Dean Powers @dean@mastodon.thefediverse.net

People keep asking "what is a concern troll"?

It's as the name implies: someone who's trolling under the guise of care, concern, and just having your best interests in mind.

Examples of concern trolling include:

* Yeah, racism is awful and should be stopped but let's play the devil's advocate...
* Feeding the homeless actually hurts the homeless
* The Fediverse doesn't help anyone because corporations will eventually control it

Now you know!

🎙️Listen to @clive explain #mastodon and the #fediverse to Brooke Gladstone of @onthemedia for WNYC radio
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/on-the-media-mastodon-may-take-twitters-weary

Some of the features that will follow soon:
- Ability to export people you follow to a publicly-shareable list (also helps with account migration as people you follow do not move with you to a new address, only your followers do)
- Ability to export people you block as a list

I've been working in the de-centralized social media space for 5 year now!

Thought I'd pause and reflect on what's happened from my perspective:

1. My basic reason for getting started was the death of organic social media
2. At the outset we looked into several possibilities: blockchain, NFC, self-hosting, mesh networks, etc.
3. Initially I wanted to build P2P networks, not client/server federated networks
4. Self-sovereign identity was top-of-mind

Both Elon Musk and Donald Trump wield sledge hammers to protect their fragile egos. Both are utterly lacking in empathy. Both lie, and push baseless conspiracy theories. Their singular goal is to imprint their giant egos on everyone else — to exercise raw power over people.

I think it's glorious that there's now a Mastodon server operated by people who used to work for Twitter (macaw.social). I could have never imagined it when I started in 2016.

Stop what you're doing and watch this completely bonkers, cringe documentary some YouTuber made 9 months ago about Sam Bankman-Fried.

It's 5 minutes of absolute insanity. https://youtu.be/pVlkFW43820

I love watching all these Mastodon instances come online because I am realizing that there are literally thousands of CEO/Admins in the world who know how to operate a social media service better than Elon.

@atomicpoet I don’t see what the problem is, they seem to be using link verification to accomplish this which is kind of neat. Nobody is forced to trust these links. Anyone could start a similar service.

I blocked my first transphobe here.
I guess its one of the big downsides of this places success.

As a reminder, dont interact with these people. It wont make you happy and they feel validated.
Just report and block, dont engage because there is never an upside in trying to convince these people.

#fediblock

Please don't use #Fedified! 🙏

This is what it says about itself:

"(Fedified) is *the* way to make sure that you're following the account managed by the same person you used to follow on Twitter."

It wants to be a central authority. This is dangerous, and opposite to what the #Fediverse stands for.

People become dependent on a central authority, then it gets bought out by billionaires.

You can already verify your account on here without using any centralised lists:

https://fedi.tips/how-to-use-mastodon-and-the-fediverse-advanced-tips/#HowDoIVerifyMyAccount

Really great article that explains the reasons behind #Mastodon's limited search functionality:

https://midrange.tedium.co/issues/how-mastodon-search-works/

#MastodonSocial #TwitterMigration #DigitalCulture #DigitalCivics

#Admin #IndiewebSocial

So here is the latest on the #TwitterMigration as it applies here. Still seeing over 100+ new users per day, and as a whole, we are up to over 8,000 users *3,300 of them since the Musk purchase of Twitter.*

I just did our fourth server upgrade since then as I saw some server sluggishness last night. LMK how it looks. I only expect more upgrades needed to come.

Thanks to all who have given here! Even a $1 per month donation really helps. https://www.patreon.com/indiewebsocial

Can we all just agree that having options for notifications is nice?

Sometimes I want to see hear a sound. Sometimes I don't.

@ken @tchambers @Gargron @atomicpoet @leolaporte @elipariser @profcarroll

I do wonder though about helping institutions set up their own servers, just as we all used to have our own Mail servers.

That would not only scale quickly but also resolve some of people's verification concerns. Plus it'll start to naturally invest the institution in their Mastodon presence.

What would be great is a community of server admins to help each other out, especially those with enterprise-y backgrounds.

@Gargron congratulations! I know you've been working your tail off, but you've help free literally millions of folks. I hope it makes you proud and performs better than you ever hoped.

I am immensely grateful to @Gargron for creating Mastodon, for his careful stewardship and leadership, and for keeping this server going. The least I could do is contribute to the Mastodon Patreon as a member. You can/should, too: https://www.patreon.com/mastodon

Just a PSA.

Mastodon v4 goes online on Monday.

Many server/instance admins will be updating.

I've ran through the process with the latest RC yesterday on my testbed and it all went well, but, like any update these things are prone to hiccups.

Keep that in mind if your server seems to go offline briefly, the admins will be trying their best