In for a penny... My own writing is on the gopher. Mastodon is my first experience of any network like that (like a social media; federation used to be normal before modern times, consider XMPP which Google just offlined their former Hangouts hosted service of, the internet itself..). So I can reasonably speak to the mastodon side of this. In the three weeks since Paypal guy bought the bird, we gained about seventy thousand new users on our long-standing mastodon instance. I ballpark about 1/1000 people became a typical(ly strange) sdf user, though the former bird users still introduce themselves with a reasonable understanding that they're not buying the bird on mastodon. I judge this by the sudden influx of new names at our usual events on SDF, such as our improvisational synth battles. I believe we are the fifth largest current Mastodon node at 70k people. You can do the math on that since the paypal purchase. I guess user density is something like exponentially distributed (you can find NZ instances with the common 300 users). People seeem to be using the federation, unless they are on a non-federating instance, though some people sign up their username on a number of socially nearby instances. There are people who appear to have been popular on the bird site who are desparately trying to wave their erstwhile open source tech news users back to Paypal guy's eight dollar monthly subscription deal. Long time mastodon users reminisce about the good old days. My understanding is that Paypal guy and bird site company are acting weird and often described as imploding at the moment, though I understand that paypal guy is very rich so he might not care about lawsuits for his buy-a-checkmark being manipulated to manipulatively tank companies. Emptying, closing an office inexplicably, and so forth. On 11/18/22, DL Neil <NZLUG(a)etelligence.info> wrote:
On 18/11/2022 12.46, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
On Tue, 8 Nov 2022 10:28:34 +1300, I wrote:
Yeah ... “toot” ...
It appears that quaint little term is being retired <https://gizmodo.com/mastodon-toot-retired-twitter-tweet-equivalent-1849786221>, in favour of the blander “publish”. That was apparently the Mastodon creator’s original choice anyway.
"Bland" is probably the fate of things that become generalised and 'standardised'.
The applicable 'standard' (it's not really termed such) is even called "The ActivityPub protocol".
Objects may have three datetime descriptors: "published", "updated", and "deleted". The first kind-of gives the game away.
In its original form the protocol was called "ActivityPump". Be thankful we are not pumping posts! Toot-ing never conjured-up images of a mastodon/mammoth in my mind - nothing to do with bad/dangerous driving, for example. Vaguely struck me as sounding jealous of "tweeting". Aren't elephants described as trumpeting?
In recent days, mastodon.nzoss.nz (the New Zealand Open Source Society) has been reporting growth by leaps-and-bounds. I don't think it is necessary to be a financial member of the society before asking for an account. Make own approach, or will be happy to enquire on your behalf, upon request (off-list).
-- Regards =dn
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