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Kris Nova joins Bryan, Adam, and the Oxide Friends to talk about Mastodon. Kris runs Hachyderm, a Mastodon server. She shares her experience with Mastodon and the Fediverse.
Show Notes
We've been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it's not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for November 14th, 2022.
In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our special guest was Kris Nova. Other speakers on November 14th included XXX, and YY. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)
Creators & Guests
What is Oxide and Friends?
Oxide hosts a weekly Discord show where we discuss a wide range of topics: computer history, startups, Oxide hardware bringup, and other topics du jour. These are the recordings in podcast form.
Join us live (usually Mondays at 5pm PT) https://discord.gg/gcQxNHAKCB
Subscribe to our calendar: https://sesh.fyi/api/calendar/v2/iMdFbuFRupMwuTiwvXswNU.ics
It's gonna be ironic if Twitter Spaces just starts working flawlessly.
Speaker 2:Like a last desperate plea to keep us.
Speaker 1:You you you know who did always did this to me? Providence. So you know I both went to Providence where I went. And Providence could speed through time and space and knew when I was going to the airport to leave Providence, and it was then and only then that pro I mean, the most beautiful days I've ever seen in Providence were when I was on the way to the airport. I'm like, damn it, Providence.
Speaker 1:You've done it again.
Speaker 2:It's like the opposite of the Steven O'Grady effect.
Speaker 1:It is absolutely the opposite of the Steven
Speaker 2:O'Grady effect.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I was, I I so, people should I was incentivized to everyone in Providence should have been incentivized for me to leave. So I'm glad that I feel what I mean, just knowing what has happened inside of Twitter, I am waiting for this whole thing to collapse today, Kevin. And I and I mean, like, technically collapse.
Speaker 2:I mean, like No. Totally. Like, I saw this Twitter thread where it was, like, I guess all weekend the notification counts have been busted. Have you noticed this?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I'd heard that, and I'm looking for hold on. I'm gonna send Chris an invite. Yeah. I've heard that.
Speaker 2:And then you got the boss, making claims about RPCs and, like, getting into discussions with engineers, like, in public about technical details. Just I mean,
Speaker 1:it's That that was particularly bonkers. The the whole, like, apologizing for the number of the the
Speaker 2:Of RPCs?
Speaker 1:Of RPCs. It's like are you going to because, you know, you and I both share that someone who we we decided that micromanager was was unacceptably fine grained to describe him. And I think we ended describing him as either a Nano manager, a Pico manager, or a PEMCO manager depending on what his disposition was. But do you remember when this this is a VP who is, like, on us about the instruction sequence?
Speaker 3:You were using the retrace. Remember this?
Speaker 1:Yes. I do. And and we and we were I remember both
Speaker 4:of you, like, well, that is
Speaker 1:that question. Like, Mark will attempt to manage to the instruction level. He actually because I see no balance which he will not say.
Speaker 2:This is like a 4 byte comment that we were that we are down to. Like that level of detail. Like these 4 particular bytes.
Speaker 1:He is managed to to the the the byte, level. And, hold on. Just d m. I I I don't know. Unfortunately, one of the challenges of platform collapse is, like, I don't know which platform to DM people on.
Speaker 1:Like, are we? It is it we're definitely living we're we're eyewitnesses to history for sure. So let me give me just a sec.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. You know, it it does feel like, like this website is just hanging on by a thread. It also just lunacy to think, like, if you if you fire all the engineers and the people keeping things up, that somehow Twitter would continue to exist without hiccups. Just astounding.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And we are kinda doing a weird experiment of, like, what does happen if you actually, get rid of all, say, the SREs. Like, how does the system collect exactly?
Speaker 2:Also incentivized by asking folks to go on a death march to prove their worth, and then immediately ending the thing that they death marched for with like the blue check mark, dollars 8 subscription or whatever. Pretty astounding.
Speaker 1:And, I mean, I would again, I'd I'm loathed to kind of turn this into something broader and more strategic. But if you wanted to deliberately demoralize people, like, that's that's actually the goal. That's actually, like, a pretty effective way to demoralize people.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. Totally. And on on all of this, like, would defy imagination in Silicon Valley. Right?
Speaker 2:The HBO writers would say, guys, no. No. No.
Speaker 1:It's fine. Yeah. The this is just lazy writing. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So no. The it's I am waiting for anything again structurally to happen. I'm and I know that we we definitely need to find a new home. Actually, Adam, do you wanna give me a quick update, while we're waiting for Chris on the the the search for new social audio space because it's I think it's not going great. But,
Speaker 2:was this on me?
Speaker 1:No. No. No. No. It's on you.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Sorry. I'm
Speaker 2:kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, we're looking for new social audio space. Folks have made some good suggestions. Discord seems promising. Twitch seems credible. I did evaluate one that sort of had a 1997 AWT kind of UI feel to it.
Speaker 2:But I think, I don't know, I haven't bounced this off you, Brian, so let's do live. I think we should find, like, 3 or 4 that we're willing to kick the tires on and, like, maybe schedule half an hour or something on each of them just to give it, you know, an earnest evaluation. And maybe we cut it off earlier for, like, nope. You know, Discord's good enough for whatever it is, then maybe we say we don't need to evaluate the rest, but throw a few in the pile and, invite anyone who wants to Yammer with us. Maybe we do it as an AMA or something.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That'd be great. I and, then we can kind of, test run various features and so on. No. I think that that that'd be great.
Speaker 1:I think so some of the things that we're looking for, which I Adam, to us, this feels like really natural, but it seems like there's just not something that hits the sweet spot. So we want we need the ability to have lots of people listen simultaneously. Especially, whenever Kelsey Hightower joins, we always have, like, a 1,000 people pour in. So we we definitely need to have the ability to have, like, 1,000 on the order of 1,000. We need the ability, to have speakers.
Speaker 1:I think, Adam, one one of the things you and I really like is the ability for us to dynamically have speakers join us.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Absolutely. And In part because it's great when people show up also in part because we're bad at planning.
Speaker 1:Right. Yes. I think both of these things though actually. I think
Speaker 2:that's the unit again.
Speaker 1:It is it is actually both of these things. Things. It's not merely that we're bad at planning. No.
Speaker 2:No. No. Absolutely. That is just a factor.
Speaker 1:Right. The and I think it's also that we, we like that serendipity of it. And I feel like we had some of the most valuable contributions from folks that have, that we we you and I don't personally know, and they introduce themselves. And, I mean, if people haven't, they, please go back. I mean, talk about last week's space.
Speaker 1:Vivid, vivid example of this where one of the things that we were talking about in particular with the the way these layoffs were mishandled at Twitter was the effect on those that are in the US on a visa and, a bunch of immigrants, who were who'd been in the US for various lengths of time. Some were sharing their experiences, and some we knew and some we didn't. And I thought that was really meaningful.
Speaker 2:It was great. And, I think shame on me and my own privilege that I did not see the depth of that discussion coming, and I was really, appreciative of the folks who had joined us.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, and that's honestly, like, I've I mean, I feel I had I not married the immigrant? I I don't I mean, I don't know peep people realize how. Anyway, that was that was great great to get people sharing their stories. So we really like that aspect of it.
Speaker 1:We like that the and so, Adam, this is and this is a good kind of segue into, into what we wanna get to today and talking about Massimo and the Fediverse and and get Chris talking here about about her experiences with with Hackaderm. So I've been kind of doing a mental inventory of what has been good about Twitter and what has been not so good about Twitter and what is, like, both good and not so good about Twitter. So I I don't know if you've got kinda specific thoughts of of things that that that you like, like, what is the what are the ways in which Twitter has most uplifted your
Speaker 2:life? I think that when I have had these serendipitous conversations in particular with people I really admire and respect, I'll give you an example that comes to top of mind. There's this guy, Andy Anotko, who's a tech writer, has been a tech writer for a very long time because I used to read his articles in the Mac user magazine. Oh, wow. In the nineties and would like love this guy, right?
Speaker 2:Like, I mean, when I was like 12 or 13 or whatever was super into this guy, I had written this this, article that got picked up by ours about, ZFS and macOS. And, I get, you know, engaged with him on Twitter about how much he loved this article and it just, like, warmed my heart. It it was a delightful interaction.
Speaker 1:Okay. So the the that and the this is and I think this is where the real power of Twitter where you are interacting with someone that you follow but doesn't necessarily follow you. Yeah. This is like when, have you seen any loyal carter, by the way, if you talk about loyal carter?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I don't know that we've talked about it on the show, but, we've definitely talked about it.
Speaker 1:Okay. I definitely have talked to you about loyal carter. Hip hop artist. Unbelievable artist. And I he liked one of my replies to his tweets.
Speaker 1:Oh, god. I was just like, oh, man. This is celebrity, baby.
Speaker 2:Just rub it all over yourself.
Speaker 1:Rub it all over me. But he just like it was a good reminder of that feeling of, like, wow. That feels good. It feels good. Like, I've got someone whose work I have admired from afar who's engaging with me, and that feels good.
Speaker 1:And, you know, I I know we've been able to return that favor a bunch in our careers. So that's okay. Good. Yeah. I like that one.
Speaker 1:That's good. That's a good one in the, like, positive vibes. The other On on the
Speaker 2:on the other side of the ledger.
Speaker 1:I Yeah. Let's do this on the ledger.
Speaker 2:And this this may be sort of my naive initial introduction to Mastodon that, I feel like Twitter as it as it evolved, kinda pushed changed my behavior in ways that I didn't appreciate. And until until getting back to Mastodon, where, you know, there was, you know, I think it it started to encourage, this kind of, strive for virality.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:And and I think one of the big changes is when likes became part of the algorithm and something that it would share. And so the, you know, internal calculus of when you like something changed, and the internal calculus of kinda how you phrase things to play into that algorithm kind of changed. And, and I think probably, you know, from my perspective, not for the better, not, not for deeper conversations, but for ones that were more pithy and more appealing and often, like, dunking on folks. Yes. And and that was deliberate.
Speaker 2:Right? Like, because that's fun and that drives engagement and that's that's, keeps eyeballs on it. And I think it was very effective, But I'm not sure I liked it, you know, especially when I look at the the cumulative effects.
Speaker 1:Totally. And I think that I mean, this is where Quitter would piss me off, and I would say us off. And there's a degree to which we liked it. I mean, I came back for it. I and I, like and, like, that's not this is not the better angels of my nature.
Speaker 1:And, you know, so I think, like, the the right at the cross section of this, and this is, again, a good segue to get into, like, Mastodon and how it's different. So Mastodon does not have quote tweets. And what's your take on that, Adam?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, it seems like a a a good way to prevent me from dumping dunking on people. Right?
Speaker 5:It it
Speaker 1:it really is. And it's like, there's a great piece by the and I shut the name in front of me, but the the, the the CEO, of, of of Massodon dot social, I guess, explaining that this is, like, a deliberate decision. And it's, like, really interesting. It does kinda cool it off, and the discussions are being much better. So I think that Nova, you're you're here.
Speaker 1:I wanna get you in here because the the, we are, you know, you you've been, maybe you could just describe your own journey with Mastodon, because I mean, you've been, really helping get our tribe on
Speaker 6:Hey. Hey. Good morning. Good morning, everyone. So is
Speaker 1:this It is on. You're on. Yes. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Well, I'm I'm glad you said something. I was, like, trying to jump in. It was it was taken a lot for me to, like, chew on my tongue here and not opine.
Speaker 1:No. Opine. Please. Yeah. Go for it.
Speaker 6:But yeah. So, like, let me answer your your your most recent question. How did we get on Mastodon? I mean, so I run a Twitch stream, and we have been, like, kind of dealing with the whole, like, Twitter, like, fiasco anyway for the past few months. And one of the things we do on Twitch is we, like, try out new software and we try out new things and we kinda build stuff in my home lab.
Speaker 6:So, like, our very small, like, streamers only little group of hackers, you know, decided to set up a Mastodon server, I think, in April of this year. And, well, like, you know, fast forward, and now, you know, a substantial part of the Internet is moving on to these servers that sit behind me on my Twitch channel. And we're like, oh my gosh. We actually have production infrastructure now. So that's kind of like how the the story of Hackaderm came to be.
Speaker 1:That is awesome. So you I I almost like and when you when you because, obviously, in April, I mean, this clearly corresponds to Musk saying that he's gonna buy Twitter. Are you thinking, like, this may be the lifeboat we all need to crawl into? Or you're just like, this is something I kinda wanna experiment with?
Speaker 6:I mean, I think both. Right? Like, I think one of the things I remind myself about the Internet is, like, any large, like, change has always kind of been uncomfortable and unexpected. And, like, looking back to, like, IRC and email and, like, you know, joining Facebook even, like, when I was in college. Right?
Speaker 6:Like, this it was controversial. It was hard. It was different. It was weird. I hated it at first.
Speaker 6:Even Docker.
Speaker 1:And the
Speaker 6:first time I ran a Docker container, I was pissed. I can I swear here? But I was pissed. Right? It sucked.
Speaker 6:I fucking hate it. Right? I I wanted to SSH into it. It was horrible. It it stopped in the middle of running it, and then, like, it would be gone forever.
Speaker 6:And I just wanted my text file back. And, like, I I remind myself of all of this. And I say, like, maybe this is just, like, a new paradigm that, like, I'm just not, like, used to, and I haven't taken it into, like, my own way of dealing with the Internet. Right? Right?
Speaker 6:Because, like, whether or not I wanna admit it, like, I'm my my well-being and my mental health is way more coupled with the Internet than it should be.
Speaker 1:I think you speak on behalf of all of us here. Yeah. Totally. Okay. So there's a lot to unpack there.
Speaker 1:I think you've nailed a bunch of really important points. One of which being that, like, these transitions often are uncomfortable to the point that people kind of draw the wrong inference. So this is like, oh, if my technology is uncomfortable, But it's often true that when you got people pouring into something for good and external reasons, there's not yeah. There are a lot of things that need to be improved. And I Yeah.
Speaker 6:I was gonna say, like, I think I think it's improvement. And I think I think you hit the nail on the head with, like, you know, just because your technology is new or different or sucks or people don't like it doesn't mean it's gonna be big. I I think timing is what we have here.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 6:Right? Like and and we talk about this all the time in the VC circles. It's like, like, you have to have a good product and you also have to time the market right. But, like, this whole thing is just timed perfectly. Like, with the implosion of Twitter, plus the, like, economic state of the world and the fact that our economy is dipping, plus the fact that, like, a whole new generation of technologists are, like, moving into the scene for the first time in their lives, and they have a completely different relationship with the economy than, like, folks like we did.
Speaker 6:Like, this whole thing is just timed perfectly in my opinion.
Speaker 1:Totally. And I loved mentioning though though that rising generation of technologists because the white by the way, that rising generation of technologists did not grow up on Twitter. They are not like, they they grew up in actually a much more defragmented world much more fragmented world rather where they I mean, speaking out for watching my own kids, right, who are on Snap for this. My they're on Twitter for for things that look more my kids treat Twitter the way I treat LinkedIn.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Well, timing, I'd say I don't think the timing is, like, the thing because, Gnu Social has been there for 10 years. And there are still instances of New Social. And the protocol evolved essentially from what New Social was talking. I think it the thing that it was here when the Twitter imploded.
Speaker 1:Well, I think, you know, the the that's definitely right, but I do think that that you needed this timing element. And I actually think I joined Mastodon on when there are a lot of people seem to join it on was the thing at April 2, 2017. I've even tried to go back through. I'm like, what happened on April 2nd on Twitter? And I think it must have just been that Mastodon announced itself.
Speaker 1:Because I noticed that a bunch of people joined that same time, and I did. And I think, Chris, you probably did the same thing where you hopped on there. Because you were you on Mastodon before April this year?
Speaker 6:No. No. No. I was not. We
Speaker 1:Oh, you were on WhatsApp. Okay. Server.
Speaker 6:Okay. Yeah. And and that was like like I think it was like me and my my partner, Q. Like, we we were, like, you know, users 1 and 2 of Hackaderm, and that was our intro to the to the fediverse. Right?
Speaker 6:Like, it's like
Speaker 1:You had not been on the fediverse at all prior to that? No. Interesting. Okay. So then could you look.
Speaker 1:Actually, let let's just get this out of the way because you got you run your own instance, which has been terrific. And I think a lot of people have a first question of like, wait a minute. What is this thing? What is federated mean? What does it mean to have an instance?
Speaker 1:Could you describe a little bit about what it means?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Okay. So this is awesome. So we I talk about this all the time. And and this is really the thing that got me, like, most excited about Mastodon in general.
Speaker 6:So, like, small amount of context. I I work at GitHub. I am a large distributed systems expert. I've been building large production platforms for the past 10 years. And this whole concept of, like, federated technologies is something that has been on my radar for the past half decade or so.
Speaker 6:And, like, we see this with Kubernetes, and we see this with, like, how people manage off an identity. And this is this concept in general of, like, having a lot of small pockets of infrastructure that then, like, communicate between each other and build more of, like, a mesh topology is actually a much more resilient and much more sustainable architecture when you start dealing these, like, large global systems. And, like, Mastodon takes that and applies, like, the social media element to it. And, basically, like, your Mastodon instance is your little neighborhood in your portal into the world, and it works a lot like like email. Right?
Speaker 6:Like, you have a fully qualified name just like you do with with email, and your neighborhood has, like it's a unique experience. It's unique to the folks that are on your little neighborhood, and that you completely have the keys to the kingdom there. Right? Like, you just run the open source software, but you define your own moderation policies and your own and it gives you a lot of control and freedom to, like, build your own little Internet community. The beauty of it though is you can then federate and talk to anybody set of verse.
Speaker 6:So it's just like email. There's only one universe, but you have your own little, like, pocket of data in the corner of it. It's really, really exciting.
Speaker 1:Well, so, there are a lot of things I I like about that. And actually, I should say first, when we did our our immediate post Elon Musk Twitter episode that Thursday took over, and we had Charity on and it's kind of a a random assortment. And I said that, like, you know, defederation is actually not something that I want. I think I what I want is a single source in a product. Having been on Mastodon in the 2 weeks since, I really love it, actually.
Speaker 1:Snow, to your point. And I love and I think that you you kind of were alluding to this. But the fact that there is a a human being or a collection of human beings running this instance gives it a great community feel that you don't get on these larger social networks. And I think it it it rate I mean, I would love to get your take on this. Do you think it makes people feel a greater sense of responsibility to know the human beings at the other end of their that are admins on their instance?
Speaker 6:I personally, I think so. I I think this whole thing is about accountability and responsibility. And and and it it's it's like breaking down that facade between, like, the consumer and the service provider. Right? Like and and I don't like, I wrote a whole book on this about, like, you know, being hypercritical of late stage capitalism and, like, you know, the trauma that has caused an entire generation of people.
Speaker 6:But, our living rooms. We're bringing into, like, our children's lives. And in my opinion, this kinda breaks that down. Right? Like, it's no longer this invisible service provider that is this faceless entity that you can go scream and yell at and criticize and and, like, deal with all of this trauma around.
Speaker 6:Oh, it's it's a person. It's me. It's Chris Nova. Right? And it's my community.
Speaker 6:It's github.com/hackaderm. Right? Like, it's a real place, and we see this with businesses. It's just the small business of Twitter, and I fucking love it. It's amazing.
Speaker 1:It's it's like the the social media walkability score. It's like the social media walkability score. It's like a 100 in in at hackender.
Speaker 2:Chris, is is there some analogy to be drawn between, say, like, Comcast and your local ISP? Is that, like, sort of a reasonable way to start thinking about it?
Speaker 6:I I say Twitter is Walmart and, Mastodon is like a local coffee shop.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Right. Where it's like and people know your name and then and it's like but this local coffee shop cannot possibly feed all of Sacramento. It's like, yeah, that's actually not the point, by the way.
Speaker 1:So Yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, it's in in terms of how you feed Sacramento or whatever. What can you talk a little bit, Chris, about the hardware and the logistics of running a Mastodon server? Just because, you know, I see lots of them popping up now, and I don't know whether this is, like, a small AWS instance or a room full of colo or how that scales with users or that that'd be that'd be fascinating to hear about.
Speaker 6:Yeah. So I'm gonna do a totally shameless plug here. If if if y'all go to twitch.tv/ chrisnova, you could see I am actually live right now. You can only see the, the server behind me, live on Twitch, and you can see me talking to you all. But, yeah.
Speaker 6:It runs and I have a little half cabinet that sits in my basement, and it's got a couple of old it's got one Dell r 670 and 3 r 6 thirties that we call the Animaniacs, yacko, wacko, and dot. And those all run on a single one single fiber optic connection or a connection that comes through my basement. I I pulled the wire myself when we first bought the house, like, 2 months ago.
Speaker 1:I I gotta say, just hearing your machine names, I'm like, pets not cattle, baby. I I I I love the because I feel like that's something also that we have kind of lost in the elastic infrastructure. It's like you can still actually have infrastructural paths. It's actually that's actually a good thing.
Speaker 4:There's the the
Speaker 1:you can have dynamic dynamically provisioned, but still instances that you love.
Speaker 6:Yeah. And and I mean, that's where we are. Right? Like like, I like, don't get me wrong. I'm all about large, dynamic, elastic infrastructure where we have tens of thousands of servers online.
Speaker 6:Right? Like, I've I work at GitHub. I've worked at Twilio. I've been working in Kubernetes for the past deck or 16, however long that is, since 2016. But, like, this is this is small.
Speaker 6:Right? Like, we're doing, you know, 500 gigabytes of traffic a day. And, like, it's we have, I think, 300 gigs of storage right now. Like, most of our our data is just traffic and, like, we can load balance that across 3 nodes. And to be honest, like, one of the things one of my colleagues at GitHub said was she was like, this is, like, the the greatest experiment the Internet has ever seen because everybody who's experimenting right now has gone through this whole thing before.
Speaker 6:We all have, like, some battle scars or some track records behind us. And so, like, I'm looking at this with, like, we have folks from Google who work on the infrastructure with me, and we have folks who, you know, work on the Rust programming language, who work on Hackaderm's infrastructure. And we're, like, we're trying new things. We're, like, talking about multicast again. Right?
Speaker 6:And we're we're, like, talking about, like, how would we actually go and and build a vertically scaled piece of infrastructure with a presence around the world with, like, our data that we wanna preserve. And our conversations are less about, like, do we have a bunch of dynamic servers and more about, like, which country do we put the data in? Right? Like, it's, like, very like, it's a human thing again. It's really fascinating.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Kat. There's a lot there that's really interesting. And, actually, I I as you're describing it, I'm thinking like, is this it's like an almost an analog for the homebrew computing movement in the late seventies where you had a bunch of people who were, you know, that who were building bigger machines by day, then coming home and having fun making smaller machines at night. And there was a lot of value to it and a lot of experimentation that was coming out of that. There's a lot of value to people running their own Mastodon businesses.
Speaker 1:That's I mean, surely, we're gonna have, teenagers running their own instances and learning a lot about, about how to maintain infrastructure by doing that.
Speaker 7:I mean, you can also you can also pay for someone else's year for you. Right? You can there is, you know, master dot host and other, like, hosting companies that will spin up a a Mastodon server on your behalf, and you pay them a monthly fee to be able to run that server. And therefore, you still have infrastructure on your own domain, like, you have mastered on your own domain. But you're you don't have to deal with the, the the It it the operating that.
Speaker 7:That's what Simon, who is, a a listener here, has has done with his. Although he did have some issues with the, amount of capacity that was, allocated to to his, particularly busy instance.
Speaker 1:And so this is where they are handling some of the mechanics of running it. But you are still handling in this in this case, Simon is still handling the kind of the human element that Chris is describing of, like, the actual, the the moderators of the the instance.
Speaker 7:Yeah. You're still the mod on the instance. And you you you pay for the domain and you set up the DNS to point it at at your, at at at the instance that they're hosting for you. This is just, you know, a hosting provider similar to, like, a WordPress hosting provider. But instead of spinning up WordPress, they're spinning up mastered on for you.
Speaker 7:I think the other thing that's super interesting about this whole movement is the fact that it's backed by a standard. It's backed by the activity pub standard, and Mastodon is one implementation of that standard. But you you could reimplement it in whatever language or set of
Speaker 1:kind of a, a rejuvenation of the old installment you know, what what you were calling Mastodon, I actually call it Mastodon slash activity pub. The
Speaker 6:Oh my god. Yeah. What?
Speaker 1:But the but it it just feels like there actually is something there in terms of the ability to implement different kinds of things on top of the the the underlying protocol. And, Chris, that's something that that you've you've seen experimentation with or because I know you you've had a lot of really interesting, thoughts on on the ways you wanna extend what you've got, and experiment with it.
Speaker 6:I mean, so this is, like, yet another feather in the hand of why I'm so, like, stoked about Mastodon and the feather first is, like like you said it or or or, like like the other speaker said, you know, it's it's built on ActivityPub, which is an open protocol. Right? Like, ActivityPub is to Mastodon in the metaverse, like SMTP is to to email. Right? Or Jabber or XMPP or any of these other open IRC even.
Speaker 6:Right? These other open protocols. So, like, one of the things that we're doing is we're we're trying to write a Rust implementation for activity pub right now. We're trying to set up a relay. So, like, this whole thing there's so much potential here.
Speaker 6:There's so much potential here. There's so much we could do with with our data. And, like, it's in my opinion, it's just a matter of time before we start seeing, like, startups hit the market with, like it's, like, half social media, half infrastructure, something something defederated mom and pop shop style, like services that people can go buy. But one of the things we're trying to solve right now is what is called, like, a relay, which basically says that, like, the hackaderm timeline, which is, like, why a lot of people are coming to hackaderm, we can basically bounce that over to another server and they can, like, meld that in with their timeline. And that all that is is just like it's just like a a reverse proxy for activity pub.
Speaker 6:And, you know, like, you could write that in any programming language you want. And when we started looking around, like, we found one that was in Go, originally in April, and that was the only one I could find. And already since then, there's been about 3 or 4 other ones pop up. So we're seeing, like, that, like, uptick in innovation and projects popping up on GitHub that, like, we saw with Kubernetes in, like, early 2000 17. It's really, really cool to watch it happen.
Speaker 1:That is really cool. And so could you talk a little bit about the timeline, the kind of the local timeline versus one's own time? Like, that that is a difference as one is coming from Twitter to Mastodon. A that timeline.
Speaker 6:The easiest the easiest way I could describe it is and actually, I'm I'm gonna do this on my stream live if y'all are watching on my stream. If you just go look at the logs right? If you if you get on, like, your server, if you spin up a server and you go look at the logs, you can see, like, it's like an like an old NGINX log line for every time somebody, like, clicks favorite or retoots or repost something or, like, they go and follow someone. And in order for the server, like, our server to actually, like, display that in your browser, we have to download and cache all of that data. So, like, your timeline is just composed of that cache.
Speaker 6:So it's it's everybody who's using Mastodon, using Hackaderm as their portal to the world is actually, Hackadermians can see, and that's what we use to feed and populate your timeline.
Speaker 1:That's very cool. And I I do feel like this is one of these, important differences because the you know, people are again, when you're coming to Macedon looking for Twitter, you're gonna be disappointed because it it is different. And I think that, for me personally, and, Adam, I do say for you as well, because certainly for you, like, those differences have been delightful, actually. So you don't wanna, you wanna kind of embrace some of these differences. And the it does mean that, like, your instance because people, you know, the first question you ask is, like, what is the importance of selecting an instance?
Speaker 1:And it is both it is both not a a life altering decision, but also kind of an important decision. And it it it's do you have a way of kind of, when people are asking how do they find an instance, what do you how do you, kinda counsel them? Oh, I'm looking at the logs here on your Twitch stream. That's pretty cool.
Speaker 6:Yeah. So, so what what I was gonna say was, like, when when I first this is another one of my weird analogies, but it'll go into answering your question. When I first started writing Rust coming over from Go, there's another streamer on Twitch named Togglebit who said something. He said, like, if you try to tell the Rust programming language what you want it to do, you're gonna have a bad time. He was like, you have to let the language teach you how it wants to be written.
Speaker 6:And he was like, until you can get over that head game switch and stop trying to put your Rust files where you want them and stop trying to, like, do things to go away and actually let the language show you, you're gonna fight with it. And, honestly, I feel the same thing about Mastodon. Delightful. And so, when when I'm, like, you know, talking with folks who are like, which instance do I join? I'm like, you can join Hackaderm if you agree with our values and our principles, but, ultimately, it's kind of low risk.
Speaker 6:Like, you can you can join wherever you want. You can move around. And that's, like, the beauty of it. It's like once you're in, you can, like, start your own instance and move to a bigger one if you like the timeline or start your own instance and then, like, you know, try to relay with a bigger instance that you wanna get more of their data from or, like, move from one the other. And so, like, I would honestly, I would say, like, just just pick 1 and try it out.
Speaker 6:And then, like, if you don't like it, you know, try another one. Like, you'll know when you get it. You can always move around.
Speaker 2:It it's great advice because it it's low risk. And for a lot of folks, it seems to be paralyzing. Right? That that this is the first question that they're presented with, without a lot of context for how to answer it. And with but, you know, so something that I think we can all do more to to help new folks figure out their answer.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I love the low risk way of thinking about it. Is this a low risk decision? It's not a because it's also not a zero consequence decision, but it's low risk. And it's Chris, you think you you could you can move around, you can change.
Speaker 1:So that's yeah, great, a great way of phrasing it. I do got a couple of hands up. When you're Canon, I'm glad you're here. I was thinking about you because you joined that space, immediately after the Alon descended upon Twitter, and you had suggested Mastodon in that space. And I was just like, yeah.
Speaker 1:I really thought about Mastodon, for and I didn't now here we are only 2 and a half weeks later. So I'm glad you're here. What are your what are your thoughts?
Speaker 8:No need to give me a second. I just had someone message me for work.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No worries. That's right.
Speaker 5:You know, we'll
Speaker 1:we'll come back to you, and, Trenton, you got your, your head up.
Speaker 3:Hey, y'all. Can you hear me fine?
Speaker 1:We can.
Speaker 3:Oh, great. So sorry I joined late. What I wanted to say that, like, for some of us in some other parts of the world, the the choosing of an instance has become so critical. For example, 2 years ago when we had war, our whole country's upstream got shut down. But while we people were not able to communicate with each other via telegrams and signals and Facebook, which is the mainstream here.
Speaker 3:All of us on our local Mastodon servers, we have, I think, at this point, 4 Mastodon servers, each of them running on a separate ISP, and all of the ISPs are connected locally, internally in the country. So that has been our, like, life saver during the war. I mean, a a literal life saver in this case. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Right. Wow.
Speaker 3:So we were able to communicate data. And a lot of the people also jumped ship to, when everyone was on Telegram, obviously, everyone will also jump ship on Jabber, which is like the federated version of, you know, of ESET messaging. Unfortunately, Apple killed the client on macOS. But, the the the concept of how the ability of running of our own instances, has literally been a lifesaver. And the communities here have been growing very well, especially they're like younglings.
Speaker 3:I'm talking like 16, 17 year old people who are just running their own server in their own house, like me. Like, we all of our instances are not DigitalOcean hosted. We run it in our own houses, on on, like, old servers with even unicode domains that we like. So in case of of, a shutdown from the government or from the upstreams, if that ever happens again, we can still keep communication internally and see what happens. And that has been no.
Speaker 3:I mean, that's not for every person, but if you're in a country that something like that might happen, Mastodon is definitely a jabber with it as well, a a literal lifesaver or a democracy saver.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Right. Yeah. Absolutely. Wow.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. And the ability to continue to communicate and know that you've got your own channel that you could that you can and then and then do you federate that those Mastodon as well? We use them strictly locally?
Speaker 3:No. No. They are all federated. They all have unicode Armenian domains. You know, things like, the term hacker in Armenian, but you it.
Speaker 3:Luckily, we also helped, I think one of the, sysadmins of the servers, work with Mastodon on the unicode part as well. We also deployed other types of activity pop, servers like social home and, pixel fed. A lot of people like to do, photography. So anything that we can see running activity pop, even I personally run something called Write For Really, which is a, blogging platform on top of ActivityPop. And now a lot of the bloggers in Armenia are using a WordPress plugin that turns WordPress to an activity pop server.
Speaker 1:Wow. Oh, it's great. Yeah. Yeah. I I that is that's definitely interesting.
Speaker 1:And I think that also, I mean, you you you know, one of the things that you're highlighting and trying to get part of the reason that we wanted to have this space at this time, because I know we've had it at often at 5 PM Pacific, which is not a convenient time at all in Europe. The rest of the world has been really ahead of the US on this. And, Chris, you know, it's we're we're talking about this last week, but because it's only my perception that the while the the US kinda went all in on on Twitter, folks outside were rightfully looking at other alternatives. So I think as as it as many it has happened many times before, I feel we owe a debt to those who went their own path quite a bit earlier. And now those of us who are coming into it later are really able to appreciate the value of that and all the you know, having all of your own facilities there in Trenton, in Armenia for that has been we all even now take advantage of it, which is great.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Chris, I want to give you the heads up. I muted you because we were picking up a little bit of your keyboard. Sorry about
Speaker 6:that. No no worries. Actually, the folks in Twitch were like, Nova, mute yourself. You're a BLT.
Speaker 1:And no. And it was actually getting me on Twitter. Someone's like, hey. Is that are those your, like, cherry reds I'm hearing? Because that's awesome.
Speaker 1:Like, let's talk about keyword. Like, don't think those are actually mine. I think those are actually
Speaker 6:Cherry blues. Cherry Blues.
Speaker 1:Cherry Blues. There in there. Nice. Nice. Alright.
Speaker 1:So, Lydia Cannon, are you, you back from your
Speaker 8:Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. So, yeah, that actually touched on something I wanted to say, which is the fact that, yeah, when it comes to, you know, other activity built stuff, like, there isn't just Mastodon.
Speaker 8:There is, like there in in the same space, there's also Pleroma and, MISKey, which is what I use, that are implementing sort of the similar social media type of thing and often has slightly different features than Mastodon. But, yeah, also, there's there's the things like, peer 2, which is, you know, streaming video or just video replacement, like, for YouTube type stuff that is also on active ePub. There's there's PixelFed. PixelFed was mentioned, which I think is meant to be it it's for, you know, photo sharing. It's and it's for art.
Speaker 8:And then there's, Giti. Giti, is actually experimenting with using activity pub to federate, like, get GitHub type issues and and things like that and, be able to have that across instances. So there's a lot of interesting stuff in that space beyond just Mastodon, and there's a lot of stuff that's usable already outside of there.
Speaker 2:Okay. $1,000,000 question. Is there social audio?
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's packed up.
Speaker 3:Not yet.
Speaker 2:Not yet.
Speaker 8:That is not something I'm aware of.
Speaker 5:There should be
Speaker 2:it yet.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'm hoping so because I do think that, like, in the that the kind of the the positive Twitter bucket. I Twitter spaces has been one of it has been one of, if not the best features about Twitter for me. Adam, because you talk about all those things that you like.
Speaker 2:And what's number 2?
Speaker 1:You know, the it goes on. So number 2 gets more complicated, I think, actually, where you because the I think, was that a nervous question?
Speaker 5:Sorry. No.
Speaker 2:No. No. I guess, I mean, for me, it's like, I could not have told you what new features came to Twitter in the last, I don't know, 10 years?
Speaker 1:You know what? I think that the new feature that came to Twitter that I really appreciate it is how hard it is to actually maintain a network that has any civility whatsoever to it. And I think that there was a huge human toll that we didn't see to create something that was even vaguely usable and that we really appreciated as the cracks have opened.
Speaker 2:That that's that's totally fair enough. And and you're right right. That that was that comment was kind of minimizing that effort. But I would say also that product features have sort of mostly been either, not either something that I didn't really understand as as part of my workflow or something that seemed, to go away pretty quickly or often both. But but but agreed.
Speaker 2:How about this? Agreed Twitter Spaces has been great and a great feature. Twitter. Through acquisition? I
Speaker 1:yes. I think so. They I mean, Leah Colbert and her team, I think they come with their acquisition. But yeah. So I I have I have loved Twitter Spaces because it allows for all those things that you initially talked about that I like, why do we I mean, because you talked about, like, why are we spending too much of our lives on the Internet?
Speaker 1:It's because the human connection is actually really important, and I I really love that about about Twitter Spaces. So that's been in the the just your question about, like, can we get a hopefully, open protocols are gonna allow for the implementation of something in the metaverse that because I think that this is it's important. I think we've seen the value of it, and I I'm I'm hoping that we will, we will certainly find a replacement because we we can't stay here. But, looking forward to that. The so I wanna get to some other things that I actually love about the about and the metaverse that are, people coming from Twitter, will quickly appreciate when you start using it.
Speaker 1:One is the and, Adam, you hit on the story here, but the total absence of an algorithm, the fact that your timeline is, like, just your timeline. Your timeline is the people that you follow and the things that they say or boost, not the things that they like.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I got the things that Twitter is trying to get you to engage with, you know, the tweet from 17 hours ago that, you know, is is so enticing that you can't look away?
Speaker 1:Not the tweet from 17 hours ago. Not the I mean, that's it. Like, Twitter kept putting Scott Adams tweets in my feed. It's like, what are you doing?
Speaker 2:Well, hey. May maybe they realized that, like, anger anger is a good motivator. Right?
Speaker 1:Well, no. That that's it. Is that, like, I think whether they were doing it, like, deliberately of, like, hey. Let's let's mastermind the way that we get people angry and riled up because they stay on the platform. Or I think much more likely, it happened like bacteria.
Speaker 1:It just kind of evolved, and, oh, our numbers are up into the right. I mean, you see this Musk is even now. He's like, Musk is like, our engagement numbers are off the roof. Like, yeah, you wanna know why? I mean, a burning building will have a lot of people gathering around it to watch it burn.
Speaker 1:Like, it it it that's not a business. A burning building is not a business.
Speaker 8:That's exactly how I felt about that.
Speaker 1:Right? Ridiculous. And so I I think that the and so one of these and we, again, we hit it on earlier, but, man, the quote tweet is, like, right there where because I my first thought was, like, oh, we will add the the quote tweet will be added Mastodon. Then you guys, like, no. No.
Speaker 1:It's a deliberate decision to not have the quote tweet. And that was like a moment of, like, I was like the mirror was held up to me. And it's like, you, Brian, are
Speaker 5:the monster. You are and
Speaker 1:and I'm like because I'm like, I mean, that's what it boils down to at some level. Yeah. Prime I you know, primarily.
Speaker 2:I think, like, sometimes we say, like, you know, try to emphasize or say even more this or whatever, but you're right. But by and large, it's sort of like punching up, sub tweeting, you know, by, you know, for the most part.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I then I then I wonder to what degree I mean, I still would like as I've been thinking this, I'm like, gee, you've said some things too that I'm like, oh, I really wanna, like, not just reply to that, but I wanna I wanna I wanna kinda quote that. And it's kind of a yes and, and yes and is not always shitty. So is there a way maybe
Speaker 9:if they're mutuals? I don't know
Speaker 1:if it's WebView. But there's there are no there are no quits. Yes. Sorry. Go ahead.
Speaker 6:So what I was gonna say is, like, oh, like, I number 1, I I have to opine on quote tweeting. I think that, like, in general, quote tweeting is net negative. It's like subtweeting. Like, it's it's bad
Speaker 1:for everyone.
Speaker 6:It's bad for everyone. Bad for you. It's bad for your health. It's bad for the other person. Nobody wins.
Speaker 6:It's just lose lose for everyone. I also think that, like, most of the time, to be candid, it's it's petty. Right? Like Totally. That's the word I would use for it.
Speaker 6:Is is is it's like we can we can be adults here and we can just actually engage with each other directly or not engage
Speaker 2:at all. Brian, this is an intervention, just so you know.
Speaker 1:No. It should be. I I I I have asked for this intervention. No. I know.
Speaker 1:I I I agree. I agree. And it's yeah. Sorry. Chris, Brown.
Speaker 1:Oh, go
Speaker 6:and all I was gonna say, and then I'll shut up. I promise. All I think that we we're saying right now is we just have a feature request for Mastodon to get better at unfurling URLs. That's literally all I'm saying is, like, if we can just get it to the point where we can click whether it's a tweet or a toot or something into Mastodon and then you just see it in your browser like a quote tweet, like, we're done. That's it.
Speaker 6:This whole conversation's over. Right.
Speaker 1:Okay. Actually, Chris, I'm glad you mentioned the browser because another thing that I love about Mastodon and the Fediverse, usable from the browser. No need I mean, god, I how much do you hate it? Slack and Reddit? I hope that there is a special place in hell for both of the people that insist on those things being seen in their apps.
Speaker 1:It's like, this experience is better on the app. Like, do you wanna download the app right now? It's like, I definitely don't. Go away. And I love the fact.
Speaker 1:I don't know. Adam, if you use the
Speaker 2:No. Absolutely. I've got you used on mobile and use the app. It's definitely, like, the Reddit, like salesmanship in the browser is is in enraging. Like I mean I just don't use Reddit as a result.
Speaker 1:I it's terrible. And it's like, are you sure you wanna use it on the browser? Like, are you absolutely certain about like, no. Seriously, have you thought about all the ramifications right now using on the browser, because it doesn't seem like you have. And you're like, I don't have my wallet
Speaker 2:with me. Stop. Right?
Speaker 5:Stop. Stop.
Speaker 1:But I love the fact that it's usable on the web, on the browser. It's like you can actually use this thing. It's light. It's fast. I mean, it's been it it it's really nice.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You
Speaker 2:don't have, like, thousands of RPC calls to load the homepage.
Speaker 7:Oh, well played. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Cross that
Speaker 1:one off your big o card.
Speaker 2:There we go. So looks like we've got a hand from Yeah.
Speaker 4:Ignalotives. On the on the other hand, even if it's built for the web, well, then your apps aren't as great. Because the app situation for Mastodon is not that good, honestly.
Speaker 1:Sure. And, I mean, I know you you've been on it, I think, a lot longer story than I have. I'm just contrasting it to the the the Twitter experience where it's the the app experience has not been great there. So I mean, these apps are gigantic. They are they often crash.
Speaker 1:I mean, they've got a lot of problems with them.
Speaker 3:But by the way, I've been I've been using the PWA. I think that's what it's called. The PWA, progressive web app version on iOS. Just, you know, the share button and add to a home screen, and it's been perfect.
Speaker 1:I I
Speaker 3:don't know if that's also doable on on, Android, but, like, that feature for me has been it's it's been like, it's like a a separate window of Safari on its own kind of thing, but that experience has been perfect.
Speaker 1:I understand. One wants to
Speaker 5:do that.
Speaker 8:You can do that on Android too.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You can do it on Android too. I've been using both Hackaderm, and that's on the social on on Android on Chrome, and it's awesome. Morris, you got your your hand up.
Speaker 9:Yes. Thank you. For for the, for the, quote, treat question. You see, everyone said, said, it's not gonna be added to Mastodon, but Mastodon isn't the standard, and Mastodon interoperates with other activity PAP implementations. So, you can, already see the confusion with the, content warning, fields in the standard that is defined as a subject line.
Speaker 9:And Macedon uses it for for a content warning, but it isn't in the standard like this. So we are we will see an interesting social experiment where the dominant server implementations will kind of and front end implementations will kind of kind of make make up make and break features and representations and what a certain thing means just by implementing it.
Speaker 1:Okay. That's interesting. And you've actually, I'm glad we got to the subject because, Chris, I'll get your take on this. On this I know this has been a it's been a hot topic about this issue of what I actually I didn't realize was subject field and activity pub, but does come across a a content warning in, in Mastodon, which people kinda culturally use to, let people know, hey. This is a subject you may not be interested in that I'm gonna expand on, politics being kind of a classic one.
Speaker 1:And then a really interesting and, I think, important discussion about, well, are we using that to not talk about subjects that are uncomfortable but vital, and in particular, race? And you got a lot of folks from black Twitter saying, hey. The the race should not be hidden under a content warning because this is the life that I have to live or the life that I live, and this is what I'm having to endure. And I think it's very important that people see that. I the one thing I would say because I would love your take on on this whole this discussion that's happening.
Speaker 1:I would say that the quality of discussion I'm seeing on this issue is much better on Mastodon than it is anywhere else, which I think is just help telling.
Speaker 6:So the the the way that I'm handling this let me let me just start off by saying is, like, personally, in my opinion and as far as I'm concerned, race should never be behind a content warning. Warning. That's just, like, just, like, get that out of the way right away. This is people's lives. They live it every day.
Speaker 6:And and, honestly, like, I can't I can't even go outside in in the the United States of America without seeing the colonialism and, like, that's all racism. It's it's fucking everywhere. I see it every day. Every time I walk out the front door, like, I'm not gonna put that behind a content warning. However, that's me.
Speaker 6:So the the rule that I'm applying to hack a derm is your server, your rules. And so if people wanna go spin up their own server and and moderate it however they want, like, that's the point of the metaverse. Right? Like, we will we will block them as needed. We will suspend those accounts as needed.
Speaker 6:We will keep them out of here as needed. And I think as far as, like, my duty as a moderator and as an administrator, I'm not gonna get in the business of being the fediverse police. I do not wanna get in the business of, like, going and nitpicking people's content warning and saying this should or shouldn't be and, like, you know, using emojis to say that I'd be like this or didn't like it. Like, that's not my job. We're all adults here, like, hackadermis for professionals.
Speaker 6:And, like, as far as I'm concerned and the message I'm gonna send and the influence I'm gonna lead with is, like, put that shit out there. Get it front forward. Right? If people feel like we're being racist, it's probably because we fucking are. We should probably be real about it.
Speaker 6:Totally.
Speaker 1:Alright. Jeremy, you just that's how you come to the stage.
Speaker 10:Yeah. I the the the bit I have to add there is, talking race is great. Don't need content warnings for that. What I do like content warnings for is, Twitter will autoplay, videos of folks who look like me getting killed.
Speaker 1:And Yeah.
Speaker 10:Waking up to that in the morning important, I think, not to lump those two things together. There's talking about roughness and there's like, material that's super traumatic.
Speaker 1:Right. And is and legitimate. And so that's interesting. And then would you where would you kind of counsel people? Because this is this is again that it's been a hot issue I think people are discussing.
Speaker 1:I think it's great that people are discussing this issue. Would would you counsel people to look toward when when they're when they're you're talking about imagery or video, really begin to think about what you are are posting and kinda how you're presenting that.
Speaker 10:It's tough because there's no right answer, but especially video, especially photos, like, don't dampen folks' lived experience, but, the, yeah, graphic like, graphic violence is usually an easy, an easy don't. Different people have experiences with text, but, but, the the the more you can hide it and I understand why it happens on Twitter. It's super inflammatory and it's great for engagement, but it kills my soul.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I I have to agree with Jeremy on this one. The same with us. Like, anytime that a war breaks out here, we share the information very publicly so people can know, but, obviously, war and it's not ever good. But if it's any kind of imagery or videos or even link to images and videos, that that's also we learned that, like, people think, oh, it's not behind content warning.
Speaker 3:This link might be saved, and you go to the link. It's an awful YouTube video or a very awful, Reddit, something. This is or we decided that all of these should be behind the content warning so people don't get traumatized before in the morning. You know?
Speaker 1:Totally. Yeah. That's great. Very good guidance. And again, I think I I'm heartened by the fact that because I don't know if this is your take too.
Speaker 1:I think the quality of discussion on this issue has been actually pretty good. And in general, the quality of discussion on Mastodon is way beyond what we're gonna There is no real discussion on Twitter. I mean, there's very little true discussion on Twitter. And I'm seeing a lot of really good discussion on lots of good issues.
Speaker 6:I I feel like if if I was to summarize it's intended to be effective because it can be. Right? Like, be because, like, if we have a discussion on Mastodon about race or about content warnings, like, we can change more effective discussions. Right? Like, we have skin in the game again.
Speaker 6:We have equity in our social media again. We can actually have these discussions and roll out a change, and it actually goes and and it impacts our experience and and the way that we're dealing with it. So, like, maybe a war does break out, and we wanna change our rules. Like, that's reasonable again. We can do that.
Speaker 6:And it doesn't involve shitposting and it doesn't involve, like, getting millions and millions of likes and retweets and, like, trying to convince the world that, like, our cause is somehow more virtuous than other. It just is, like, it's mom and pop shop style, like, discussion.
Speaker 2:And, Chris, how how does, like, a disagreement between
Speaker 6:interesting. So whenever, like, I fill out, like, a like, a moderation, like, I wanna report someone or whatever, there is, like, a toggle button that says, like, send this to the other server. So, like, if you were on my server and you were, like, you know, acting up or responding to somebody on another server and they reported you, there's, like, a they can opt in to, like, send the report and, like, basically go tattletale on them back to their own server mods. And then there's 3 different levels of, like, blocking. There's, like, straight up, like, block this domain, like, at the gateway, like, at layer 7.
Speaker 6:Like, if any traffic comes from, you know, this this domain, just outright refuse it on our servers. And then there's, like, silence and suspend, which are, like, you know, taking it back a little bit as you as you come closer. And then there's just, like, mute, which is just, like, mute this for your own personal user. So, like, you see that there are some controls on, like, how you can how you can manage that. And, like, as an administrator, we're trying to figure out, like, the best policies and when to do what for, like, our community.
Speaker 6:But, yeah, again, like, we just, like, are just putting everything in GitHub and, like, it's it's all an experiment. We're kinda learning as we're going.
Speaker 2:And have you used all 3 of those levers?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Absolutely.
Speaker 2:Okay. Cool. Thank you.
Speaker 3:By the way, I've been having a problem with that. So I'm on the bsd.networkserver, and I would, like to follow Adam Curry. Now I don't agree with him, but I would like to follow him. Right? And my server admins have decided to block Adam Curry's Mastodon server completely, which put me in a tough spot.
Speaker 3:Luckily, I do have my own instance in Armenia, so I could follow him from there. But, you know, these are some kind of disagreements that you might have with your own server admin if you're not the admin of your own server. I've also noticed that they also could, and, Chris, correct me if I'm wrong, they could also hide it so people would not see unless they specifically follow them using the exact, you know, the username URL. And after that, you can see them, if I'm not mistaken?
Speaker 8:Yeah. So there's in for a moment.
Speaker 6:Oh, yes.
Speaker 8:So, I actually wanted to draw back really quick to, content warnings, and I wanna say I'm biased on this because I'm in a relationship with the person who came up with the concept. But, I just wanted to I just wanted to note that that person, the reason that they are a thing is because, she is a Navy veteran, and she is a victim of relationship abuse. And this was a tool for her to be able to use social media without being triggered with her PTSD that she has. And so I think that's an important thing to keep in mind when we're talking about content warnings. It's that's kind of what the purpose of it was, to prevent people who need to not see certain types of content from seeing that content.
Speaker 1:Well, I know yeah. And just to to Jeremy's point too, I think that that the kind of the key is, like, you've got a human being on the other side of this, And it's Exactly. You're not just about eyeballs and clicks likes virality. I mean, another kind of, like, meta point here, and because I want to back what you're saying, but the is it is harder to go viral on Mastodon at some level. It's harder for, I think, a hot take to go viral.
Speaker 1:I think that is a great thing. The engagement that I have seen a mass on is higher than I'm than I've seen in Twitter in a long time. And I mean, like, real engagement. People are, like, people are reading something and commenting on it or adding their own thing or I mean, there's a lot of really good a lot of very positive engagement, but it do not expect a hot take to go viral because it won't. And I think that that's actually great.
Speaker 1:I think it's a good thing.
Speaker 8:And then as far as federation goes, yeah, that that there can very much be issues along that. There's a lot of instances that defederate with a lot of other instances for a lot of reasons, some of which are very good reasons and some of which are very silly. I mean, it's pretty obvious why you would want to defederate with something like truth dot social or Gab, I think. But
Speaker 1:That was record.
Speaker 8:But there's there's also, there's also a lot of instances that would defederate with other instances. Like, for example, the one I'm on, Nyada social is a Miski instance and doesn't publish, the list of instances we have defederated with. And so because of that, there are other instances who, I have friends or I have had friends on that just because they can't see our block lists, they defederate with us automatically. And so there's been drama around that. There's often a lot of meta discussion, and it can get very heated.
Speaker 8:You haven't seen any of the meta discussion that happens on Mastodon yet. I assure you, it gets bad in a way that you can't really get on Twitter. But I still don't think that necessarily is a net negative.
Speaker 1:Well
Speaker 8:It's just that there's an entirely new type of drama that can happen because it's a new type of social network.
Speaker 6:Okay. I I gotta I gotta run.
Speaker 1:You bet.
Speaker 6:Yep. I'll talk to everyone later and strong plus one on on the last comments. And I think I learned a lot about content warning just now and how it's it's it's it's it's like an accessibility thing that you can, like, offer as as a way for people to, like, manage it on their end. And it's Yes.
Speaker 8:That's a great way to say it. It's an accessibility tool.
Speaker 6:Right. It's a data entry thing. Right? Like and if, like, we don't like the way that the UI doesn't, like, deal with the data, then, like, we change the UI. But, like like Yeah.
Speaker 6:Image description. There's just people out there who can't manage it the same way that, we can't, like, you know, for for one reason or another. And as somebody who's a trauma survivor myself
Speaker 1:and then
Speaker 5:a trauma family, strong
Speaker 1:plus one.
Speaker 2:Chris, thanks so much for joining us. Really appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And, Chris, thank you for everything you're doing with Hackaderm. It's awesome. It's a huge service, and we I think those folks may have seen, but, Oxide is is proud to be the the first, company on on HackerDerm. So that was that's been a lot of fun.
Speaker 1:Thank you very much.
Speaker 9:For the content warning thing, A few years ago, I talked to someone who said, well, I don't know what to see because, well, I'm not in this case, the person is autistic. And so, assume or interpreting what what could be triggering is a very hard mental task for them. And no no list exists, at least on the instance they were on. And, we talked about it and had some interesting discussion. And the thing we got out out of this is that the UI could support this because at the moment, you only can do all expand all cvs or collapse all CVs.
Speaker 9:And there's no real way to filter between CVs you want to ex to auto expand, and those you don't because there's no standardization.
Speaker 1:We do expect the
Speaker 9:there the the UI could help by, sampling the local or federated time and look at the CVs and provide you with an example list. These are the top 10 CVs, and there's a free form field. So CV topics could, organically in the community make make themselves for a social standard without the need for process or or configuration.
Speaker 1:Well, and I think yeah. Sorry, Adam. Go ahead. Yeah. There also the but the
Speaker 4:the thing is right now, it's a free form field, and there's 0 0 structure to it, 0 validation as as it said that it's, a subject line that was repurposed essentially as a CV. So
Speaker 8:I think it's important
Speaker 1:for it
Speaker 8:to remain an open ended field. Just noting that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well and so and I think that I mean, to me, kind of the the the high over bit is this is a, this is functionality that users of this want. But those of us if if on a commercial site where we are not buying a product, but we famously are the product, they are less incentivized to give us these kinds of tools.
Speaker 1:So I think that there's a lot of reason for optimism. This is gonna be an issue that I think there's gonna be a lot of discussion on, and and as you point out, lots of room for improvement. And
Speaker 8:One of the things I wanna say yeah. Sorry. One of the things I do wanna say is that I am also autistic and so are most of people in my friend group. And we tend not to have a lot of issues with this, but the thing is what we've done is we've developed sort of this social understanding that if, you know, if someone you follow, or well, if you see content that you think should be content warned and you know the person who who, like, posted it. You could just message them and say, hey, in the future, can you content warn this?
Speaker 8:And there's no judgment, nothing like that between us. And that's kind of how it's worked. But if you're if you don't already have that social network in, you know, on Mastodon where you have that kind of convention going, I I do understand how that can be confusing.
Speaker 1:Well, I I do think, and, Adam, you famously gave me a book for my birthday. So you've been publicly shamed. That's right. It's like, I think I think you might know. I think you're 2 about this.
Speaker 1:And it we're actually really, really good book. And I do think that the mass on is less incentivized towards public shaming, which I think has got a lot of positive associated with it. There's a lot of things that, like, we have behind it just lingered to your to your earlier point of, like, this is something you can message someone privately and say, hey, by the way, like, you may wanna rethink this next time. It and, yeah, actually affect some change. And most of
Speaker 4:the there isn't public shaming.
Speaker 1:No. No. I I know. No. I I know that.
Speaker 1:No. I know. We we definitely have not eliminated humanity here. But I I I wanna get I wanna get, Marin and Tim in. Now you've had your hand up a bunch.
Speaker 1:I want I want you to get it get you in here.
Speaker 5:Hi. Can you hear me?
Speaker 1:Yep. We can hear you.
Speaker 5:I just wanted, first to end up a few projects. First is a PVA, Pinafore. It's a Masterdon client. It's, PWA developed by Greg Fontenius and it's, awesome. And, Lenny is actually written in Rust.
Speaker 5:And this leads to my next point that, unfortunately, the activity path is, in my view, suffering from the same problem as Jadar. There there is basic protocol, but there is no guarantee that you will have all the features. Right.
Speaker 1:So
Speaker 5:for example so, and actually it goes, a long way back. There was a split between activity pop, Fox, and in the web folks. The second, bunch focused more on UX and the first one focused more on protocols.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:So far it, so far it wasn't great on, either side. And I think it would be very, what's the word, interesting to see whether the new interest in activity path would actually fill it with more features. Because in in the web, bots are kinda in their own homes. Each one is developing their feature and activity path is, in my video, suffering from a little bit of design by community.
Speaker 1:It's right. Well, and that and that's apparel of having more people interested in a thing is not always better. I mean, people in open source communities, we always think large communities are better than small communities. But having been in both very large communities and very small communities, very small communities have some things to be said for themselves because it is much easier to get consensus than you don't have a bunch of new interests coming in.
Speaker 8:On the other hand, there is the interesting interoperability that this allows where, for example, I can post a video of something on peer tube, and then on my Mastodon or Miski instance, I can boost that so other people will see it and people can reply back, and it will show up as a comment on the video. And I think that's just really interesting how it also enables things like that.
Speaker 1:That is really cool. And with anything that would make YouTube comments not an absolute hellhole would be very much relevant. Jeremy, you got your hand up.
Speaker 10:Yeah. I was going to, add. I've, received one more, unexpected benefit from federated instances and the decentralization making, my name less valuable. I am, penguinonhackuderm, but on Twitter, there can only be 1 AHL. There can only be 1 penguin.
Speaker 10:And so if you are late, no vanity for you. First name, bunch of numbers, which seems fine, except, for myself, the downside has been I'm a persistent target for spam and for hacks and for, death threats because it's
Speaker 5:Oh, man.
Speaker 1:Ace hatches when a, when
Speaker 10:a when a Twitch user or a or a professional video gamer is like,
Speaker 2:but that's the thing that I call myself, and
Speaker 10:I'm a 14 year old who doesn't know about
Speaker 4:since both
Speaker 10:Oh. Watching is cool.
Speaker 1:Okay. So I thought it was so it's people who are, like, wanna challenge you for the the the name. I thought it was people who are coming after you because they're associating you with other penguins. Like, look, I hate penguins. I finally found the penguin here.
Speaker 1:But this is actually, like, people who are like, no. I'm the penguin. You're not the penguin.
Speaker 8:You you I actually dropped a previous username because of someone doing this and essentially later trying to impersonate me.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Okay. That's so interesting. So but it's on so this actually I Jeremy, I because I have I've had this question about, their and I know Adam is it because his plan of having the American Hockey League's mastodon, the, so there can be multiple every instance can have its own, that IDs are not uniqueified across instances. Is that right?
Speaker 10:Much the same way much the same way as email. Right? You Okay. Get your, your name at instance. And so, there can be a penguin at, mastodon social, a penguin at octodont, a penguin at masto, a ping but all of the all the other instances can have a duplicate of your name much like, you know, going to a start up early.
Speaker 10:It's cool to get Jeremy at the place. But when you go to a 100 1,000 person organization, there's a great chance that they've hired another Jeremy who was barred between 1976 and 1983 at the, popular name then. And, and so you don't, you don't get it, much if you're inside the same company or inside the same instances. But thousands of instances, thousands of people with your exact name.
Speaker 1:Alright. So Adam's plan of putting the American Hockey League in a box is gonna require Adam, you're gonna have to go to every instance you can think of to create AHL to prevent them.
Speaker 2:You know, this is actually delightful because now they could have their own AHL at, you know, hockey dot social or whatever, and no one will need to tell me about the latest checkers, controversy or the Calder Cup outcome or anything like that.
Speaker 10:So I'm realizing where this all started too. Do you know why I'm Penguin? No. It's because Jeremy was taken. Do you know by who?
Speaker 1:Oh, I do know by yes. I know Jeremy. Absolutely. I know I yeah. That is funny.
Speaker 1:Jeremy screwed you.
Speaker 10:Right? User number 12, maybe?
Speaker 1:User number 12, I loved. Have you met Jeremy?
Speaker 10:Yeah. No. We've, we've been out in Berkeley.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Jeremy is great. And so I there's so much I love about Jeremy is just like because I was dealing with Jeremy in 2007 when we were when Twitter was a tire fire and the fail whale. And he was just like, help me. Get me out of here.
Speaker 1:Like, I am I am and he did say I remember he said, like, the first opportunity I get to sell everything and leave, I'm doing. And I'm like, okay. Well, let's debug your problem right now. I mean, it was just like it was and sure enough, that's basically what he did. And, like, good on him.
Speaker 1:I thought it it's,
Speaker 2:He was, like, slipping you a note, like, palming you a note? Like, help me
Speaker 1:get me out of here. Right. Like, why does it say do not read aloud? Oh, do not read aloud. Oh, I'm so sorry.
Speaker 1:Right. Exactly. He, but he I really like Jeremy. So, Jeremy, I'm very sorry that the I I would love to join you in obviously disparaging original Jeremy, but original Jeremy is first, Jeremy, what do we call him? I'm not sure.
Speaker 10:Sorry. Jeremy Prime? Just Jeremy? Jeremy on Twitter? No.
Speaker 10:Jeremy? There's there's
Speaker 1:no real Jeremy? Yeah. Did you go like, were you gonna and I guess that you probably predate, like, the real Jeremy or, you know, you could've taken all these other, well, you can, that's interesting. So then you that that was the birth of of Penguin. And then are you, Jeremy, on Mastodon?
Speaker 1:Are you sticking with Penguin? Are you
Speaker 10:Yeah. I mean, I was a I'm not gonna say day 0, but I on hackaderm was, like, April, whatever it is, 24th or 25th. So whatever the second day was. Was. And so on that particular instance, yes.
Speaker 10:On another particular instance, I joined 2017 or 2018. Yes. But I'm not going to try and, like, do the name rush of however many tens of thousands of instances are that feels like a path to madness.
Speaker 1:Right. I also I'm not gonna say day 0 because I refer to I prefer to price it as hour 14. And, that is that's awesome. And so and Jeremy, have you been using so you're early on Hackaderm, and have you switched your engagement now over primarily to to Mastodon?
Speaker 10:No. And, I had joined Hekner but not, but not started posting. Like, Twitter was
Speaker 6:it was
Speaker 10:something to explore. Still on Twitter, unmasked it on more, a lot more in re a lot more in read mode. A lot of it still, you know, you you're floating in the in the water in the wreckage, and you're trying to find your, trying to find your people now. There's not the discovery mechanism, but I just mentioned why not having the discovery mechanism is is really nice because that means that, the bad folks don't find me as quickly. And so, but, yeah, I've I've got a foot in both worlds right now.
Speaker 1:Did did you see Paul Ford's, I I can't bring myself to say toot, but it was a toot of, the, Paul Ford's published Mastodon post, that this is he describes this condition that you're in as purgatory, where you are in between the bird site and Mastodon, and kind of foot feet in in both domains. What I did wanna mention, the, that I don't think we've hit on yet. But, Adam, I'm loving the 500 character limits.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. That was great. But, okay. This is a dumb one. But I see other toots that seem to go well past that.
Speaker 2:That.
Speaker 3:Yes. It is it is server specific.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yes. It's server so for example, when I post from my WordPress using the activity pop plug in, it I told it to publish the whole post. And for example, what my Armenia server does have character limits just as it's just a default configuration. And for example, bsd.network has, like, 5,000 character limit, I think. So it it is server specific.
Speaker 3:The protocol does not define a limitation.
Speaker 1:Okay. So the
Speaker 8:It is considered good etiquette for long post to be CW just for being long.
Speaker 1:I would
Speaker 4:say. I think most server software has, like, a limit of what they will accept at, like, 8,000 characters or so. But you can just bump it, if you have your own server too, whatever.
Speaker 1:That's interesting. Well, I they I'm on mastodon.social, which I think is I I think it was one of the early instances that's I'd certainly I seem to have created it when they we first announced it, which has a 500 character limit, which I found to be just that different. There's a big difference, as it turns out, between 285100. And because the tweet thread is the other thing, Adam, that is a feature. Have you done the tweet swarms?
Speaker 8:Have
Speaker 2:you? Yeah. Well, I for for I mean, I I know that you read them, but every week for this show when when I announce
Speaker 1:Yes. Right.
Speaker 2:Yes. The the videos, I do. I don't and I gotta say, I I was not clear on what how how much I was violating etiquette rules on Mastodon as I tooth stormed, you know, some of the content from from these videos.
Speaker 1:Okay. So you're just using to like, you're you're past toot. Toot is fine.
Speaker 4:I'm not really.
Speaker 2:I'm not really. I when I when you hear me say it, there are quotation marks around it. Okay?
Speaker 1:But I also heard you say tooth storm, but you just seem to, like, just go I mean, you didn't seem to slow the car down.
Speaker 2:Oh, I vomited in my mouth.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah. No.
Speaker 2:That's what happened. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So I'm gonna have to replay the recording, see if I can
Speaker 5:do that.
Speaker 1:I mean, I'm not sure that I'm
Speaker 8:I'm on miss key, so it's called a note.
Speaker 1:I know. Well and on I did know that that's not the social that say publish instead of toot as the verb. The Steven O'Grady had a blog post that you linked to, Adam, that I thought was really good. The and I I know he had a couple of questions on there. I I feel we've hit a lot of them today, but there are were the questions on there that you saw that we've not actually
Speaker 2:Well, you know, one of those things that he brought up that we didn't we haven't really talked about is the money. Yes. Like like, how does this become sustainable? I do, I do love this zeitgeist of folks saying like $8 a month, forget about it. But, you know, for example, I'm, I'm paying $10 a month, on Patreon for mastodon.social.
Speaker 2:But but I I think how this all becomes, sustainably
Speaker 3:Can I answer that? Please.
Speaker 4:So I can share maybe is that, in around 2018, 20 19, my free camps.com, secretly sponsored basically the entire Pleroma development team. It was, like, 6 people, I think, at that time. And they basically paid them to develop Pliaroma for some reasons.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I think that I mean, economically, this is gonna be decentralized, so it's gonna look different. And I think that if you you know, to to Chris' earlier point about, knowing kind of having this human to human contact. I think you know, Adam, I think people are more likely to do the the Patreon, the the $10 month Patreon. I think the $8 per month for Twitter blue.
Speaker 1:I think that may be a point of principle. This may be surprising to learn.
Speaker 2:No. That's fair enough. And it actually I mean, this is an embarrassing reveal now, but this is a safe space. Like, I was paying the $3 a month, for the old Twitter blue or whatever in part because I felt like I took a lot from the site and sure. Like, I wanted I wanted the thing to exist.
Speaker 2:Now, obviously, I have fairly complicated feelings about that. But I think it's it's born of the same, you know, motivation that that gives $10 a month to the Patreon, site.
Speaker 1:And I don't think it's gonna be it would be interesting to see how expensive it is to run. I because I I think that the when you are, when you take when you don't have a company behind it, you also don't have a lot of costs associated with it. I mean, people are a lot of the costs of Twitter. It's not just Infiniti.
Speaker 3:Yes. That's what I was gonna say. So one of the reasons why our Armenian instances have been sustainable was 2 things. One of them is we have, a lot of volunteers in different aspects, not just moderators on the web interface to, you know, help us with the reporting and banning and stuff like that. A lot of times when, for example, when we teach children programming and systems in UNIX, we tell them, yo, can you get on the system and, let's say, upgrade a package on this free BSD or install of latest version of Docker because of some reason.
Speaker 3:So that's one thing that has helped us to become sustainable, giving the users of the system that we trust more access so we, the founders, quote, unquote, of the instance, have you know, we have also other lives to do. And the second thing is that we realized is actually company sponsorship, which has been very weirdly working. So one of the instances here is done by my friend. So he runs his server physically in our company's data center. My other friend who runs it in the other side of the country, he asked his own company that, can you give me, let's say, $20 a month so I will put my server of, Mastodon?
Speaker 3:And on the about page, I will say, you know, happily sponsored by this software development company that no one has ever heard of, has, like, 2 customers that is outsourcing. And they're like, yeah. Sure. It's it's nothing. You know?
Speaker 3:It's just a small amount of money for electricity and hard drives, and one of their Sys admins are is helping that instance, quote, unquote, founder to replace the disk once in a while and stuff like that. So it's been more like a human interaction that has been it's been people who'll be keeping it, sustainable, not not even our own users, but the people that we know on the instance. The human connection has made it very, very, very sustainable for us.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's interesting. And I I think that that is there's a really something to that. I mean, when we were, you know, looking for a a spot for oxide because, obviously, I I I think that the social has been very important for oxide, and we love our community here. And but knowing that it it really is not gonna continue on on Twitter Spaces or Twitter, you know, I Chris and I had a conversation.
Speaker 1:And, like, alright. What what do we want this to look like? And the and I'm excited to support Hackaderm however we can. It's gonna be some monetary support. And, ideally, I think that we we wanna live the dream of of getting Hackaderm running, on an oxide rack.
Speaker 3:Yes, please.
Speaker 1:Yes, please. I I think that there are some I and maybe even from Chris, when I noticed that she that's what the I I that oxide rack will definitely it's definitely not a home lab kind of a rack unless you got the King KW in your basement. So This is
Speaker 2:why I was asking about some of the gear that was running in after I saw Chris's tweet about running it on oxide gear, which I'm all for. It's just I mean, the oxide rack is kind of a big boy.
Speaker 1:It it it it's chunking. But we've got I It
Speaker 8:would be massively overkill.
Speaker 1:It would be massively overkill, but it would also be, I think, it would be a lot of fun for us to I mean, it'd be for sure. And it would be a good use case for us and then also a great way to give back. Because, honestly and, you know, Adam, you and I have said over and over again, we would gladly buy Twitter spaces as a product. This is valuable to us, to Oxide. We would absolutely pay for it.
Speaker 1:There's no way to do that right now on Twitter. That is the product I would pay for. And I I think that for there are social engagement has value to cut to companies that that is not advertising. And I think that we are we've we've lived ours in this kind of very narrow idea that the only value of social networking is advertising. And that's not the only value.
Speaker 1:And we can actually get to value that's much more organic, I think. And then we are I think companies can be willing to contribute to. So then trying to just your point about, like, it doesn't surprise me that company is going to help.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There there may be kind of a generational shift on this as well where I I feel like and Brian, I don't know if I I speak for our generation, but there's kind of anathema to to paying for things that feel like they should be free, that that led to, ad sponsorship. Whereas I feel like, younger generations have much more familiarity with, you know, rather than buying their music, they're very happy to pay for Spotify in a way that I was reluctant to. And maybe this is, another part of that shift where folks are happy to pay, you know, the 5, 10, $20 a month for access for, for these social sites, whereas, you know, our generation may be baulked at it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think so. And I think there there are definitely different models. We do we can have a we can get commercial viability without necessarily the Twitter model. The Twitter model is not the only model to commercial viability.
Speaker 1:And indeed, it might not even be a model to commercial liability.
Speaker 2:Right. Which is which is the right. Right. Is it indeed a model? Right?
Speaker 2:And then same thing with Facebook. Right? Like, we're as as we see, it's, falters faltering.
Speaker 3:Oh, I just wanted to add that I personally should thank the Americans in the chat here because our next server is sponsored by USAID.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow. Wow. That's really interesting. That's awesome.
Speaker 3:Our next servers are sponsored with, via USAID. They agreed to give us, a lot of desktops for the children to study as well as a desktop that should have server like specs. Let's put it that way, so so we can host our stuff on there as well, both the internal Git stuff as well as external Mastodon stuff. So, I know, I told I I can't believe I just forgot about it. I was literally in their office today talking about delivering these servers to the town, the town that does have a Mastodon instance of its own.
Speaker 1:That is
Speaker 3:from US taxpayers' money. Thank you very much all.
Speaker 1:That is great. Well, and I feel that, like, with these organizations like USAID, you've got people who are so and, hopefully, you found this to be case in Armenia. But people who civil civic servant civil servants who are very well meaning on the ground who often have to deal with a lot of bureaucratic entities. So I'm glad there's some positivity coming out of that. That is that is really great, and exciting to hear.
Speaker 1:There I so what I we're doing to wrap, but I I I did wanna hit 2 other points that I Adam, I love your your take on. One is the, the I kind of like the impaired searchability of Mastodon. And what do you
Speaker 2:what do you like about it?
Speaker 1:Oh, so what I like about it is that it it it does not lend itself is is, is saying something that I disagree with, and I wanna be mad about it.
Speaker 2:Totally fair. And and, guilty as charged in terms of using Twitter search, for that mechanism. Yeah. Totally agreed.
Speaker 4:And I think it's important to know that, people on the diverse have have responded, harshly to even attempt at providing search.
Speaker 1:Well, and I and I kinda get it. At first, I'm like, oh, that's ridiculous. And I'm like, you
Speaker 8:know what? That makes sense.
Speaker 1:Actually, make it a little harder for people to seek out being enraged. And I say that actually because I need to impair myself because it's like this is like I'm having that intervention with myself. Right? And then the other thing I and, Alex, I know you and I both like these kind of of specialists that have found their way on the Twitter. I I find it super interesting.
Speaker 1:Right? You got, like Yeah. Weather, Twitter, or whatever. And I know they've been really concerned about those coteries moving, but I find that they're moving pretty quick. As it turns out, like, if you're, like, like, if you do you know, if you're a meteorologist or you're a neuroscientist or you're an epidemiologist, you can actually figure out Mastodon.
Speaker 1:It's actually not that hard to figure out. They and those seem to be moving. Is that your experience?
Speaker 3:Do you
Speaker 1:have any queries you like?
Speaker 2:So, I mean, I guess the the ones that I have been most interested in, in particular in like the last, say, 6 days has been election and politics related ones. And I don't, I haven't found that to have moved yet. I found a bunch of folks that I like, have have kind of not, I've been eager for Mastodon, but sort of, blocked at the gates from some of these, as we discussed, low, low, ramification, low consequence decisions, but a little bit stymied. So I don't know. I think some of the communities that I have been following
Speaker 5:recently have
Speaker 2:not initially made the jump yet.
Speaker 3:Oh, oh, I have I'm sorry. I'm talking a lot today. So the the two things that we also have done, and, I think a lot of people will not like us about this, for example, the blogs that we like Brian, your blog being one of them and add them too, is, because your blog doesn't support activity pub, we have an RSS to ActivityPub publisher. So whenever you write a new blog, it takes the content and publishes publishes it to ActivityPub. That's one of the things that we did.
Speaker 3:And the second thing is we've done a survey, I think, last year. 80 plus percent of our users were not in tech. Like, they were not developers, he's having nothing like that. I don't know how did that happen. They in students, and the the only thing that we saw in in common is that they were nerds, as in, like, they they had something that they wanted to talk about.
Speaker 3:One of them just wanted to toot about their experience in another city. Like, they just wanted a safe space about that instead of being a mainstream media. So I don't think it's complicated for your communities, Adam, to bring to Macedon. They just need, like, a guide, an FAQ, maybe, you know.
Speaker 2:That's right. Someone to hold their hand along the way. I think that's right.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Or or some protracted Twitter downtime, which surely
Speaker 2:That'll be a strong motivator for sure.
Speaker 1:Alright. Morten, do you get your hand up? I think this is gonna be the last point, and, with we wanna wrap here, but I know you've had your hand up a long time.
Speaker 9:Thanks. A few days ago, with the last big influx of Twitter users, our local instance, had to scale up. So they already closed registrations, but because the feediverse got bigger and there was more traffic, they had to buy a bigger server. So for the sustainability and financing, aspect we already touched on, I think the, the efficiency of the protocol and implementations is very important because it can keep costs down or make them explode. The question is, has anyone looked yet, really at the limits of of efficiency, in the activity PAP protocol.
Speaker 9:We had some some very preliminary discussions, locally, but nothing really technical with figures and stuff like that.
Speaker 1:Well and I I think that we can definitely count on lots of folks looking at that those kinds of things, in the the days weeks to come. I do I I do wanna wrap because we've got a split, but, thank you very much. Adam, I think we our next are is this gonna be our last space, or are we gonna what what do you think is our
Speaker 2:let's set that as the goal. We got a lot of work to this week to make that true. But, the the goal is a week from today, we're on a different platform. And and, the fallback is we'll be back here.
Speaker 1:Well, and actually, I can't, week from today, I'm we're traveling for Thanksgiving. So I'm I'm actually out.
Speaker 2:Better. Right. You would turns out you and me both. I just forgot. So we got 2 weeks.
Speaker 2:Perfect. You get almost anything done in 2 weeks.
Speaker 1:In 2 weeks? That's plenty of times. We don't even have to think about it for a night. So the but so, Stashin, it's very much welcome. Again, we love the ability for people to be able to to get up on stage, and, and hear from people we haven't heard from before.
Speaker 1:So thank you so much, everybody, and we will see you on Mastodon. Thanks, everyone.