We've been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it's not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for November 14th, 2022.
In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our special guest was Kris Nova. Other speakers on November 14th included XXX, and YY. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)
Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:
- Waiting for Twitter to technically collapse
- Running an experiment - what happens when you get rid of all of the SREs - how does it go down?
- If this were on Silicon Valley this would be deemed lazy writing
- @4:28 Oxide and Friends is shopping around for new social audio space
- will kick the tires on a few
- need: ability for lots of simultaneous listeners (thousands)
- need: dynamically have speakers join - key to the show
- see last week's layoff discussion around visas
- mental inventory - good about Twitter?
- serendipitous conversations
- getting engagement from those whose work you admire - great vibes
- not so good - pushed behavior to encourage a strive toward virality
- @12:25 Kris's experience with Mastadon
- Decided to setup a hacker-centric Mastadon space to service some home-lab projects
- The history of new things on the internet is discomfort and pain - Email, Facebook, Docker
- That doesn't mean that all uncomfortable tech is the next big thing
- Timing is key - implosion of Twitter, economic state of the world, convergence of certain subset of a technology generation
- @18:00 what is the fediverse
- A lot like email, but with a neighborhood
- Your service provider is not a faceless megacorp, but it's a person
- What's the infrastructure like?
- Kris on Twitch
- grassroots/community conversations about how to best build and scale and store data, etc
- Mastadon managed hosting
- Rust relay for ActivityPub under development
- Choosing a server is low-risk
- Choosing a server outside of the US is not necessarily low-risk - in countries affected by war for example, the ability to continue to communicate is a literal lifesaver
- ActivityPub Wordpress plugin
- decentralized photo sharing - Pixelfed
- What new features came to Twitter in the past 10 years?
- @42:00 things to love coming from Twitter to Mastadon
- Lack of an algorithm
- No quote tweets that allow you to be shitty
- Usable from the browser - no need for a dedicated app
- On the other hand, the apps are not that good
- [@48:10] Mastadon is not the standard
- There's confusion with the current content warning in the standard
- Dominant implementation will make and break features
- The duty of a moderator or admin is not to be the fediverse police
- Content warnings for discussions of race is one thing, autoplayed video of people getting killed is another
- In general, good discussion on Mastadon, no true discussion on Twitter
- The origin of the content warning is to prevent triggering PTSD when using social media
- Harder for a hot take to go viral on Mastadon, which is a good thing
- @1:05:30
- Pinafore Mastadon client
- open protocol is no guarantee that someone implemented all the features
- on the other hand, there's interoperability across platforms
- much like emails, the name isn't unique, only unique per instance
- server-specific character limit
- @1:16:14 How does this all become sustainably financed?
- People are a lot of the costs of Twitter
- Human connections (and light company sponsorship) has kept things sustainable for now
- Paying for things that should be free is Anathema for a certain generation, led to advertisement model
- USAID providing funding for a Mastadon server in Armenia
- @1:24:40 Bryan likes the impaired searchability of Mastadon
- makes it hard to find something to go be mad about
- Coteries of specialists on Twitter have created some unique communities, many of them are moving
- RSS to ActivityPub Converter
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!