talk about pixel fed with you. Pixel Fed is a free and open source photo sharing service that uses Activity Pub for Federation.
It's an alternate to Instagram. It was released in Act in 2,018 and it's actively developed.
It allows you to make a post. And share between one and 10 photos or videos per post. Now I just signed up for today and haven't had much of a chance to play with it.
On their site they said up to 15 MB and I'm like Does that mean each photo and video can be up to 15 MB or the total?
Of the photos and videos per post. Is 15 MB. At this point, I don't know.
I'll have to find out, but I wanted to point that out. And you can use with, image formats, JPEG, ping and webp.
I would only use Webp. I would and MP 4 for videos. That's what it looks like.
Explorer and share beautiful videos, photos and videos. And again, you can find servers that are things that you're interested in.
The largest and original one is pixel fed dot are things that you're interested in. The largest and original one is pixel fed dot social.
So I joined that one today. But there's tons of others. Out there, you can search for them by country, language, and so on.
This is not the only place to find the list. Notice that the network has shared 14 million photos of 177,000 users.
There are 820 active servers with around 216 people per server. There are 820 active servers with around 216 people per server. So again, it's still small.
That means
By the way, yes, the furries are on pixel fed because furries are everywhere. Got to love the furries.
So again, you wanna create your own? Go right ahead. You can host your own pixel fed instance or server and then federate with everybody else.
So I went to pixel fed. Social, which has 4.9 million posts, 11,000 active users, 88,000 total users, and I signed up for the account there.
And so I decided, okay, I'm gonna make a post. So this is what it looked like.
I chose the image. I chose one image. And I put my little post there. It insists that you put all text in there and that's what goes in that box.
So I did that. I could market if it's sensitive or not safe for work. I could tag people like you can on Instagram.
I can add to a collection. I added a Creative Commons license to it. I did put my General St.
Louis location and I said it's public. And so I hit post and a moment later, there's my dog looking all cute as hell on there.
And so I made my first post. And then I found people to follow because I knew some of the people that I follow on Mastodon also use pixel fed.
And so I followed several people. And of course the people that when I found one of them, the people they were interacting with, other people I wanted to follow. So I followed them.
And so this is what your feed is going to look like again. Chronological based on who you follow.
No algorithm, no ads. And so I was able to see Federico Teaches, post here about this.
And there were plenty more. Now, this is where it gets really cool. You can follow mastodon accounts with pixel fit.
You just basically take the handle, the full handle. And paste it in the search box and then it says do you wanna add this to pixel fed and you say yes and now using pixel fed you could read somebody's mastered on feed and you can do the reverse.
You can use mastodon to follow pixel fed accounts. And so never even have to get a special pixel fed app.
You'll just be able to, look at it in Mastodon along with everything else along with videos along with anything else we've talked about today.
And what's interesting though, you have to remember is, by default, mastodon, a pixel fed is, if you use pixel fed to subscribe to mastodon.
By default it's only gonna show you mastodon posts with images in them. There's a check box in the settings of pixel fad that says also show me post the desktop text.
And so that would then allow you to look at. Anything you subscribe to on Mastodon, but let's say there are people that post photos on Mastodon and you're like, I just want to look at him in pixel fit.
You could do it. That is the beauty of Federation and the growth of the Fed averse all based around this activity for protocol.
The fact that it's easy to host your own. It's easy not to be under the thumb and control of these companies that do not have our interest at heart.
Okay.
Not the customer, not the customer. You're the product, not the customer. So these are really growing daily.
It's a very exciting time to get involved with the Feder. I hope that the services I talked about tonight have inspired some of you to try out some of these and let me know I mean let me know I'll follow you.
What you're doing out there, let everybody know. Maybe posted to the discuss list as we get going in coming days.
Maybe posted to the discuss list as we get going in coming days, but I think this would be really exciting and really fun. I think this would be really exciting and really fun.
And a good way to get to know each other better and see some of the cool So anyway, that's it.
That is my look. Sorry.
Okay, my brain hurt. What? But my brain, what did I miss? Pixel fat.
Why don't I just put my pictures into mastodon?
You could. You could. But remember that if people really are interested in photography, they're going to be going to pixel to look there.
Yeah.
Right? I mean, I know people on Twitter that I'm sorry, mastered on that that publish cool photos.
But I don't know of anybody that's like, I primarily post photos and I'm gonna use mass to dump that.
I'm sure they're all. I'm sure they're all, I don't see any of that.
Right. So if you were like, I really wanna, I wanna link up with other people that are into photography and sharing and discussing images, then you want to go to Pixel fit.
Right? And at least create an account. But if you're like, I really only want to use one app to read everything.
You could put all the pixel fed accounts into a pixel fed list. And then click on the pixel fed list and mast it on to see all the photos and materials that people have posted there.
For instance, that's one thing you could do. The idea is get creative. You know, once you realize everything is linked together, you can start accessing what the different information out there in ways that are beneficial to you.
And, that's always good. That's a good thing and you're helping out free software, open source software, you know.
You're doing your own thing. I think it's I think it's great. I've been really excited by it.
I hope I hope it excited some of you guys as well.
So. I'll take any questions or comments that anybody has.
How about if we just email it to
The discuss at Slew the mailing list and put picture in the subject line and there you have it.
I was gonna say you can't post a attachment.
If you can't post. Yeah. It is.
Scott, this is Jonathan.
Yeah, hi Jonathan.
I have a few questions.
Do you recommend for a beginner mastered on over the other social networks?
Well, it depends what you wanna do, right? So if you're like, I wanna get into discussions with people in a forum like.
Atmosphere that I would look at Lemmy. If you're like, I wanna do more like Twitter, micro blogging, follow people, you know, then I would recommend learning mastodon.
So if I.
Quirks but the documentation is good people will help you i'll help you so you know, just depends what you want to do photography.
I'd look at pixel fit. It just kind of depends. Where you want to start, you know.
I'm looking for technical communities. Thank you.
Well, I would probably look at me or Mastodon.
For BSD and.
Oh sure.
Non system D, Debian distributions.
Yeah, I'm sure. I mean, I'm sure there are. I just didn't search for Debian.
But.
So I copied on your Macedon address if I send you an invite. You won't follow me back or whatever.
Yeah, just, just follow me and just, you know, send me, you can send direct messages.
On the mastodon so you could do that. And or you know or refer to me if you made a post that the top the actual content of the post was.
Hey, at Granham and at mastered on social.com. I'm on mast and done now.
I'll see it in my notifications because you've referenced me. You see what I'm saying?
Oh, I see.
Cause my notification show me anything I directly interacted with. Or if anybody follows me or if anybody mentions me.
So Scott social social social at mastodon or whatever is the main.
Right here. It's right here. Oh, I'm not sharing my screen anymore. 1 s.
1 s.
That's the main.
No, no, no, no, no, the feather burst is. A huge collection of everybody using Activity Pub.
Mastodon. Dot social is the largest mastodon server. But there are gazillions of others.
Okay, so you if I join that one that I'm for sure I can connect with you
Oh, most definitely. I'm on master on social but I mean What, let's do this.
Let, let me continue sharing. But let me get out of this. And let me go to join mastodon.
Dot com.
So, John goes, I'd like to join Mastodon and I'm interested in stuff having to do with BSD.
So you click on servers. And. You know, here's a list of servers, you know, like, well, I want English.
And I want technology. There's 570, and I want North America, let's say.
So there's 57 and so you would kind of go through and look at this list and if anybody have BSD or maybe you're like Well, these guys right here.
Techcub dot social. Say there for everybody. So I'm gonna go check him out. So unfortunately you can't click on it, which is dumb.
So I would highlight techub. Dot social. And I go to that. And I can start reading what people are posting on and I can search.
And remember, you can only search for hashtags.
So that is everywhere. 10 people in the last 2 days have used the BSD hashtag.
So if I click on that, okay, this guy is on mastodon. Dot social. This guy's on Foster Don that might be one you wanna check out.
Is fostered on.org. That's a pretty big one. And so you could read them and go, oh, where is this guy at?
Where's that guy at? And maybe there's an instance called BSD talk. Dot social or whatever.
Right? So in this case, Foster done. Right? You might click on that and go, I'm gonna check out Foster.
So. As you can see, here's the address up here. So I'm gonna get rid of everything.
Except foster.org and let's go check out Foster.
Alright, and so these are I wanna see local, so I click on local. And now I am only seeing posts from the Foster Don server.
Okay, and so you could scroll through here and look and go. See that's a warning but it's for a spoiler from a movie.
Right. And so you could go through and look at the postcard. People talking about the kind of stuff I'm interested in.
And see that way. There's other ways.
Yes, if you go to instances. Dot social. This is kind of a neat thing where you ask you a couple of questions.
And so I'll say, okay, I speak English. Do what, what size do you want?
Do you want less than a hundred less than 500 less than a thousand or less than 500 less than 500 less than a thousand or less than or it doesn't map.
So I'm gonna say doesn't matter. And then, okay, what's your policy on moderation?
Do you want to allow nudity without not safe for work or do you want to say no that's not allowed?
Do you wanna allow nudity with not safe for work? Yeah, that's okay. Or no, I really don't want to do that.
It's a tech server. No, I don't want porn. Linked to legal content. I don't care.
No spam. No advertising. Spoilers, that didn't bother me. Next.
And it goes, okay, here they are. And you can search. So now you can go BSD.
Oh, there you go, bud. Only.
It.
I type the wrong thing. Yeah, only bsds.com. Server for those interested in the BSD operating system with the sense of humor.
That has 35 statuses and 4 users. It's pretty tiny. But you could grow it.
You know? So that's the
Is it?
Yes.
Is that an open group?
I'm sure it is with 4 people, but who knows? Go to instance.
Yep, sign in.
There it is.
We 5 or 6 people tomorrow morning.
Yeah. That's right, that'll be 5 or 6. Exactly.
So is.
So that's what you do. You go to join Mastodon and look at that. Oh, search for search for mastodon server and thought social is a good, that's the one I just showed you that has that wizard to help you locate some that might be
II just brought up another question. So there's only 4 people on that. Is that higher risk of going away.
That instance. Because there's only 4 people on it.
Of course. Right, and you don't know who's really the moderator or owner and he could be like, hey, only 4 people signed up.
I'm not gonna do this anymore.
Who knows? You know, you have to interact with it and see what they say.
So that's what I mean. Or members. Or members.
Is that 4 people that They're currently on that act. Or members. Okay.
Yeah, that's it. You know, as opposed to messed it on dot social. See, I wanna, I'm gonna log out.
So I go back to.
Oops. Wow.
Yeah, lock me up. Alright, so I'm gonna go to the main home page.
And 447,000 active users on mastodon. Social.
So I'm not worried about that disappearing.
Okay.
There you go. Any other questions?
How about this compared to some of the more traditional techie oriented, media groups like slack and Openstack.
Okay.
No idea. I have no idea. I avoid slack like the plague. So.
Why?
I think the software is crappy software that's poorly designed. And on max, it's terribly slow.
They did a bad job.
Okay.
It's not a very well done electron app, unlike some other electron apps.
I'm Max. Plus I personally would find that horribly distracting. Like I know people that work companies where you have to have it open all day and I'd be like, how do you get anything done?
You know, that's me.
Anybody else? Questions?
Anybody?
I understand.
I'm gonna follow up on that then.
Go ahead.
Oh, go ahead, Stan. I'll follow up later.
You talk about. Talk about, people following you. Hey, you get somebody to start stalking you.
Can you block them or what?
Yeah, Oh yeah. Yep. And with, with Lenny, you can block entire servers.
Alright.
So what I've been doing lately is I say, show me everything and then I'll see an instance that's like in Polish.
I'm like, I don't speak Polish to block it. Or I'll see an instance about something I'm just horrifically not interested in block it.
You know, again, it's not that they're bad. It's just. I'm trying to filter down and only find stuff I might be interested in.
Right.
You know, so you can block servers, you can block individuals' you know, whatever. Yep, absolutely.
Yep. Gary, what are you gonna say?
You were saying about, the electron app for slack having to be open all day. I'm not enough of a slack easier to understand the the reason for that meaning of that.
Because when a message
Cause people say, well, you're working. This is how we communicate during the day. We communicate via Slack, so you need to have it open.
Like a chat, I intercom.
And.
Okay, the message isn't just What do you look at?
So people in the company can talk to each other. And so. Yeah. Be like having R running all day and you must have it open and you must interact with it.
That's sort of stuff.
So if it's not open, you don't see it. It's not. It's not there when you sign in again.
Yeah.
Well, the messages are there.
Oh Lord. No, no, they're there. Messages are permanent. Unless you
But then you have to scroll through. You know, hundreds.
And, Well, there's really no reason not to leave them up because it'll ding you if you get get up.
If you get one, I mean that assumes you don't have a bunch of people just pissing all over it.
That's the problem though. I've, you know, read. Talk to other people and they like have to have it open and the come everybody's like posting stuff to it so it's ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding
ding is distracted. You know.
Well then you then you turn off the notifications and just look at it when you want to.
Yeah, but some people can't do that. They're not allowed to. That's bad.
Okay. And that's different from your email.
You know. I don't turn on notifications for email.
Okay, there's the problem.
When I sit down at students computers. And I'm trying to help them and there's a notification popping up in the corner about a sale at Target, our shoes, or I'm like, how do you work on this machine?
Oh yeah.
With distractions every 20 s up in the corner. About you know. Turn off notifications while you're trying to work.
Dries me crazy, but that's me. So, okay. I'm gonna ask you guys what you thought was most interesting or what you might be checking out.
So Ron, BC, what about you? What do you, what do you find interesting or cool?
We're on BC.
No, okay, Tom Chapin, how about you?
Yeah, maybe the B stands for bashful.
No, it's British Columbia. He's from Canada.
Oh, yeah, hey, Ron, what do you think is the most useful, a?
Maybe that helps.
Yeah.
Okay.
Translate into your Canadian.
No? Tom Chapin, what do you find most useful interesting?
Not get an answer from him. Gary Mayer, what do you find most useful and interesting?
What peaked your
Oh, it gave me a whole new. Point of view. And, there's still a lot of stuff I don't understand here.
Like I said, it It's almost, an over abundance of opportunities. Yeah, I got a process.
I mean, obviously don't dive into everything all at once. You know, try something.
Well, but you've given me the tools. You know, you demonstrated how to go in. With Jonathan just now and, okay, you wanna find, BSD discussions.
Bye.
How would I do that? Or I know I want to follow up on some Mayo 2, got 11, Wi-Fi stuff.
I know I want to follow up on some Mayo 2, got 11, Wi-Fi stuff.
Right.
I gave you some ideas how to go in and start looking for that. That's what I needed.
Right. Yeah. Now of course, think of all the people that have mentioned BSD but didn't use hashtags.
That's why not being able to search on words sucks and only being able to search on hashtags because We all know people have talked about BSD.
I forget I almost never hashtag stuff. I just forget. You know, I know I need to get better at doing it.
I just forget. And so, you know, the people that follow me might see it, but it's not searchable.
That's why when I'm if I'm allowed to say opt in to search, yeah, I'm gonna turn it off.
Please index my post. You know. So. Tony.
Tony C, what do you find most useful interesting?
I think, let me, let me, probably interesting, but it needs some sort of accurate search like you have an iOS.
Yeah, maybe some of those apps do. I just don't know. But, yeah, good.
Stan, how about you?
Yeah.
I found the act with orp and add sign and hashtags. The car. The coverage, you explaining those to me.
Right.
And how they're used. This is most interesting.
An index ID. Is this an index ID?
Yeah, it's a it's a it's a
Well, I'm a dinosaur, folks. Gee, I don't know what the hell this stuff is.
Yeah, you know what a taxonomy is, right? So the word they came up with for that kind of stuff.
Years ago is folks on me because they're developed by people, not librarians, right? And so what happens is you might be reading a post and see a hashtag and go, I'm gonna use that hashtag.
Right. And so the more people that see it, the more people then start using it, the more people you then can search on it.
So yeah, hey, you're not a dinosaur. There's an XKCD cartoon.
Where they say, if you meet up with somebody that doesn't know what you know, Assume every day 10,000 people learn something you already know.
That person's not a dinosaur or ignorant. They're just, this is their lucky day.
Today they're one of the 10,000 people they get to learn that new thing. So today you're one of the 10,000 people that got to learn what a hashtag is.
That's cool. That's to be celebrated. So, but on the other hand, Stan, don't get near any targets.
Please.
The number of people that are older to you never goes up.
Eric, how about you?
Eric, I can see you turned off your mic, but we can't hear you.
Turn off your mute, you mean.
Yeah, you turned off your mute. Thank you. You turned off your mute, but we can't hear you.
Hello?
Hello!
Hello, there you go.
Okay. There. Yeah, I found the new links to school. I hadn't heard of those Lemmy and.
Past it on.
Pixel.
And, what do you call it? I heard a mass sum for but was I hadn't heard of the Tube, Lemmy, and, pixel fed.
You all have to check those out. So I'll have to check. Mmm, okay. Alright.
Good. Good. Excellent. And Jonathan, I bet it's the I bet you're gonna try to find some stuff with BSD.
Which is fantastic. Let us know how that goes. That's really cool.
And finally, Lee, how about you? What do you find useful or interesting?
Much better understanding of Macedon and then let me.
Good. Yeah. I mean, I've been using Maston for several months now and I because I follow people that I already knew had good content.
I followed new people. I've seen new people. I learned so much. I was never a person who followed new people. I learned so much.
I was never a person who like followed celebrities on Twitter because I don't care. You know, I wanna follow people that know what they're talking about or have interesting ideas or have interesting commentary or share interesting links.
And so, you know, I use, Mested on multiple times a day to keep up with news, learn new things, find things I wanna follow up on.
Try out and read. So, and I know most of you would use it that way too. So give it a try.
And let us, like I said, let us know. But anyway, thanks a lot. You guys found it useful.
Thanks, Scott. Oh, this is really great, Scott. Thanks. It's definitely mind expanding like you were talking about being the one in 10,000 here.
Yeah.
Right.
I see what it's probably now 3, 4 of us in the 10,000 and better yet you actually got a week's notice this time.
I know, thank you. Actually, I did work the entire day on it, but I did work on it several days before also, so it wasn't that stressful.
And I will be publishing it. Later on. So I'll send editor at slug the links.
Thank you, sir. Cool. Thank you.
Absolutely. Alright guys, do you have a good night?
Thanks, yeah.
Let's go.
Okay.
Okay, good night.
Hey, anybody. Any other discussions? Oh.
Okay.
I suggest we turn off the recording. But people do not have to leave.
We're a book candidate. Okay. This was the St. Louis Linux user group, the St.
Yeah.
Louis log. Today's date was Thursday, July the 20 first. 20, excuse me, 2023.
How are you?
Yeah.
And, thank you all for coming. Our speaker tonight was Scott Granleman and he was talking about, social media for the techies.
Thank you