5/🧵 Mastodon and the broader Fediverse work using a protocol called ActivityPub.
If you're interested in how that works from a technical perspective, a good place to start is https://tinysubversions.com/notes/reading-activitypub/ by @darius
If you're curious about where that tech goes next, follow @cwebber who is CTO at @spritelyinst working on awesome stuff like https://github.com/ocapn/ocapn
I put @tomgauld's brilliant new comic for @newscientist alongside Ibn Al-Rabin's masterpiece “Le Verbe Prophétique” as demonstrating the ways you can do things in comics seemingly simple yet bewilderingly complex that can only be done in comics.
#comics
After being banned from Twitter I’ve done about 20 interviews with reporters around the world. They all ask:
If I get my account back, will I stay on Twitter? Unless Elon Musk makes a dramatic course change, I don't know why anyone—journalist or otherwise—would feel comfortable investing a single tweet into the hands of this volatile totalitarian. I won't delete my Twitter account, but Mastodon is home going forward.
Public Service Warning
Mastodon has a very big surge of new users right now. There's no way to tell if it will be sustained, but at this early point it looks similar to Nov 18 when Musk pulled the employee purge.
It is very challenging for system administration to accommodate so many new users. If your server starts to struggle, it is not broken and will get sorted out.
We're all in this together. It's our social network. Be patient. What we are building is amazing.
If you're trying to find journalists on Mastodon, I've created a verified database of several hundred here: http://presscheck.org. Since the backlog has become enormous, the unverified waiting list is now public also: http://presscheck.org/pending
#Inkvent day 16: Serendipity
This is a navy blue with both shimmer and sheen (actual sheen, not like yesterday’s).
Many of the journalists Elon suspended today on Twitter are here on #Mastodon. Please follow and boost:
Drew Harwell, Washington Post
@drewharwell
Donie O’Sullivan, CNN
@donieosullivan
Steve Herman, VOA
@w7voa
Micah Lee, Intercept
@micahflee
Tony Webster
@tony
Matt Binder, Mashable
@MattBinder
Woah. Watching Twitter misuse our research by putting warnings on links to Mastodon.
Here for example is the warning that @georgetakei "may be unsafe."
In a study led by Ben Kaiser at Princeton, we tested the effect of interstitial warnings on user behavior.
https://www.lawfareblog.com/warnings-work-combating-misinformation-without-deplatforming
GitHub is rolling out support for the free scanning of exposed secrets (such as credentials and auth tokens) to all public repositories on its code hosting platform.
Today, Twitter suspended It's Going Down (@igd_news), a longtime anarchist and anti-fascist news source that had never previously run afoul of the Twitter rules. At the time of their suspension, they had 108,000 followers.
Elon Musk was lying through his teeth when he said he believes in free speech. He bought Twitter in order to suppress the voices of those who seek an egalitarian society. Since taking over the platform, he has reinstated avowed neo-Nazis and taken guidance from those who explicitly support fascism as he targets journalists and activists.
More background:
https://crimethinc.com/TwitterCanary
You can follow IGD on Mastodon here:
At the urging of a few folks here, I decided to run a test to see which social networks clicked through most on this week's scoop about a hack of the FBI's InfraGard program.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/12/fbis-vetted-info-sharing-network-infragard-hacked/
LinkedIn tells me I have ~100k followers there. 80 Linkedin users commented on that story, but it looks like only about 25 of them actually clicked the link the first 24h!
A number equal to about 2 percent of my 350k Twitter followers clicked on the story (6600).
In contrast, the story posted here generated 3300 impressions in the same time period, even though I had (at the time) only about 15,000 followers. Also, That 3300 number would probably have been higher, but for the fact that I forgot to add the versioning link and edited that into it afterwards.
That tells me that, for now at least, engagement on Mastodon is significantly higher than on either LinkedIn or Twitter.