On Being Asked Why I Wear Two Watches
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On Being Asked Why I Wear Two Watches

Byrichard

During the Via Ferrata I did on Sunday I was asked why I wear two watches and I answered with a joke before giving the serious answer that I wear two watches at once because I want the data from both watches. I was asked why I need the data from both watches and that’s where there is a change that is happening at the moment.

A Waning in Garmin Watches

By wearing the F-91 for a few days and wearing the Garmin watch less and less I find that my desire for heart rate, steps, recovery and other things to be recoreded is declining over time. I wore the Garmin for the Via Ferrata because I wanted the data. In the end I just looked at the temperature data and not much else.

Over a period of weeks I think I have weaned myself off of the desire to quantify everything I do, to several different services. I’m wearing a casio on my left wrist, as the primary watch, and the Apple watch as a secondary watch on the right wrist. For weeks, or even months, I have been keeping data from walks but I don’t feel the need to check that data at the end of walks, runs or other sports. I’m happy just to do things.

Dependencies

Both Garmin, and Apple, made such a huge effort to get us to wear them twenty four hours a day, and work towards challenges, that they have turned me off of wearing them. They “punish” us for not walking, they “punish” us for not keeping a never-ending streak. According to the Apple watch I walked three hours out of five so far. It feels like we’re filling an addiction rather than getting interesting data.

Not the Only One

Funnilly I was not the only one wearing two fitness trackers. Someone else had a fitbit and a Garmin watch but because one was a band and the other was a watch it was less obvious. I suspect that it may become more common for geeks to wear two watches in the near future.

And Finally

If we want to we can use hand held gps devices and we can use our phones as GPS trackers. In my experience relying on phones as GPS trackers is likely to result in incomplete data. If you put a phone into battery saver mode while tracking you may lose the GPS track, including with Sports tracker, among other apps.

During the pandemic I could wear two watches without it being a problem. Now that I am slowly going back into normal society I have to choose whether to wear two watches or not, whether to be normal, or not.

The Roche Au Dade Via Ferrata
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The Roche Au Dade Via Ferrata

Byrichard

Two days ago I was agonising about whether to go for a via ferrata(VF) or a hike. Eventually I decided that I would go for the hike, because hiking was an 18 minute drive away. I went for a walk/run and then I found that I had a burning desire to do the via ferrata. I went down to the cave and rummaged through to find various bits and pieces. I found my Grigri, climbing rope, harnesses and more. I also found that I had a tandem speed which I considered using.

It’s amusing. I had a real, deep, burning passion to do the Via Ferrata. I had forgotten how it feels to prepare for something that is potentially dangerous, but in reality very safe, if you follow the rules and regulations of the sport. It’s fun to consider whether to use the brand new VF set or to use the slightly older set. My slightly older set might have been used on one or two VF before I broke my arm and stopped climbing from 2019-2024 or so.

When I was walking along the port’s high wall in Javea in 2001 or so I felt scared at being three or four meters in height, compared to the road beneath. I questioned how I would cope with the heights that we encounter on a VF. I hoped that I would not be scared of heights again.

Luckily Via Ferrata is something you don’t forget. I found that all of my old Via Ferrata habits were still there. The habit of keeping arms straight, of resting when required, of taking pictures, of day dreaming and of patiently waiting for the rest of the group. At one or two points I was asked “why are you waiting” and the answer is simple. If I went at my speed the one and a half hour VF would take fourty five minutes. I have done VFs every weekend every summer for years so I am perfectly at home on VFs.

I was so “at home” that I took 72 photos during the VF.

The one challenge I faced was keeping the phone safe. I would have taken more photos but my key concern was dropping the phone if I slipped or lost my balance. I didn’t have as much flexibility to take photos as I would have liked. I need to find a system that gives me that flexibility. When I was doing VF all the time I had a strap so that if I dropped a camera it would drop less than a meter. Yesterday I was taking a risk every time I took photos.

In the past, when doing Via ferrata regularly, I have smashed one or two cameras to bits as they hit the rocks, over and over again. The best solution might be to use the Garmin virb.

About the Via Ferata Itself

The Roche au Dade Via Ferrata is about 45 minutes from Nyon. It is located in the valley that you pass by as you drive from Switzerland to England and vice versa. You get off the main road, drive through the village and head to a small simple parking. There are three or four routes that you can take. You have an introductory VF that takes you across several bridges. You also have the option of just going to do the zipline. There are two of them but for the second one you need to be more experienced to get to it.

For the most part I would class the VFs as easy but that’s with years of VF experience. There is one bit on the classic route that I think people should be wary of. It’s the vertical climb after the last monkey bridge because it is more vertical and physical than the other parts. This is where people might struggle if they are not prepared.

I like that there are three or four routes to enjoy because you can spend more than fourty five minutes here. You also have a picnick table. You can climb one part, get back down, have a snack or drink and do the other parts.

As you can see from the featured photo the via ferrata is right on the road, as is the parking so access time is quick.

And Finally

In the end I’m happy that I chose to climb with the Via Ferrata group rather than hike with the hiking group. One of the advantages of doing something with a smaller group is that you get to know the people better. I definitely want to do more activities with this group and I’m happy that we ended the day with a drink before driving home. I think that “end of activity” drinks, even if it’s orangina, are important.

Threads in Europe
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Threads in Europe

Byrichard

A few weeks ago Facebook (I refuse to whitewash that company by calling it Meta) decided to blackmail European users. The deal was simple. We were coerced. “Accept to pay for Facebook or we will force you to see ads. This was a lose lose situation that the European Union is now fighting. Imagine being given this choice. If you pay you’re going to be rewarding a company that has abused us.

Facebook Never Apologises for Being Immoral

Facebook enabled the spread of a genocidal message, it enabled the spread of disinformation to get both Trump elected and Brexit to be agreed to. It also experimented with making people more than once. Despite all of this Facebook never apologised.

When I was given the ultimatum of Pay up or you have consented for us to use your data they blackmailed us into either paying “protection money”, or being subjected to targeted advertising. It would give Facebook an excuse to say “But they agreed to us abusing of the data we have on them, and using profiling to manipulate them.

Pay or Be Data Mined

I got side tracked. The real issue is that people being given the choice to pay for facebook, or be manipulated Facebook could say “We gave Europeans the choice, and they chose to give their data rather than their money. This isn’t a choice. There are two to three billion users. It has a monopoly position so we can be isolated by not using Facebook, or exploited, by being on Facebook.

The Nuissance of Algorithms

I created my Threads account to preserve my username rather than out of a desire to use the social network. Instagram, Threads and Facebook all have the same problem. They force us to see crap generated by influencers and strangers, rather than friends. You can pay not to see ads, but you can’t pay to avoid the toxic posts by influencers. By toxic I mean anything that may have a negative effect on our mental well being, whether reminding us of our solitude, of our not being at an event, of not being at the right point at the right age in life and more.

Toxic Facebook

Instagram, for me, and many others, is toxic. I believe that Threads will be just as toxic. I noticed for example that we’re encouraged to like, rather than comment. Years ago I found that social media became far lonelier when people started to like rather than comment, reply or other. A like is a metric, a statistic. A comment is personal.

Social Networks Need to Be Organic

Social networks need to be organic. They need to encourage people to converse with each other, and to converse with the friends of friends. Social network should connect like minded people who have the time for each other, at a manageable scale.

After just a few minutes of using Threads I see posts by people with 4000 or more likes, hundreds of comments and more. My response is “I’m being forced to see content by people who will never reciprocate the attention. I am being spammed by influencers and other toxic individuals.

Of course, I could strive for finding something that 4000 people like, or three hundred people comment on but that’s not what social media is about. Social media is about a convivial intimate conversation between tight knit friends that eventually want to meet in person, rather than stay online. Facebook doesn’t encourage organic social network growth. It encourages the cult of personality. It amplifies the sentiment of being alone and lonely, of being ignored.

The Strength of 2006-2007 Twitter

The strength of social networks, including Twitter is that you started from a blank slate. If you had one friend you saw their posts, and their replies. If you had two friends, then you saw the same. The more active your social network became, the larger your circle of friends and contacts. There was a reward for investing time and attention on a social network.

With Threads we don’t have this. We see posts that are chosen by an algorithm that has nothing to do with our social graph. This is noise, and this devalues Threads because we spend more time dealing with noise, than worthwhile posts by friends.

And Finally

One of the greatest problems with Facebook is that it has a monopoly. It has Facebook, Threads, Instagram and Whatsapp. It has over two billion users. Whether you’re an early adopter, a late adopter, or a normal person, people with similar interests are on Facebook platforms so we’re forced to be there as well. Facebook has a monopoly, especially since the death of Twitter.

It’s a shame that social media has become a fight for attention, rather than an organic conversation between friends, colleagues and people who do specific activities together. Now is the time to use Threads obsessively to become visible, but I believe that I will end up feeling more solitude, rather than less.

The Solitude of Social Media
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The Solitude of Social Media

Byrichard

One of the unique things about Twitter in 2006 and 2007, especially during the first tweetups was that it was a network of strangers who became friends without meeting in person. The people I became friends with in 2006-2007 are still friends now, to some degree. I met them every week at tuttle events and tweetups.


At the same time Facebook was a network of friends from university, which then became friends from work, to friends from various activities. These were networks where, in the first case, you met new people, and in the second you consolidated personal friendships in the physical world online.


This morning I noticed a Fortune article titled ‘People are posting a lot less on public social media’: Creator economy investor says the old web is gone, replaced by ‘people who are professionally entertaining you’.


The entire reason for using social media is to connect with human beings, at a human level, and to develop friendships that go from the world wide web to the physical world. By being about influencers and other charletans Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and other social networks become worthless because it’s the cult of the amateur supercharged. The Amateur who pays to create content for free, so that others can benefit is absurd.


When social media was about human beings connecting with each other, getting along, and then finding the desire to meet in person social media was a pleasant and friendly place to spend time. That’s where social media outshines other media. Social media was about connecting people. Social media was about multiplexing. Social media was about our social networks being our social net worth to use some of the marketing terminology of the time.


“creators thrive when brands are happy to pay them to create content on platforms they’re creating content on,” Lee says.” On paper this is fantastic. On paper dehumanist content creators are creating social media content creators on a platform that undercuts the sense of self, and friendships. Plenty of content on YouTube is sensationalist rubbish. They might get sponsors, and their content might be monetised, but the content is mediocre, at best.


Instagram thrived when it was a network of friends sharing photos with friends. It became absurd when it put forward the impersonal influencer.


The paradox is that I’m curious about a lot of things. If I had found YouTube videos that were worth watching, about certain products, I might have watched them, rather than surfed to articles and blog posts. One of the issues that I find with TikTok, YouTube and other platforms is that the content creators are long winded and disingenuous. They write clickbait titles to force you to watch their content, but in doing so they get me to do the opposite.


I’ve been surfing the web since the 90s so I have seen three or four decades of clickbait by now. I’m tired of the clickbait content. Influencers rely on clickbait tactics to get views, and I find this exhausting. I often browse YouTube for content, but within minutes I usually give up. Everything is sensationalist clickbait.


Most reels on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube are awful tabloid crap.


“The reason people follow social media creators, the reason they bother, is partly because of the authenticity,” Kaletsky says. “There’s nothing in the world that’s less authentic than an AI-generated character. So it sort of defeats the point in many ways.”

Social media Fortune article


That’s precisely why I switched away from Social Media. Sensationalist clickbait is not honest. Sensationalist clickbait is not genuine. Social media is so busy getting algorithms to push rubbish upon us that they forget that the reason we use social media is to see what people we know are doing, rather than strangers. The issue is that algorithms are showing content by strangers. That’s not influence. That’s clickbait. that’s spam. That’s irrelevant.


The entire raison d’être of social media is to be a way to see what your network of friends are enjoying and what they think of things. It’s about engaging online, and desiring to do things offline. By keeping people isolated social media is undercutting its entire reason for existing. Why should I use YouTube or Instagram if I am shown irrelevant content?


If I want to know what strangers think, I have the open web. I have search engines, and I have news sites. Since the death of Twitter I find myself blogging more, reading more articles, and doing other things. I reverted to pre-social media habits.


Social media had a reason for being, when it reduced isolation and connected people. Paradoxically Facebook groups do that. I have a deep dislike of Facebook, but that’s where it feels like I could still find an offline community that could lead to in person meetings.


And Finally


I’m tired. I am tired of reading about how influencers are being put forward. I am tired of seeing articles about how influencers are having to keep social media companies happy. I am tired of never seing articles about how social media companies ignore the Return of Investment for ordinary users. One of the consequences of this focus on ROI for “influencers” is that influencers use Mastodon and the Fediverse in the same manner, diminishing the ROI of being on Mastodon instances. The focus should be on connecting people.

The Apathetic Mastodon
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The Apathetic Mastodon

Byrichard

On at least three occasions toots that were written as a cry for empathy, or at least venting, were interacted with by apathetic people. For this simple reason I deleted two Fediverse accounts. I deleted my Mastodon.social account, and my FireFish.social accounts. I have a precise desire, when using social media. That desire is to find a community of likeminded individuals that I have such enjoyable conversations with, that I want to meet them in person.

Noise Pollution

Noise pollution is caused by apathetic people, people that don’t consider that people want to sleep, study, think or other things. If noise pollution was not a problem libraries and other places of learning would not require quiet. They would be as noisy as everywhere else.
For daring to complain about noise pollution I was insulted, and then mocked on mastodon.social. When I look to vent, or, ideally, find empathy, and I find apathy my instant desire is to tell the person to duck off. I didn’t. I decided to write one more toot. The second response encouraged me to block the apathetic individual.

The Cult of Personality

I don’t remember what a second person wrote but it encouraged me to speak about normal people as sheeple, and to speak about the benefits of tight knit communities. One individual denounced the term sheeple and then wrote some rubbish about how not all accounts with a million followers are bad. I considered responding but didn’t. Why fight an uphill battle.

The Trigger

The trigger that got me to delete my mastodon.social and firefish.social posts was an ironic “I’m happy for you”. I am almost certain that it was ironic, although due to a lack of emoticons I do not know this for certain. What I do know is that I dumped Facebook early in the pandemic because of such interactions.

The Options

Give Up on Social Media

Sometimes I feel like giving up on asocial media. I feel like giving up on asocial media because the space is shared between generations, and use cases. Some people are utilitarian broadcasts, whose only desire is to find a mass audience. The second group are trolls looking for a misunderstanding, rather than a conversation, and the third group The third group are people, like me, who want to converse, but have to spend weeks or months finding pleasant conversations.

That’s why it’s tempting to give up on social media. It takes so much time and yet it’s so fragile. I’m thinking of returning to Facebook and Twitter because of how bad Mastodon is at the moment.

The Fediverse and Blogging

I wrote Mastodon above, because although I feel that Mastodon is a waste of time, due to how easy it is to be trolled, but very difficult to find empathy, it feels like working with WordPress and other Fediverse compatible instances is an interesting playground to play in. I love that my blog is somewhere so visible now. It is no longer stuck in a desert, it is at the front of my Fediverse streams, when i like and share my blog posts. I feel that this is the Fediverse’s unique selling point.

Revert to Facebook and Twitter

The reason for leaving Twitter and Facebook is/was to leave a toxic environment and look for a healthier community where it is fun to invest time and attention. With my experience of Mastodon, in particular, I feel that staying away makes sense, especially from big instances. The experiences we left Twitter and Facebook to avoid, are present on Mastodon.social.

Stay on Small Instances

The other, more rational option is to stay on smaller instances, and just wait until communities form. It might take months or years, but eventually they might arrive. This will take time.

Use a Nickname

Another option would be to use the web anonymously, using a nickname, like so many people do, to avoid trolls having an effect on your official persona. It’s the rational choice, but a social network where you have to hide behind an avatar is less interesting than one where people use their actual names.

And Finally

Although Mastodon and the Fediverse are growing both places are still filled with solitude. We can devote hours a day, to try to find engagement, or we can take a break, write a blog post that is shared to the Fediverse, and let it do the talking.

Threads and the Fediverse
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Threads and the Fediverse

Byrichard

A few weeks ago I was completely opposed to Threads being connected and accepted by the Fediverse because I hated the idea of 100 million users flooding a social network with 10 million users. Now that threads has imploded I feel differently.

Now that Threads is the same size as the Frediverse, or at least closer to being the same size, the impact of the two joining up would be diminished. Now is the time when, theoretically, the impact of Threads and the Fediverse merging would be less dramatic.

Still Unwanted

[caption id="attachment_10494" align="alignnone" width="300"]A human looking a Threads, with the Fediverse visible behind. A human looking a Threads, with the Fediverse visible behind.[/caption]

Although the Fediverse and Threads could merge, and be on equal footing, for now, I still don’t want it. Facebook users have a different social media ethic than the Fediverse does. I don’t want to see posts by utilitarians, rather than human beings. I want human connections, not marketers.

The Algorithm

[caption id="attachment_10492" align="alignnone" width="300"]Threads and the Fediverse where the Fediverse is the milky way Threads and the Fediverse where the Fediverse is the milky way[/caption]

Algorithms use machine learning to read posts, assess them, and decide how to share them. The Fediverse is about sharing, and re-sharing, in chronological order. How could Threads read toots, notes, articles and more, without breaching privacy rules?

For now the Fediverse behaves according to who we follow, and what the people we follow share. With algorithms machine learning would make those decisions, destroying the chronological order of things

The question is “how can Facebook adapt to be compatible with the Fediverse?”. In theory it can’t because we’re talking about two different philosophies. One where chronology and follows are king, and the other where algorithms dictate what people see, feel and buy.

A Different Age

[caption id="attachment_10495" align="alignnone" width="300"]A hand holding threads with the Fediverse behind it A hand holding threads with the Fediverse behind it[/caption]

Although I really liked the old Twitter, and social media landscape, when it was unprofitable, that reality has vanished and now we are in the age of Influencers, clickbait, social media as addiction, and more. That’s why the thing that fascinates me the most now, is using WordPress and ClassicPress to play with the Fediverse. When they play nicely together I will be able to blog, and converse from my blog posts, without spending too much time in the Fediverse.

And Finally

Threads Posts get more likes for brands than on Twitter which illustrates why Threads is not interesting for human beings. Social media, for me, is about sharing and caring, rather than utilitarian apathy.

To summarise: Threads is a network for brands to market to people, whilst the Fedivere exists for people to converse, share, and collaborate. If the utilitarianism of Threads comes to the Fediverse, then the Fediverse will lose some of its allure.

The Post Social Media Age
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The Post Social Media Age

Byrichard

Someone asked Is decentralization the future of social media? and I’d take an extra leap. I believe that the Fediverse, made possible by ActivityPub, and the other one, made possible by the Authenticated Transfer Protocol both point to a different future

Playing With WordPress, ClassicPress and Firefish

As we play with the fediverse, and we experiment with WordPress, ClassicPress and Firefish, among other instances or communities one thing becomes clear. The social media age could be over, replaced by something akin to the blogrings of the 90s. What I mean by this is that the fediverse is a gigantic web portal. We add photos via pixelfed, video via peertube, conversations by mastodon, notes via Firefish, and blog posts via WordPress and ClassicPress, among others. The point is we’re on niche platforms, talking with other niche platforms without logging in and out constantly. Log in, in one place, and we’re connected to everything within the fediverse. We’re on a community of communities.

Post Social Network

That’s why we’re in a post social media age. In the 90s and the first half of the zeros (2000s) we were on websites for our niche interests. Eventually with Twitter, Facebook and the explosion of websites it was decided that oauth was useful to make logging into and out of websites almost instant. We didn’t need to think of a user name, password and all that crap. It was automatic, so we could surf between services more easily.
Remember in Twit podcasts of the mid zeroes Leo Laporte and others were speaking about signup burnout, about being tired of having to fill in forms for every single website they joined.
Now we’re beyond that. Twitter is x-tinct and Facebook sees that it needs to join the fediverse, not to be irrelevant. I would argue that it is idiotic of Facebook to join the fediverse because it already has four billion users, on a planet with 10 billion people. Everyone that is on the fediverse, probably quit Facebook years ago, because of the crimes that Facebook has commited, from helping fascists reach power, encouraging genocide, playing with making people depressed, and more.

The New Era

In the age of the fediverse photo sharing is integral to the fediverse, video sharing is integral to the fediverse, blogging is integral to the fediverse, and conversations are integral to the fediverse. We can generate the content of our choice, and share it on the fediverse and everything is already integrated.

Google Reader, E-mail and FeedReaders

With Google reader, e-mail and feedreaders we could subscribe to RSS feeds to dozens, or even hundreds of feeds at a time, but every day you need to go through and mark things as read, either by scrolling through them, loading the post or other. It’s easy to have hundreds, or even thousands of unread posts. With the Fediverse we don’t have that problem, we jump in and out when we want, and we see what is recent, rather than what is recommended. We can see what is recommended, but in my eyes the people we “follow” are already recommending things for us to see.

Corporate Social Media and the Cost of Quitting

“We have been advocating for interoperability between platforms for years,” he wrote shortly. “The biggest hurdle to users switching platforms when those platforms become exploitative is the lock-in of the social graph, the fact that switching platforms means abandoning everyone you know and who knows you. The fact that large platforms are adopting ActivityPub is not only validation of the movement towards decentralized social media, but a path forward for people locked into these platforms to switch to better providers. Which in turn, puts pressure on such platforms to provide better, less exploitative services. This is a clear victory for our cause, hopefully one of many to come.”

When Jaiku and Twitter were competing I preferred Jaiku, and when Twitter and Identica were competing I preferred Identica. I loved Google + but it was destroyed. I liked Google Reader but it was destroyed. I liked Instagram but it was bought by Facebook and destroyed. Facebook destroyed itself, by encouraging people to see stuff by strangers, rather than their friends, forcing people to seak new groups. Some of those groups were toxic, so I dumped Facebook.

With the fediverse you can be on three, four or five instances and follow all the same people across each instance. You’re not stuck to a single instance. There is no single point of failure. You can bounce from instance to instance, and occasionaly look for replies and reactions.

And Finally

One of the beautiful things about the Fediverse is that we don’t need to see ads anymore. We just see content, conversations and community. We don’t have to scroll down and see posts that look like posts, until you notice they’re selling cryptocurrency, magical cures, or other rubbish. Twitter was fun, but now we’re scrolling by an advert every fourth or fifth post, like it was with Instagram after Facebook bought it.

I like the Fediverse and what it represents.

ClassicPress and the Fediverse part deux
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ClassicPress and the Fediverse part deux

Byrichard

After my first post about playing with ClassicPress and the Fediverse it was suggested that I try the nightly build of ClassicPress so I did. The result can be seen here.

Mastodon and Firefish

I have tested integration with the fediverse via Mastodon.social but also firefish.social and mastodon.social is faster, but mastodon.social eventually catches up. I tried posting a blog post, and commenting on blog posts and it works although not instantly. You need to wait for the changes to be propagated to where they are needed.

A change in tact

Initially I was going to try using a different domain but I struggled with getting the SSL certificates to work so I decided to create the subdomain ClassicPress.main-vision.com for ClassicPress tests and blog.main-vision.com for WordPress. In the case of ClassicPress I wanted to be able to play around, without making too much noise with my daily blog.

With the WordPress blog I wanted to test whether the webfinger json file for individual users would work, and it does, at least partially. When I looked up the usernames on webfinger it did show the users, but mastodon and Firefish do not detect them.

ClassicPress and WordPress Are Viable Options

I spent most of yesterday playing around with the two, and seeing if ideas worked, and so far the answer is “yes, if you’re patient” but that’s because the idea is still relatively new so progress has to be made. WordPress does work well, and ClassicPress is close behind. If you write a post, and check for comments the next day, then it works fine.

Sub-Domains count

The other question was whether it had to be example.com or whether subdomain.example.com would work and the answer is that subdomains work. If your blog instance is two or three subdirectories deep, then subdomains are a good alternative to manually generating webfinger files.

More Experimenting with ClassicPress
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More Experimenting with ClassicPress

Byrichard

Although I didn’t achieve what I set out to achieve I have been experimenting with ClassicPress and the Fediverse, but rather than do it from my main blog I have decided to experiment within a subdomain and so far I have achieved much. I see that activitypub and webfinger can be installed on ClassicPress.

I checked that a webfinger was created and displayed correctly but this took trial and error. The biggest error is that to create a webfinger that is valid you must come from an https hyperlink. If it is not secure you get a “socket not secure error”. I found a solution, by creating classicpress.main-vision.com for the sake of testing.

In so doing I achieved two things. The first is that I found a way to experiment with ClassicPress without destroying my website but at the same time I found a way to experiment with other things too. By a similar setup I could get Wordpress and webfingers, where a few accounts are possible, rather than just one.

The Stumbling Block

I have hit a wall. I created the ClassicPress instance. The webfinger works when I test it and the account is visible on the Fediverse. The problem, at the moment, is that posts do not appear in Fediverse timelines. I don’t know why that is yet. I also noticed that if I follow from mastodon instances, I can, but from Firefish I can’t. It’s not meant to work, so my experimentation is out of curiousity.

The Next Step

The next step will be to create a subdomain and experiment with a wordpress blog. I expect this to work flawlessly, but what I really want to see, is whether I can get the webfinger to work so that it displays several users for a single instance. If I succeed then I will have demonstrated that Wordpress can be a full-fledged Fediverse instance.

The Diversification Of The Social Media and Microblogging Environment
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The Diversification Of The Social Media and Microblogging Environment

Byrichard

When Elon Musk bought Twitter he signed the start of the Social Media giant’s implosion. A decade earlier Murdoch had done the same thing to MySpace. In the end he sold MySpace for a fraction of what he had bought it for. 


We could cry, and bemoan the loss of Twitter but we could also look around, and see what has happened. For years I said that I wanted to leave Twitter, but no one else did, because despite all of its flaws, it had critical mass. It had the right diversity of people to be a required social network, for anyone using social media. 


Making Social Media Migration Attractive


With the purchase of Twitter by Musk, and the swing by Twitter to the Far Right, it created a legitimate reason for tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands to jump the shark, to join other websites, whether Mastodon, Calckey, Facebook, Instagram and more. It encouraged people to simultaneously look for alternative solutions. It weakened the Twitter brand, but strengthened the use case for similar websites and products. 


When Facebook bought Instagram and WhatsApp we were almost stuck. It provided a reason for people to use Signal, Telegram and Wire, among other apps. When a social media giant buys a website, it encourages people to flee to an open source solution that is free, or at least likely to be taken over by corporate interests. 


Migrate to the Fediverse


It’s easy to keep looking at Twitter, Reddit, Facebook and the giants, but I think it’s more interesting to look at the Fediverse, because the Fediverse is broadening and expanding its use-case. Twitter is not the first social network to be bought, and destroyed by the Right. It’s the most recent. 


This time, though, it feels different, because open source solutions are ready to provide people with an open source, community driven alternative that offers instagram like functionality with Pixelfed, and forum and microblogging with Mastodon, Misskey and spin offs on one side, and BlueSky and its own federation project on the other. 


Your Own Instance


For the cost of Twitter Blue we can set up our own Mastodon instance. For a small monthly contribution we can fund an independent server like calckey, which is part of the fediverse, but built on Misskey, rather than Mastodon. 


Recently I have been frustrated by something specific. Twitter, Facebook and other sites all had scaling issues, which they fixed and ironed out. Now Misskey and Mastodon are growing, and they need to fix those same issues in turn. We’re back to a time where, if we’re using Calckey or other instances they slow down and give error messages due to the server load being too high. We’re back to where we were years ago with the tech giants. It’s frustrating, although if Calckey slows down I jump on to Mastodon Social and vice versa. If one instance is overloaded we can switch to another, until things calm down. 


Fluid Transfers


The beauty of the Fediverse, compared to Twitter, Facebook and Instagram is that if you get tired with one community you can export several CSV files from one instance and pull them into the next. You don’t have to use one server, if the community is not for you. Within a few minutes you can transfer hundreds, if not thousands, of the people you’re following. The instance doesn’t care where you’re following from. It’s only when you get answers or interactions that it matters. 


Towards a Decline of the Centralised Social Network


The Far Right, by controlling Facebook, Instagram, Meta and Twitter has encouraged people to drop their platforms, in favour of Fediverse and BlueSky compatible social networks.  They have shown, for the last time, that centralised ownership of a social network is bad, and that now is the time to move back towards the social web. Now is the time to go back to community driven, open source solutions. Tech giants, and their shareholders have devalued themselves. Rationally no social network should ever sell itself for billions, for two reasons. The first is that they’re breaking the implied contract they have with their user base. The second is that users can migrate within a matter of weeks, days, or even hours. 


When Twitter agreed to be sold to an individual it destroyed the Twitter community’s trust in the board of directors, and by juxtaposition, all social media giants. Twitter was the last giant I was still using. Now that I’m gone, it’s open source, and community funded social networks from now on.