Alipay.

Time to break out the block cannon. Ain’t no way that I let anything Zuck touches touch my stuff.

The name is a really weird one. Sounds more like a spreadsheet than a social media application.

No.

ActivityPub is a protocol. It has no agency.

People can save the Internet. Perhaps with ActivityPub, perhaps with something else.

And here we see the seeds of IRC’sthe Fediverse’s irrelevancy being planted and lovingly tended.

What you just said could have easily been put into the mouths of any number of IRC advocates 20 years ago. Where is IRC now? Remind me.

Because it’s sometimes a ludicrous demand?

Common pattern I see in Mastodon’s … more strident, shall we call them? … advocates:

Poster: I just took a picture of a <insert bird>. Note the red and yellow flash of plumage, in contrast to the more usual green and red. I caught this little darling hopping along the charcoal grey slate walkway I’ve got running through my garden, right next to the <insert flower> you can see at the right side of the frame.

<put picture here>

Strident Twit: WHY YOU NO PUT ALT TEXT!?

Or, worse:

Strident Twit Bot: WHY YOU NO PUT ALT TEXT FOR OUR BLIND USERS!?

---

So what, precisely (providing details), would you put into alt text that’s not already in the post? Would you just copy and paste the alt text? When I ask the strident twits this, I generally get vague homilies and blocks.

I think he’s a bit over-hopeful at the fediverse’s prospects, sadly. People will give up so much (like all of their privacy!) for a small amount of convenience.

It’s not Twitter that Mastodon has to seize the moment from. It’s all the other commercial offerings that will inevitably pop up in its place as Twitter crashes and burns.

Is there a version that’s not behind a paywall?

This is nonsense.

I’ve seen more young’uns whining that it’s “too hard” to choose an instance. It’s the young’uns that are used to things being all in one place: one Facebook, one Twitter, one Instagram, etc. The elder Gen-X/younger-Boomer crowd are all very familiar with having to make choices in service providers (because we had choices!). We had to choose telephone service providers, Internet service providers (who weren’t our telephone guys for AGES!), email service providers (often our ISPs, but not always: also our work environments, and third-party suppliers once we’d gone through the change-the-ISP-email dance often enough), etc. etc. etc.

The young’uns are the ones that flock to wherever their friends are flocking this week and have ISP choices they can count on one hand, even after a bizarre gardening accident sheared off a few fingers. Choice has been systematically removed from people in the tech sphere since I was in my teens. Fewer choices in phone configurations, fewer choices in ISPs, fewer choices in email providers, fewer choices in chat systems, fewer choices in …

… until we have the situation where people think of social media sites instead of social media platforms.

US companies not obeying laws in other countries, even when operating there, is by now just a sad cliche.

Public speech has no expectation of privacy. Nobody would find anything wrong with recording a public announcement. If you want to have a private conversation, it’s up to you to hold that conversation privately.

Please let me know where you live and which cafe you frequent. I’ll just stand there while you have a quiet conversation with your SO, my phone recording everything you say. You won’t object, naturally, because it’s a public space and if you didn’t want your romantic conversation broadcast live on Twitch you’d have had it elsewhere, right?

Scraping public text, which is something that’s been widely accepted on the web for two decades …

Saying that “she asked for it; she was dressed like a slut” was widely accepted in the world at large for THOUSANDS of years (and still is in some places!). Until it suddenly wasn’t. In some parts of the world.

Hell, pounding the shit out of someone for being “rude” was (and is) widely accepted for thousands of years. Not all that long ago, in human historical terms, killing someone for talking back to you was not only acceptable, it was required to preserve your “honour” (or whatever other term was used in that space).

Maybe—and just hear me out here—maybe things that are “widely accepted” have turned out to be shitty things, not things to be emulated and amplified.

(Please wait until I’m in your cafe and recording before you respond, though. I want to make sure that thousands of people are listening in.)

If the author is telling the full story…

Key word is the first word there. Everybody who has ever been banned from a site or server in all of the Internet’s history was innocent when they tell the tale.

Spotted the Russian op.

Oh God I hope not!

We will see. When “Quote Toots” come to Mastodon, let’s watch and see if Mastodon turns into a toxic dogpile site. My prediction is that it will (though it will be more left-flavoured than right-flavoured like the Birdsite). Yours is that it won’t.

We’ll let history decide which of us was right. (And if I was right, I’ll drop Mastodon and the Fediverse like I dropped the Hellsite and the Birdsite.)

If they come to Mastodon with the Twitter approach (can’t turn them off, get shoved into my notices) then I drop Mastodon. It’s that simple. Like I dropped Facebook and Twitter before (for much the same reason).

I’ve seen way too many QT dog-pile calls to tolerate them for even an instant in my Fediverse experience. If they come to the Fediverse, I drop the Fediverse. End of story.

No. It really isn’t. This desire to use the language of sociopaths is itself dangerous. Call it what it is: new. And interesting.

Sociopaths disrupting sociopaths? Where I come from that’s called two things:

1. Poetic justice.
2. A shit-show best kept faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar away from.

How’s about this as a notion, though: stop worshipping techbrodudes and other sociopaths and instead start getting the kindling built up under the stakes for them?

And can only really be used by other users of the seriously fringe set, yes.

And they don’t interfere with my experience, unlike the Twitter retweets.

I’m fine with the fringe of the already fringe (Fediverse) have access to circle jerking tools that don’t pollute my space. Twitter’s circle jerking tools spewed all over me. Fuck 'em.