I’ve recently followed a couple of bots on Mastodon that promise to show “Random Magic: The Gathering Cards” or “Every Pokémon Card.” Following both of these reminds me how much I like trying to think through how the unique abilities of different cards (or miniatures, or whatever else) can be combined to win a game. The last time that I’ve really scratched that itch was when I was in grad school and got really into the X-Wing Miniatures Game. After spending a ton of money on the First Edition and realizing that I still wasn’t great at the game because I couldn’t be bothered to follow “the meta,” I got disillusioned when the Second Edition came out and made all my purchases semi-obsolete and the little skill I’d built up totally obsolete.

With Mozilla exiting the fediverse, I guess it’s time to really think about either hosting a personal server or seeing if I can make my Hugo site play nice with ActivityPub…

introduction and history

I’ve experimented for a while with consuming a range of media through an RSS reader. I don’t remember how long I subscribed to Feedbin, but being able to follow both Twitter accounts and email newsletters in the same app as my RSS subscriptions was a real game-changer. Eventually, I jumped ship for NetNewsWire—I don’t remember all the reasons behind the switch, but knowing that I could keep subscribing to Twitter and start following some subreddits was definitely a major factor.

This is a helpful EFF overview that I’m posting to bookmark for later.

My current RSS reader (feeeed for iOS) boasts Fediverse integration. I always figured it was just through grabbing accounts’ RSS feeds, and you can do that, but it turns out if you subscribe to it as a Fediverse account, it works as a quasi-client, with additional data pulled in. Neat!

My brother misheard “fediverse” as “feta-verse” on a podcast, and I’m now soliciting your best cheese puns for Mastodon, Pixelfed, etc.

I was recently talking to some friends about how I’ve been working to make my Hugo blog the center of my online presence. In particular, even though I didn’t know the term at first, I’ve been trying since 2019 to follow the POSSE strategy of “Publish (to) Own Site, Send Elsewhere” (note that, in the grand tradition of many tech acronyms, everyone agrees what the acronym means, but there are multiple ways of understanding what it stands for exactly).

Domain name infrastructure plays a bigger role than we might think.

I like that there’s a They Might Be Giants lyrics bot to follow on Mastodon, but I’m dealing with a lot more TMBG songs stuck in my head these days.

Strong follow up to the last post I just linked to.

Lots of helpful thoughts in this post. Makes me think about the value of Mastodon for the academy—and other spaces that I care about. Also, I love seeing Doctorow and academic thinking come together.

This week, I’m attending two different research conferences (well, I only barely attended the first one, to be honest). The leadup to these conferences has involved some changes to my web presence, just in case people actually check my website when I put it on my slides. Overall, I’m happy with the changes that I’ve made, so I thought I’d take advantage of my free Delta in-flight wi-fi to blog about some of the changes I’ve made and why.

I’ve tried to scale back my media consumption recently. My RSS client feels empty, and it’s weird not to check social media as much. Every time I think about stepping it back up, though, it just stresses me out.

I’d seen some of the headlines Masnick is critiquing here, but I hadn’t read the articles. I appreciate this critique and overview.

Over the past several weeks, I’ve noticed a lot of conversations about Mastodon’s lack of a feature equivalent to Twitter’s “quote tweets.” To be honest, I don’t really care about the lack of a “quote toot” feature, and I’ve done my best to steer clear of these conversations (though I did note while writing this post that it caught the eye of Mastodon’s founder in a big way). I gather that these conversations been around for a while, but I get the sense from my own feeds that there’s been a notable recent uptick. That uptick has meant that it’s been difficult to avoid them crossing my feed, and so even without trying, I’ve had a few thoughts about “quote toots” that I think might be worth sharing.

Mastodon isn’t perfect, but this strikes me as a good sign.

Although it’s been a real delight to see so many people joining Mastodon over the past few weeks, I’ve found that there’s also a disadvantage that I hadn’t expected: I’m spending a lot more time scrolling through Mastodon these days than I ever have since setting up my Mastodon accounts.

When I began setting up Mastodon accounts and shifting away from Twitter back in April, I felt like I had made a big leap forward in terms of my online consumption. One thing that I’d always struggled with on Twitter was the feeling that I needed to see every single post from every single account. I’d eventually helped with that by consuming Twitter via RSS and narrowing my followed accounts down to the ones that I really, really wanted to follow. By virtue of converting Twitter to RSS, I was still consuming all the posts from those accounts, but it also forced me to only pick those accounts that wouldn’t overwhelm my RSS reader with posts I didn’t really care about.

Just when you thought this couldn’t get any worse. Will be really interested to see if Dorsey gets banned.

This has been one of the most delightful moments I’ve experienced in my relatively short time on Mastodon. This week has been a good one for Mastodon: Musk’s continued missteps have brought more people, and a meme like this one helps give the fediverse more of a shared culture.

I’ve been trying to avoid dire predictions for Twitter since Musk took over, but this seems more and more like a turning point in the identity and reputation of the platform.

The fediverse is great and all, but for me, it won’t be complete until there’s a Mormon instance of Mastodon at curelom.social.

I fall victim to this despite being a Mastodon fan. Appreciate the reminder to be more careful with language.

This looks great!

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. So, I thought I’d write up some of what stood out to me in the post.

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. So, it was three days later that I realized that in addition to our Micro.blog conversation, Chris had been kind enough to leave some comments on my site, giving the Hypothesis comment layer a test run. The most helpful comment included a link to a post he’d written describing how to subscribe to a Hypothesis RSS feed that supported wildcards, something that I’d previously thought was impossible (and, at any rate, isn’t listed in the Hypothesis documentation I was checking).Thanks to this, I’ve now got a notification system for website comments, which is going to make life a lot easier; however, I did find that I had to use a variation of the format that Chris posted: