1/2 I have deactivated my account on Twitter (X), which began in 2007. Under Elon Musk, Twitter has not only decided to stop blocking bigots and liars and pro-insurrectionists, it has actively welcomed them, with apparent support from Mr. Musk.
@waltmossberg This speaks volumes, Walt. X is indeed a cesspool and your leadership here will have a big impact.
This is an existential moment for the web and the concept of open standards like #ActivityPub
Thankfully @Gargron has labored for years to create a viable approach that could form the foundation for an open social web. And many here are working to make the user experience simpler and more approachable for mainstream users.
Your presence on @Mastodon is incredibly important now.
@mike@Gargron@Mastodon Thanks, Mike. I’ve been on Mastodon quite awhile, as you know. But I rarely used it, because (a) it can be confounding to use (yes, I can figure it all out, but you know I favor things average folks can grok quickly) and (b) content moderation matters hugely to me and I need to know what the policies are for multiple servers and who is responsible….
@mike@Gargron@Mastodon …here’s an example of the complexity here: I just tried to react to a post about my leaving Twitter, and was met with a big notice saying I couldn’t do that because I wasn’t logged into the server where it lived. I thought all the posts and replies were interchangeable among servers.
@waltmossberg@mike@Mastodon I appreciate the feedback. The notice doesn't say you can't, it tells you how to do it. That notice has been reworked in the latest beta, as visible on mastodon.social—curious to know if you'd consider that an improvement.
@Gargron@mike@Mastodon I’ll let you know what I think when I see it. I don’t use betas. But, just by your description, it sounds like a chore. Please understand I’m not denigrating all your hard work here, but after 27 years of reviewing tech products for average people, I react poorly to requiring instructions for simple tasks. Are conversations and reactions here between people on different servers interchangeable or not?
@waltmossberg@mike@Mastodon Yes. Your account is on mastodon.world. You are conversing with me, whose account is on mastodon.social, and Mike, whose is on flipboard.social. Totally separate infrastructure, but your post just pops up in my notifications.
@Gargron@mike@Mastodon So then why did I get that big ugly notice before? I can’t recall to whom I was trying to respond or what server they were on. As you can imagine, I’m getting a lot of traffic from people I don’t know or follow because of my decision to ditch Twitter. I assume I can easily respond to any of them.
@waltmossberg@mike@Mastodon Presumably you opened a post on its original website, which was not the same website where your account is. That website has no idea who you are. The notice gives you a pointer how to open the same post in your own website where you are logged in. You can navigate to mastodon.social and try interacting with any post to see what the new notice looks like.
@Gargron@waltmossberg@mike@Mastodon there really needs to be a better solution here than ‘type your URL’. I don’t know what that is - some sort of identity cookie that does a redirect?
It’s much better in ‘apps’, like ivory, when you have it bounce into the app using universal links / extension.