#Medium link; don't be surprised if it does weird things before showing you the article.
"Mastodon brought a protocol to a product fight"
> Yes, yes, the network is under immense strain as people flee the Elon strain infecting Twitter. But come on, there are folks who really believe this is going to replace, or even stand alongside Twitter, as a massively scaled social network? I call bullshit. While it’s impressive that millions of users have apparently given Mastodon a try, the product is far too slapdash and clunky to keep folks engaged. A lump of coal.
No, it isn't meant to be a #Twitter replacement. Keep your Twitter account until you no longer want it--or the company closes and the site shuts down--you can use Mastodon alongside Twitter.
And the #Fediverse networks are much more than just #Mastodon. Don't think you have experienced the network and all it has to offer if all you've done is briefly tried to use Mastodon, because you haven't experienced it.
> I’ve somehow avoided signing up for the service up until now. Largely because signing up was and is so comically obtuse — pick your server everyone, hope you choose wisely!
Have you not used e-mail? It works the same way. You pick a server, such as Gmail or Outlook dot com, and sign up. Please tell me you realize that the people you communicate with are not all on the same e-mail service that you use.
> But, but, it’s not a product, it’s a protocol. Yeah, that’s a nice thing to say. And to believe in. But I truly believe the ship has sadly sailed for such idealism in this space. Jack Dorsey can talk about how this should have been what Twitter was from the get go until he’s bluesky in the face. It’s just not going to happen. And he’s more to blame for that than most everyone else. As is he for the Elon element of this current equation. But that’s a different story.
Okay, so how about this story: Twitter has only been profitable two or three years of its entire history. Since it started, it has existed by burning through investors' funds. Eventually, with or without Elon Musk's ownership, that runs out. Without such funding, their corporate-centralized ( #corpocentric ) model cannot exist very long. And same for their centralized competitors, such as Post.news, Gab, Parler, and so on. What is left is either #federated or #peer-to-peer approaches, where no single entity is responsible for funding and managing the entire network. So whether it is the #Fediverse ( with #ActivityPub and #OStatus and their successors ) & the Federation ( with #Diaspora ) or #Bluesky, or #Twister, or #NOSTR, the eventual future of #socnets is #decentralized, if not entirely peer-to-peer unless a national government takes over Facebook and Twitter in order to provide effectively unlimited resources. It is the protocol that makes it possible for thousands or millions of instances to displace and replace one big centralized instance.
I generally don't follow Medium links either. Though I did follow one a week or two ago and did so without hitting their login wall. Frankly, I'm much more inclined to follow links to #WordPress.com or even #Blogger. (Though Google has worked hard at spewing JavaScript in places that worked fine without it, so I have to think about known Blogger links.)
#ShowerThought imagine a hybrid blog/wiki platform where the primary author UI is a blog editor, but drafts are saved and versioned as wiki pages. The visitor UI would be a bit like #CoActivate.org, with separate sections for reading blog posts in published order, and for browsing through wiki pages. The wiki could also be private, allowing a trusted group to give feedback on drafts in progress, a la #Medium (do they still have that feature).
@wjmaggos I agree it would be great to see an official #TeamHuman account in the #fediverse, even if it's only reposting from the TH account on the birdsite like #CoryDoctorow does (although the reverse would be better, which is what I do). Even better would be if Doug used something like #WriteAs to publish the text version of the TH monologues directly into the fediverse, as well as posting them on #Medium. @humanetech
There's some good advice in here about what *not* to do with passphrase policies for online services, and why, with some potentially helpful references. But ultimately I disagree with a lot of Troy's conclusions, because they're biased by what kind of US makes sense to him, a power user with a high level of security knowledge, not a #JoUser. My favourite approach is what #Medium does; they send a login link to your registered email address instead of storing a password. https://www.troyhunt.com/passwords-evolved-authentication-guidance-for-the-modern-era/
Over on #Reddit, a user shared a new article from #Medium about why #Angular had caused some poor schmuck to quit #WebDev.
I chimed in with arguing that Angular does suck. Expecting to get challenged (Reddit being a semi-public forum with many different people) I intended to share receipts.
But my comment got deleted when the comment on which I had commented got deleted.
So, without further ado, let me share someone else's insight into why Angular sucks - 1/2
@fribbledom@starbreaker Reader mode is almost as good an e-ink screen for reading long walls of text. It's saved my sanity of a number of occasions on style heavy sites like #Medium
Cool. There's a new #activitypub platform for blogging called #plume, meant to be an alternative to #medium. This could be a pretty big deal, because it means orgs can go all in on the #fediverse. They can have a #mastodon/#pleroma acct for quick communication and host their blog on plume instead of medium and all of it will federate, so users can choose how to follow and communicate with them.
Yo #Medium, you didn't *write* the posts, so stop acting like I owe you a login. You are the creepy uncle everyone thought was cool but now won't visit for vacation, so stop inviting me back to your place.