These things are not apples and apples.
Mastodon is a grassroots alternative to the ugly silos of commercial social media. It offers baked-in interoperability, decentralization, cooperation and a future that isn’t based on enshittification.
Mastodon is everything Threads/Bluesky is not.
I’ve seen shiny-faced developers from Threads and Bluesky discussing how the future is federated and how they look forward to joining hands with everyone. They really seem sincere, but they are doomed.
I was a bit pissed off the other day when I looked up an old Twitter thread to find it had been spammed by someone at bland.ai . Not cool.
Despite the shitty tactic, I couldn’t resist the clickbait.
They provide automated phone agents and will call you for a demo, so I tried it. I was actually pretty impressed. I threw a bunch of nonsense and non sequiturs at her, but she patiently waited then steered the conversation back on track. If I spoke over her she stopped talking, listened to what I said, and responded appropriately.
Just for fun, I decided to pit her against Lenny so I forwarded the call to him.
Lenny is a series of cleverly-constructed canned responses designed to infuriate spammers and cold callers. The recordings are generic enough to keep them on the line as he waffles and wanders till they finally give up in frustration.
Here’s how it went:
She didn’t do too badly. Lenny is just a dumb series of fixed responses, but Bland.ai was unfazed and patiently tried to explain. When it was obvious that the conversation was going nowhere, she politely wound up the conversation.
“Don’t anthropomorphize computers – they hate it.” — Andrew McAfee.
Over a week ago I read this article by Cory Doctorow and it sparked a cascade of neurons that have been tickled over the past few years.
It was a short hop from that article, to the state of the IndieWeb, to realising what a shit-show the whole social-media world has become. The IndieWeb and its principles were the solution I didn’t know I needed - I want to get back to blogging in my own place, with my own identity like it was in the early Internet.
I like to write and I’d like to get better at it, but if you think you have to come up with something profound it’s a great excuse to procrastinate.
Twitter is quick and ok for random shower-thoughts, but not for anything meatier.
Google+ used to be a good middle ground. There were less restrictions on length so your post could have a heading, and some formatting so it looked nice.
I saw an article today called Kids Can’t Use Computers… And This Is Why It Should Worry You and it bugged me so much I had to respond at length.
I agree with some of it, but the general theme is “you don’t understand computers and I do, so you’re stupid”. There are (currently) 800 or more comments and growing so I assume it has gained some traction.
It’s written by a Computing teacher who is frustrated by people who come to him for help.