I’m not going to link to it, but I am fascinated by a recent post on the Gab blog where Andrew Torba announced some new features to help Gab users push back against research on the platform. Not only do I have two or three ongoing projects using Gab data (one is in the very, very early stages and—ironically—uses Gab blog posts), but some of what Torba wrote also aligned with some of the (fortunately mild) trolling my co-author, Amy Chapman, and I have experienced because of my work on the far-right-influenced DezNat hashtag in Mormon Twitter.

Shortly after last week’s mostly-successful experiment with Hypothesis, I noticed Chris Aldrich posting to Micro.blog about the software and started up a conversation. I’d followed Chris a few weeks before in trying to get more into Micro.blog (perhaps my favorite indie social media platform out there, though I’m also enjoying getting into Mastodon) by following academia and academia-adjacent folks, and was pleased to see an area of common interest. It wasn’t until a separate conversation on Mastodon this morning that I remembered that my Hypothesis setup was dependent on my manually checking annotations on my website.

What a mess. Glad to be pivoting toward my blog and Mastodon. link to ‘Elon Musk Threatens to End Twitter Deal Without Information on Spam Accounts - The New York Times’

Lots of interesting ideas in this interview. I particularly like libraries running Mastodon instances. link to ‘Why we need a public internet and how to get one - The Verge’

Is this just mastodon.social? Seems like it, but that’s not the only instance getting a bump, and sloppy reporting to ignore how federated instances work—that’s one of the reasons we’re all moving there. link to ‘30,000 New Users Signed Up for Mastodon After Elon Musk Bought Twitter’

À propos of nothing in particular, I’m looking into how to set up a Mastodon instance, and it’s not as hard or expensive as I thought.

This idea increasingly resonates with me. link to ‘To Make Social Media Work Better, Make It Fail Better | Electronic Frontier Foundation’