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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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