“Penis swastika” is spot on.

Again, as I wrote in my blogpost, one of the problems was that Ulanoff conflated fedi and Mastodon. You are not writing this on Mastodon, but you are writing this on fedi. This is something that Ulanoff missed completely.

Anyway, as I said, you are welcome to interpret stuff anyway you like. To me, his piece was just hilariously lazy, conventional to an almost self-parody level “tech journalism”, and that’s what I call him out on in my blogpost.

I am not saying Mastodon-the-software-project has no issues, I am not saying fedi has no issues – I talk about those issues in other places at length. But “Shatner could not find me and ‘toot’ sounds silly therefore this network will not survive” is a take that needs to be pointed at and laughed at when it comes from someone so high up on the tech journalism ladder.

I just find it remarkable that not only the shape of Claude’s logo is what it is, they also went with that particular color for it. Chef’s kiss.

Well, there was a way to say “Mastodon isn’t a viable mass market Twitter replacement and it wouldn’t become that without significant changes.” It’s literally that.

It is also pretty noticeably different than saying “Mastodon won’t survive.”

Not only that, by Ulanoff also compares Mastodon to a social network that did in fact “poof out into thin air”, Peach.

You may of course do all sorts of gymnastics when interpreting his piece, but I take what he said at face value. And the fact that he responded to my thread on fedi and admitted he was wrong (kudos for doing that, by the way!) seems to confirm my face-value reading was closer to his intended message when the piece was published.

Sure thing, enjoy!

ohno, it’s out!

Yeah. Thankfully, Fediverse is a bunch of independent projects. There are Pleroma, different Misskey forks, Lemmy, kbin, Pixelfed, Loops, GoToSocial, and dozens more.

Mastodon is still probably the biggest, user-count-wise, but if Mastodon does a real stupid, there’s going to be a fork that takes over the mindshare and the instances. This happened with OpenOffice → LibreOffice when the former got taken over by Oracle; this happened with XFree86 → X.org. This happened with ownCloud → Nextcloud.

And there are projects like FediPact, explicitly opposed to having anything to do with Meta on an instance level.

Yup. Up until roughly the times of early Twitter, federated, decentralized communication systems were the obvious norm to any engineer designing one.

Twitter was even meant to be federated and decentralized. I had interviewed one of their first engineers (this piece is about BlueSky, and in Polish; the Twitter thing is important background), who was there and working on that in the very early days. They had a proof of concept. But then the VCs got involved and the decision was that it would be harder to make money on a decentralized service. Rest is history.

Facebook is trying with Threads. Threads is directly targeting Fedi. Thankfully, it does not seem to be working the way Meta wanted it to work – that is, to start sucking people in from fedi due to sheer size and presumably better UI. Turns out people who had moved to fedi really hate Meta, who’da thunk it.

Yup, I really appreciate he did reply. Gotta say that it did improve my opinion of him.

Aww, thank you!

Yeah, I had an account on identi.ca. I even wrote about this: https://rys.io/en/168.html