This week marked the end of another semester of PhD work. Still a ways to go before I finish. I really need the next month to hit the reset button, clear my mind and get organized.

Brands: Federated

Self-hosted social

There’s lots of hype about Mastodon as people flee Twitter, but lately, I’ve been thinking about how brands will function on federated social sites.

If the big brands in the world are going to give Mastodon a shot, they aren’t going to just join an existing instance… they’ll host their own server for all of their related accounts. Let’s say you are a large international brand like Starbucks. Are you going to use @starbucks@mastodon.social? Not when you can have @official@starbucks.com, @news@starbucks.com, and @customercare@starbucks.com. If you run your own instance, you never have to worry about someone grabbing a handle you wanted to use. No worries about the content moderation policy on the instance you’ve selected. And because of the way ActivityPub works, your posts will be visible across Mastodon and other compatible services. As a bonus, it’s much harder for a fraudulent account to spoof you if you connect...

I’m trying to edit down a longer study for a journal article… and the editing is 10x harder than writing the original draft.

Quiet at the office on the day before Thanksgiving and I had some time to clean up my workspace.

I know “federated” is a more precise term, but I think people are confused by it.

For ActivityPub, I think “open” social networking is a better framing for most users. It also draws a direct contrast to the “closed” networks offered by Facebook and Twitter.