[00:00:00] Katherine Druckman: Hey everyone. Welcome back to Reality 2.0, I am Katherine Druckman and Doc is out today because he has some cool conference stuff going on, but that's okay. Because today we have Kyle Rankin and Shawn Powers, and we're going to have some fun. Uh, we're going to talk a little bit about the fed averse, especially with the, uh, recent Twitter news that we'll get to in a minute. But before we go there, I would like to remind everyone to check out our website at reality2cast.com. That is the number two in the URL where you can sign up for the newsletter, which we do send out. And, um, yeah, you can find all of the supplementary links and blog posts and there's some good stuff there. So please join us there. And also I wanted to make sure to thank our Patreon and Ko-fi supporters and our supporters of all kinds. And that includes listeners when people who email us with suggestions and comments. So, yeah. Um, Hey, what's up? How about that fed averse or really how about that Elon Musk [00:01:02] Shawn Powers: news, which one that is buying Coca-Cola so we can put the cocaine back in. That was his, I saw that [00:01:08] Katherine Druckman: tweet too. That was really funny. I actually thought about sending that to y'all late last night. And then I was like, wait, maybe it's too late to send text messages. But yeah, that was an interesting one. I was like, well, he's, he's definitely, um, on brand tonight. Uh, so yeah, I actually meant the Twitter news, but, but maybe the coke news we can cover later or in a future episode. [00:01:31] Shawn Powers: Uh that's just, yeah, the Twitter news is, I don't know what will. What will become of it, I guess. It's is it going to be a private company now? I don't. How do you do that? [00:01:43] Kyle Rankin: Yeah, you buy up all the shares. So they're yours. [00:01:47] Shawn Powers: So what did he, what did his $44 billion pay for exactly? [00:01:53] Kyle Rankin: Stop by that. I mean, all of it, like there is fire, like [00:01:57] Shawn Powers: the whole, but I mean, so is that what he's doing? I mean, is that, is that, is he buying all the stock from all the people? I mean, what if [00:02:03] Katherine Druckman: I don't want to see? You you'd have no choice. [00:02:05] Kyle Rankin: Once the majority of people have shareholders, I think, agree to it or whatever, then it just gets sold. Okay. Yeah. Then it happens. Yeah. Yeah. Like you can't have the one guy that holds it all up, you know, like that one person that like, that he, that was a shareholder, like the kid that was tweeting all of musts locations or whatever has his flights on Twitter. Like he bought a share couldn't couldn't shut it down. So that's [00:02:30] Shawn Powers: interesting. So. I guess. So is that what the, and how does he determine the price then? I mean, he's like, oh, I'll give you $44 billion, but wouldn't it be 54 [00:02:40] Katherine Druckman: a share. And it was currently at the time it was 54, [00:02:43] Kyle Rankin: 20, [00:02:43] Katherine Druckman: 54, 20. And at the time it was close to 40. I don't know what it is. You know, what, what did it close that [00:02:50] Kyle Rankin: exported earnings today? Actually. Yeah. So basically usually what people do is they'll sort of, I mean, not usually, like I really know, but I think what would happen is you would make an offer that you would per share. Like I will pay you this much per share, uh, in, uh, within a sort of based on past performance or current price and all of this other stuff. And then here's my offer right now. Your company is worth this many billion dollars and I will pay you this many more billion dollars to buy it in the worth of the company, I guess, is how many shares are outstanding times. [00:03:24] Shawn Powers: Okay. And so whatever the majority of the shareholders meaning the board or whoever owns the, you know, the majority agrees to, regardless of what the, uh, stock prices, that's what they get is whatever the majority agreed to. [00:03:38] Kyle Rankin: I mean, that's how. Re look into like hostile takeovers. Like this has happened against like people's wishes before, because like, again, I think sometimes even the board's wishes because you can go, there are options, I suppose, where you can take it to the people as it were and say, Hey, shareholders, the board doesn't want you to do this, but I will give this many per share and that's a good offer. And then if they can convince enough shareholders like a majority of shareholders yeah. You [00:04:04] Katherine Druckman: have these big institutional investors that carry, you know, massive voting power and [00:04:08] Kyle Rankin: well, plus he headline percent. He already had 9%. [00:04:12] Shawn Powers: Okay. Yeah. I was just curious how that actually now what, what happens then? The, he just decides, okay, now it's no longer a public publicly traded company. It's private. I just own it now. [00:04:20] Katherine Druckman: Yeah. No longer has any of those reporting obligations [00:04:23] Kyle Rankin: and yeah, you don't have to. Yeah. Yeah. [00:04:26] Katherine Druckman: No duty to shareholders anymore. Now that the current board has the fiduciary duty to the shareholder. So if somebody tried to block this, you know, I don't know, I don't know what would happen, but anyway, they ultimately, they have that, that obligation. But once it's private, there's no shareholder obligation anymore. And I don't know, I'm curious to see what it means. I mean, it, um, There are, there are things, you know, he had one really good suggestion, encrypted DMS. That sounds kind of great. Maybe. Um, but for the most part, I think there's a pretty good cause for concern, just because Twitter wields so much influence it's oh, that's a [00:05:04] Shawn Powers: popular platform. Yeah. He's, he's making it a private company, which means he has, you know, control of whatever happens, but there's also still a government regulations, right? I mean, there's [00:05:16] Katherine Druckman: America, what regularly? I mean [00:05:19] Shawn Powers: like, you know, hate speech and all the things that Twitter has had to struggle through, whether they did a good job of it or not. I mean, all of those issues are still there. So just because it's a private company owned by a spaceman. I mean that those issues are no longer, uh, central and of concern to not just people, but to the government and stuff. Right. I mean, it seems [00:05:42] Kyle Rankin: like it wasn't because they were a public company that they were bold and that, that stuff they're holding the different stuff by being a public company know they, yeah. They still have the same legal obligations, whatever they said, you know, set up in place for. Yeah. So, [00:05:54] Shawn Powers: and that's where, you know, his big, his big touting thing is, oh, well, you know, it's going to be freedom of speech, freedom of speech, freedom of speech, you know, and I don't know that it was anything more than, you know, the legal requirements of Twitter that caused a lot of the things. And I don't know, and that's where I don't know exactly how, uh, counts get disabled and blocked. And I mean, you know, elephant in the room, you know, Trump's account being disabled and turned off or whatever. I don't know at what point that was, you know, like Jack saying, oh, he's out versus the government having regulations that they had to. Interpret. I don't, I don't know how that works. I honestly don't and I don't know [00:06:34] Katherine Druckman: what question I, you know, I don't know actually [00:06:37] Kyle Rankin: what, and that, one's a little different, I mean, getting that one, but that one's a little different because that's, uh, that's falls under, it's a private, it's a private, it's an account on a private service that they can following their terms of service, kick people or whatever, and, and try to offer recourses for that. But, you know, they ultimately can choose who can use their service. They're not required by law to allow everyone to have an account on Twitter for instance, but [00:07:05] Shawn Powers: they probably have to justify to make sure that they're not kicking people off for inappropriate reasons. Right. I mean, sure. Yeah. Otherwise, I mean, you know, I mean, baking a cake for a gay couple, I mean, these are things that go to court, you know, like you, as a private company, you can, can do certain things, but you know, some of those things can be legally challenged. So I don't know. I think Musk bought him. Pandora's box of nightmares. [00:07:28] Kyle Rankin: Yeah, there's a really good post. I think like, um, if it got Vernon, uh, linked to, from someone who's been in the space, thinking about these issues for a long time, that really, that sort of went point by point into all of the thinking that everyone who tackles social media with his source of ideals that he's saying on day one today, and that all of like the founders of Twitter and I'll basically the founders of every social media company say at the beginning, and then. It's it's sort of like, everything's easy until you actually try to physically do something. Like if it's only in your mind, then the psych, when you first started drawing, let's say, and like what in my head it's, it's beautiful. And then you start actually trying to make your hand do the thing. And you're like, wow. That's doesn't look like what I imagined in my head. It would look like in the same thing as for like building a service like this it's it's [00:08:18] Shawn Powers: no plan survives first contact with the [00:08:20] Kyle Rankin: enemy. Right? Exactly. Yeah. There's all of the stuff that goes into making this. And then for example, there's like the best example that they gave was most of these rules have nothing really to do with, with these new ones to edge cases of, of blocking someone's Tate's even hate speech or something like that. It has more to do with like, how do you deal with the 99.99, nine, 9% of the stuff that you're blocking that no one wants to see because it's literal like spam or porn or like whatever the stuff is that like, people didn't want to be on the platform to see. But it has to be filtered. And then, but you hear about all the highly nuanced, either the algorithm that they do to automate this stuff at scale or whatever it got something wrong or whatever. But yeah, the climbing through all of those hoops is what now led to Twitter sort of being right or wrong, being how it is today and having the rules that it has to deal with all, you know, all of these crazy edge cases at scale, and having to hire people to look through, you know, the trash that the internet can produce on a daily basis to say that's objectionable or whatever. Well, [00:09:30] Katherine Druckman: having been in the position of massive amounts of content moderation, don't recommend it from rumor back in the days when, when Lennox journal had a ha whoa, massive amounts of comments, massive amounts of user interaction, and each article became a debate. And, and, uh, those are the good old days, but, but, you know, in amongst that it was, it was filtering. We, it was probably. Two to 5% of all comments were actual real comments and the rest of spam. And we had powerful filters to get rid of most of it. And then it was such a difficult thing. [00:10:05] Kyle Rankin: Yeah. And that's, that's sort of the, anyone who has set up a forum or done anything like that. You know, you, you will approach the whole thing initially with a certain set of ideals about how you will handle things. And then you'll have either automated span that ruins half of it, or just like legitimately awful people who you like you'll have a person who wasn't awful. Then they did something that they like legitimately violated something. And therefore you had to do some sort of moderation stuff. They then didn't like, and so they, you need revenge. And then people start doing all kinds of crazy stuff to get revenge. And you know, like whether it's a chat room or a forum or anything, anyone who has moderated that has had at least one instance where someone you upset, one person who is very tenacious and who wants, who wanted to then do anything, they could to take it down and, and, you know, grief people and stuff. Yeah. [00:10:58] Shawn Powers: Yeah. I don't understand his motivation night. My suspicion is that very little will change with Twitter. I think that we will see very, very few changes. Probably we'll get an edit feature. Because he's said that, and that would be a visible thing that the masses would be like, oh, he, he did it. He gave us edit. Um, but I've even heard him think through in real time, the ramifications of that, uh, in one of the interviews, he's like, yeah, I think there should be an edit, but of course, if you, if you edit it, I think it'll probably, uh, remove all of the retweets and likes because otherwise you could be changing what somebody was re-tweeting and then I thought, so you're deleting and making another tweet. I mean, what's the difference between, [00:11:43] Kyle Rankin: and that's how, for instance, that's how Mastodon implement such a thing. It has an edit button, but the buttons called delete and redraft. Yeah. [00:11:51] Shawn Powers: And so that's what he described and called it an edit button. You can do that now. There's just not a one-step thing. It's two steps. Delete. Retweet the tweet. Yeah. [00:12:00] Katherine Druckman: It's [00:12:00] Shawn Powers: already ahead. Yeah. Mastodon. I know that's where we're going. I was just trying to wrap my brain around why I, I don't, I don't know. I guess it's just, when you have all the money in the world, you just want attention. So maybe [00:12:12] Kyle Rankin: that's it. It's just, it's easy to be there. It's, it's easier to be impulsive and do impulsive things that most of us are constrained by the limitations of not having infinite resources to bring the bear to something you want, you know? And so you're sort of like, the problem you're facing is I don't like this and that about Twitter and I'm getting in trouble for all of the tweets I'm doing all the time. And I like to troll a lot of people and do all this stuff and wouldn't it be cool. Yeah. I could be in charge of that and no one could tell me, you know, whatever, and like, wait, I could be like you. And I would be like, well, yeah, but what can you do? I mean, other than run my own Mastodon instance, I can't, you know, I, which is not the same thing. Right. But if you have unlimited resources, then you're like, why I don't like that. I could probably bring some of my resources to bear, to make that the way I wanted, you know? And so, and, and if you grew up that way too, like, this is also probably maybe more of a class warfare kind of deal maybe, but if you grew up in an era in a, in a, in a certain level of privilege where you kind of got most of the things that you want, then you're going to see things a different way. I think then if you don't solve [00:13:19] Shawn Powers: your problems with money, I can see that. [00:13:25] Katherine Druckman: With owning Twitter comes a lot of power at this point today. Anyway, but I think it's also, it's a little bit of a, it's just a trophy. I think that there's [00:13:34] Kyle Rankin: imagine [00:13:35] Shawn Powers: a lot of power, but at what cost, I wouldn't want to be in charge of Twitter. Holy crap. What a nightmare. [00:13:43] Katherine Druckman: Well, but you wouldn't want to what'd you want to build a rocket and send yourself? I mean, maybe more than [00:13:49] Shawn Powers: I would want Twitter, [00:13:51] Kyle Rankin: but also if it were like your main hangout, you know, like if it were like your main digital hangout, you have like this big identity and power on. You know, there could be a temptation to want to have ultimate power there. You know, there's a, there's a difference between the level that we use Twitter and the level of follower accounts that all of us have collectively versus someone at his level where you like you can sway and influence stuff already just by the power of saying something right. Mentioned [00:14:18] Shawn Powers: doge coin and the price, you know, goes [00:14:20] Kyle Rankin: exactly. Yeah. Like make real world changes, you know, by saying something very, you know, I mean, imagine that and then say, well, and I could control all of that power, you know, instead of just the limited power I have by my mini millions of followers. Yeah. I guess, I mean, I guess, I mean, I wouldn't do it that, Hey, [00:14:37] Shawn Powers: I wouldn't, I wouldn't either. And I, like I said, I don't think we're going to see any significant changes whatsoever. I think it's going to be handled by the people who already work there. Uh, [00:14:47] Kyle Rankin: As they stick around [00:14:50] Shawn Powers: very [00:14:51] Katherine Druckman: competitive right now. And I, I did see somebody raised the point that a lot of tech companies, um, and as part of their compensation packages are stuck units. Right? So you get paid your salary and then you get, um, stuck. But if it's not public, there's no stock. So are they going to make up the difference with anyone? I mean, they're, they could also, they could issue shares of a private company as well, but I don't know. It just, it just changed a lot of things I think for, for Twitter employees. And I, you know, I think a lot of them maybe don't want to work for Elon Musk, but you I've heard that he's maybe not the greatest to work for. I don't know. [00:15:29] Kyle Rankin: I mean, I guess there are rumors about everybody. Well, no. I mean, w even outside of rumors, I've seen the reports of how he approaches. And his expectations of his employees. And he essentially, because he's a workaholic, he expects all of his employees to be a workaholic too. You know, he works 80 to 120 hours a week on his seven different CEO, gigs or whatever, and pretty much expects anyone who works under him to work at least 80 hours a week. Right. And if not more, because it's more, it's certainly more economical and to his benefit because he's put his entire life and identity into these, into being in charge of these companies, um, and expects everyone that works for the place to do the same, even though that's an unreasonable request, you know, it's, I can understand, I can understand someone being like, I like space and space travel, and I have an identity kind of associated with that to a point. Um, and maybe of, of his companies, that's one where I could see someone really feels feeling a sense of mission, you know, with some of that. But if you're like, yeah, I'm, I'm on, I'm on an assembly line, making cars like it's. There's a lot of people are on assembly lines, making cars. And they're like, that's my identity in my life. I'm going to spend 80, a hundred hours, 120 hours a week, um, for going family. And anything else, just putting [00:16:51] Shawn Powers: stickers on the batteries. That's my job. [00:16:52] Kyle Rankin: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. But, but that's the expectation it's like, no, you should really forego anything else and give, give, put your life on the line for the company. And, you know, we just don't live in that era anymore. At least many people don't, but, and if something [00:17:05] Katherine Druckman: happens on Christmas day, so be it, you know, it's still Christmas day work anyway. Yeah, I don't. Yeah. Well, we'll see about on that, on that end. Well, who knows, but, uh, but so, you know, we have seen a lot of people talking about leaving. I've actually noticed a few people who I used to follow from a long time ago or early Twitter days, but how you have a, you know, a pretty huge following delete their accounts. I just, I just saw it last night. It was like, whoa, that person deleted their account. That's crazy. Um, So, so that's happening, but you know, you know, anecdotally here and there, I don't know on what scale, but then also I'm seeing a lot more activity in the reverse, which is what, [00:17:50] Kyle Rankin: yeah. Well, just on Mastodon, social, apparently Oregon mentioned that, um, like something along the lines of seeing like twice, it was like, things are slow right now because I'm literally seeing twice the activity that I was seeing a week or two ago or whatever, you know, not to mention all the other signups and everything else just it's. And that's just on his one instance, you know, like that with all the other instances out there, many of them are seeing the same kind of a deal right now. Right. And [00:18:17] Shawn Powers: many more are spinning up. I mean, there's, you know, they're spinning now. And I think that, I, I think this is the digital version of moving to Canada, right? I mean, I think a lot of people with the, with the thing though, that you can quote unquote, buy the house and not really move there. I think a lot of people are creating Mastodon account. Even if they're not quitting to leave Twitter, you know, it's like, they're, they're painless, like protests, like, oh yeah, well I'm moving to Mastodon. [00:18:44] Kyle Rankin: Yeah. Well, and also just trying it out, you know, just also like, okay, well let me go ahead and reserve my account or whatever. And I mean, this has had this isn't the first time that there's been this sort of thing. This feels different to me. But, um, this is the first, there was a, there were a couple of a number of years ago. There's this whole InfoSec, uh, in mass move to Mastodon that lasted. So like a lot of people I've seen in the number of InfoSec people that pop back up from that era, like, oh yeah, I had my Mastodon account. I dusted it off. And here I am again, you know? And so there's been things like that. This feels different, but yeah, I mean, I'm sure plenty of people are just sort of like, well, I'm going to see what this is. See if it is an alternative. And then if enough, the thing is though, when it comes to critical mass or network effects, you really just sorta need. You need the, uh, numb enough people to sort of tip it over to where you're like, oh, it's fine. I can talk to the same people for the most part in this fine. [00:19:37] Shawn Powers: It's the thing that makes it beautiful. But the thing that makes it beautiful is also a thing that makes it frustrating because let's say, um, you wanted to, uh, follow my comic on Mastodon, right. Or fed verse or whatever you call the group of instances out there. Um, how, how would you find it? [00:20:01] Kyle Rankin: I would probably go to your site or something that something related to you already, because the same way I would on Twitter, because I wouldn't know what you would call your Twitter instance. I would have to guess. And I would know if that's official, like the differences. There's also a domain name to consider, but the username as it were is also, you know, there's a billion usernames on Twitter and one of them might actually be your. And I could guess, and maybe land on the right one, but maybe not [00:20:33] Shawn Powers: on Mastodon. And so when I'm looking for somebody on Twitter, I go to Google, like you just said, you know, search for it. I'll go to my website. I don't know somebody website. So I generally search for like Kyle Rankin, Twitter. Right. And then, uh, I would look and if there's a verified one, like, oh good. Now I don't have to like figure out if it's really him. Uh, uh, I don't even know what to search for. I wouldn't just be mastered on like Kyle Rankin Mastodon. Would it be Kyle Rankin, fed rivers, Kyle Rankin. I dunno, maybe. [00:21:06] Kyle Rankin: And the Mastodon, and then probably if someone wants to be found on there, they would have some sort of reference to it somewhere, either from the search engines that are searching, messaged on accounts. Um, and then would see my name again if I wanted to be. Uh, like, cause you would ultimately have some sort of post of, you can find me, find me at Mastodon at whatever, you know, just like you would other places I suppose. And, and at least the major instances are indexed and searched. I think to a degree there. I mean, there are also searches you can do within Mastodon itself. I wondered about that in those instances, it does span instances. That's I [00:21:44] Shawn Powers: wonder that because like, if let's say on tweeting something, uh, or tooting, I think is the Mastodon, uh, lingo and I wanted to, and I wanted to mention someone or whatever the mentioning verbiage is for Mastodon. Uh, you know, if I just do add and then start typing, will it search across instances or will it just search the local [00:22:06] Kyle Rankin: instance? It does is it'll start, it'll start with, I think your contact list, and this is something that. Guessing based on the behavior I've observed, I don't know, protocol level, what it's actually doing, but what I've observed is that it assumes, it starts with like local instance. If you just do ad name, then it fills in the domain name. If you start. But then there's also like a search when you're doing an app, uh, that brings down other, other names that sort of match across instances. And I think some of it has to do with people you follow. So I think it favors people you follow first and then, cause you're probably going to add someone that maybe you follow, but, and then after that it does like a cert, you can do like a search for other people. [00:22:51] Katherine Druckman: I just found two accounts for you, by the way, Sean, I don't know which one you use, but I found two over here. It's [00:22:56] Shawn Powers: actually that's my next, my next issue is that, um, I don't know what instance. I just don't know. [00:23:08] Kyle Rankin: And that's the one thing we can talk about it. Well, and so the best thing to do for me, my understanding is the best thing to do is to start, like, for example, if you have a friend who's like, I want to find out about this, what should I do? The best thing to tell them to do is to go to join Mastodon dot. And then, because unlike, for example, you could say, just go to mass it on that social. But even like Oregon was saying like part of the reason we're getting all this load as everyone just sort of default goes here and that's fine, except that there's all these other instances that are fine too. And if you go to join mastodon.org, it has a list of all kinds of different instances and the affinity groups that they serve. For example, there's fostered on that is focused on free and open source software and has people that, like that sort of thing, there's like BST related ones. Um, and there's all these other affinity [00:23:56] Shawn Powers: groups. That's, I mean, it's the cheesecake menu problem, right? There's, there's too many things. It's paralysis of choice. I, what if I pick the wrong one and I clearly did, because there's already more than one account, you know, on a different instance and. I think that's the biggest thing. Twitter, there's a Twitter. You go to Twitter and you have a Twitter account. It's tougher. [00:24:20] Kyle Rankin: Yeah. But I mean, how, so? A couple of things, one is what is, what makes the wrong one, as long as you can see people and they can see, you know, if you can follow people and they follow you, and then you have that, other than you don't agree with their policies or something like that, that's sort of like someone recently likened it to, I sorta liked this analogy a little bit. It's sort of like picking an apartment complex where you sort of look like what neighborhood is it in? What you know is, do I, do I, what things do I care about as far as who my neighbors are and what the policies are, what's the landlord like that sort of thing. Um, and if you find that during the bad one, you just move, you know, to a different one, you [00:24:59] Shawn Powers: can, and that was going to be my example. I was going to throw you under the bus and say, you know, you had a mastodon.social account. I think that's where it was that instance that you're originally on. And now you are on your company's Lieberman. Yeah, incidence. And there is a, there's a, a way to move sort of. Because all of your stuff is still on Macedonia, that social, uh, it doesn't move your tutes over. They're still on that instance and it may, or we weren't sure if it actually moved your followers to the [00:25:33] Kyle Rankin: new, Y I don't know. I don't know that it does necessarily. I don't know that I would want it to like, as a policy, not for me personally, obviously that would be convenient, but as a policy, if you move and that's the thing I want to allow [00:25:45] Shawn Powers: people to, I get that you wouldn't want people to like, oh, all of a sudden I'm following somebody on, you know, like port instance dot. I like horses. What the heck? Why would I follow somebody on that instance? You know? Uh, so I, the idea of it moving your followers seems hinky. So I doubt it does. I know it like leaves a forwarding address or whatever, but if let's say I'm on mastodons that's social. And let's say that I have gathered. 5 million followers because people really like how my cats look on their cat tree and I just take pictures and everybody just loves it. I'm famous for that. And then all of a sudden cat tree.social is an instance that, uh, I, I come up with, I'm like, oh my gosh, this is my whole world now. And I moved there. Then what? Or maybe mass it on social says, you know what? We are sick of fricking cat photos. So we're not allowing cat photos anymore. Well, that's my entire world. That's my whole legacy. I have to move to another instance now. [00:26:47] Kyle Rankin: Well, let me give you an even better example. Let's say that you're using an instance and then does in a billionaire decide. That they want to buy it and potentially change the policies in a way. Uh, if it were, if this happened to a Mastodon instance, all of your followers could use the same clients that they're currently using with the same accounts they already have and follow you with the new instance you decide to land at issue with Twitter right now is when the same sort of thing happens. You have no choice. Like it's much easier to move Macedonia instances from both the client from both the follower and the, the poster standpoint than it is on a surface where everyone has to use the one thing, then it doesn't federate at all. Yes. But. [00:27:31] Shawn Powers: Because there are so many ops, I mean, is it possible to move? Yes, but everybody would have to re follow me at somewhere else. And maybe, you know, my account is still there saying, Hey, Shaun's now over here, go there. You know, because they're like, why haven't I seen cat photos? Um, I don't know. It's just, it adds a layer of complexity that I don't think people are going to be, um, willing to do it. It's not as [00:27:55] Kyle Rankin: easy. It's what are you're talking about? It's way easier than, than moving from one Twitter instance to another. [00:28:04] Katherine Druckman: Well, here's the question, is that, is that such a bad thing that it's not that easy? I mean, [00:28:09] Kyle Rankin: well, the other thing is, is how it's not gonna, I don't, I don't see it as being a common enough thing. It's shirts. I think that can, it's more that this is an extra option that you didn't have before. That you now have on this platform is that you can choose what instance you're on and you can potentially move, but more likely than not, someone's going to stick with whatever they were on originally. Um, and just post because it's all federated. And because you can still talk to everyone that's on all of the other, you know, cat photo instances, um, and seal that stuff. So there's less of a need to feel like you have to, unless you strongly disagree with say the moderation policies or some other issues with the instance that you're on, in which case it's sort of like if you live in a, I mean, there's similar things to living in states in the United States. Um, there are overarching federal rules that you could think of this, like the Mastodon protocol itself for the most part, but then there's individual state laws that differ from state to state based on what the people there decide that they like. And sometimes those things change in ways that people that are there don't like, and then they can decide to either stick around or move. Um, It's easier in Mastodon. I think then moving to a different state. [00:29:23] Shawn Powers: I can only say that I am still unable to decide what instance to use. And so I don't use Mastodon. I just [00:29:29] Katherine Druckman: used a Libra one because, [00:29:32] Kyle Rankin: but here's the thing is, and that's the other thing is what it allows you to do is experiment. Like, for example, on Libra one, our instance may not necessarily be for everyone because we picked P we have intentionally disabled, certain features and change certain things too, because of the take a diff slightly different approach than a lot of Mastodon instances do. And some people would not like. Most, almost all mastered on instances, have a general timeline and a federated timeline, like a local timeline of federate timeline. So that's like a stream of consciousness. Someone's posting something right now on your local instance. You'll see it stream by if you go to that column and the federated version similar, just with whatever instances they can grab local that are federated around. You'll sort of see like a live feed of stuff. And many people love that feature because it's like discoverability. I can see what people are talking about, especially if you have a very small instance, they like the idea. If I can see all of the other people that are talking about cat photos on my cat photo instance, one time we made a conscious choice not to do that because we wanted to only have you see things you explicitly opt into. So you would never see like an algorithmic feed or never see anything, except the things that you, I want to follow this content. I want to follow this person and only in see what they, they produce. So we disabled those features. We also disabled direct message. 'cause we, we feel it's insecure. And so until it's end to end encrypted, we didn't want to have people think a false sense of privacy and security. So we turned it off. A lot of people that's controversial to a lot of people too. So there's a lot of things about the Libra one instance that may not appeal to everyone. And for those people, you have the 99% of all the other instances that have those features, right. That you can, you can use. But yeah, I mean, I, I totally get the analysis paralysis argument, but for most of those people, I would say then pick mastered on that social. It's the biggest instance, it's the most popular, um, it's, it seems to be pretty scalable, especially considering the flood of people going there and it'll be around. So it's, it's a safe bet. You know, it's the closest to being on a gigantic Twitter instance where everyone's in one. [00:31:42] Katherine Druckman: I kind of liked it. Nobody can DM DME. I kind of liked that part, but again, every, every person's, you know, preferences are going to be a little bit different and that's why you have options, but yes, analysis paralysis. [00:31:55] Shawn Powers: Yeah. And I, I should say I messed it on is amazing. Right. And I think it's, it's brilliant technology. I love the idea of the Federation. The Federation sounds like I'm talking about star Trek here, but, um, I, I'm just, it's more of a, of a usability standpoint for myself in that I just have a difficult time figuring out how to fit it into my idea of social media as it is, you know, for myself and yeah. It's, it's the. That's the paralysis of choice. There's just too many. I probably, honestly, probably what I'm going to end up doing is I'll probably have my own instance with just me so that I never have to worry about what I'm associated with other than myself. And, you know, it's a weird solution, but you know, then I at least know that I didn't pick wrong because, [00:32:44] Kyle Rankin: well, it's not that weird though, because if it's a domain that I already know belongs to you, then I know, oh, well that's definitely the legit. [00:32:53] Shawn Powers: Yeah. And honestly, that really is where I'm, where I'm headed. And then I will probably, I assume there's a way to actually delete accounts on instances rather than have like a forwarding thing, even because I, I I'm uncomfortable with like dangling MES out there. That's just weird for me too. So I dunno. I don't have a solution. I [00:33:16] Kyle Rankin: just have delete that. I think I have to delete accounts. I think that there's an option to leave a forwarding address as it were. And then there's some option to delete an account. Understanding the implication is someone could then reregister that account. Yeah. Just like an email address, right? Like if you get rid of, if you move off of Gmail and move somewhere else, then eventually that email, I believe comes back up for someone else to use and they could start getting messages, emails intended for your old account. Right? Yeah. [00:33:46] Shawn Powers: So anyway, that's, uh, those are just my, my sadness is with, with it and probably the solution. I mean, truly that was, that was the end of my whole not rant necessarily just, you know, talking about the things that I personally struggle with. Probably my solution is to spin up my own instance with the domain that I own, that will be associated with me. [00:34:07] Kyle Rankin: Yeah, well, and that gives you the full control. I mean, this is that control is something that there's a, a longstanding feature that we just haven't had the resources to bring, to bear, to hire people, to build it for leap. And one that I would love, which is to allow individuals to tag other people's posts in a way that only they can see or optionally their followers can see. So the idea is you can add, you know, I create a post. I can put hashtags that let you know the topics or whatever that it's about, and you can choose to follow hashtags and see all the posts that are tagged that way. But imagine if as an individual you could tag you follow someone like, oh, they made a really great post about Kubernetes, but they keep forgetting the do hashtag Kubernetes. So no one can find their great posts about Kubernetes. I'm going to tag it Kubernetes so I can see it when I'm filtering stuff. It's sort of like tagging something after the fact for searchability. I imagine if you could do that. Not in the graffiti way. Like the poster wouldn't see it because then you could do like briefing kind of, you know, spammy type stuff or whatever, you can tag it for your own uses and then imagine, so you do that first for yourself. So all these posts that they do, I want to find it later. I will tag with find it later or whatever you tag it with, whatever you want. So that's number one. So then it's searchable. Then imagine you can share, you can allow other users, other, your followers could also follow your tags, just like they can follow your boosts. Also, you know what Mastodon calls retweets. Cause that's a targetable thing, right? They can say, I want to see your retweets or boost. And I, or I don't imagine you could do that with your tags too. So then what that allows you to do is say there's someone who's really good about tagging. Kubernetes stuff. Um, and I followed them and follow their tags. And then I see all of this content when I do searches also imagine. So that's the positive instance, the negative instances. What if someone, what if there's a group of people that are really good about identifying hate speech in a way that I agree with, you know, based on my policies for hate speech, we see eye to eye on what those things are, and if they text something as hate speech, I don't want to see it. And you can assign hashtag filters in methadone to filter those things already, but they have to be hashtags that are already exist. Um, so imagine if you, if you had a group of trusted people or maybe a trusted instance, say a trusted AI, a bot that you follow that uses some sort of algorithm that you agree with that then tags things that follow whatever the policy is. Uh, and you follow that and follow the hashtags and you could filter based on that stuff. So you could basically all the things that moderators currently kind of do on the instance that it requires a moderator to do the individual would have. The authority do it. Now you, as someone who runs her own instance, you could do a lot of this stuff yourself already, but imagine an individual being able to do that. And the reason what I like about that, and the reason I was, I want Libra one eventually to do this is I don't like the idea of hiring people to be moderators of really horrible content. It does like all the psychological damage. And I kind of think it's unethical, um, a story [00:37:09] Shawn Powers: to tell you when you're done about that. Yeah. [00:37:12] Kyle Rankin: So yeah, so I, I think, well, if someone, I would much rather someone like if it can be somewhat crowdsourced and you could just say, I don't, I don't want to see anything that anyone that I trust says is either hate speech or not safe for work or whatever it is and your client that filters it, you know, or again, the opposite positive side is I want to see all this stuff, um, that is tagged this way. [00:37:35] Shawn Powers: Anyway, basically subscribe to moderators or moderation. [00:37:39] Kyle Rankin: I agree. Yeah. And it's community driven instead of it being the moderator of the instance, which is generally a bunch of CIS admin in Mastodon, you know, instead it's like whoever, whatever people you follow that you trust. So [00:37:52] Shawn Powers: yeah, and that, that is great. Hiring somebody to filter horrible stuff is bad. I, I worked at a school district when students first started to be able to get online when the internet was becoming a thing that students could get to. And the policy of the school district at that time was when students were browsing porn. I had to search through the logs, find the porn print pictures of the porn to put in a file for the principals superintendents. [00:38:26] Kyle Rankin: I still have [00:38:27] Shawn Powers: it collection. I still have nightmares. Oh my gosh. The things that I had to search for and print out. [00:38:34] Kyle Rankin: Yeah. [00:38:34] Katherine Druckman: Found stuff that gave you nightmares. [00:38:36] Kyle Rankin: That's interesting. Kids are better at that. [00:38:39] Shawn Powers: There's so much horse porn. I'm telling you it's messed up. It's [00:38:46] Kyle Rankin: yeah. And see that's the thing is as someone who's now who likes higher speed too, to say to myself, I'm hiring someone whose job it is to do this. I don't, I don't want mastered on admins to necessarily have to do that. And it, and I'm not saying this is none of these things are ultimate solutions to anything. That's the thing is there aren't like an Elon Musk will also realize this there, none of these things have ultimate wave magic wands. I have a billion dollars so I can fix it solutions, almost nothing does, but there are ways to make parts of these things better. And at least with Mastodon again, it's you have these affinity groups that like really awful objectionable content or whatever. And they also gravitate to certain mastered on instances where they post all that stuff. And to the point that moderators, if you're a moderator of an, of a Mastodon instance, you can ban entire other instances. So you can block on a user level. The other thing is, is reporting works both ways. So you can on mass on from a different instance. If someone reports one of your users, you as a moderator will say, And you can choose to act or not. Um, their moderators can also choose to block on their end. If the moderator of the remote instance doesn't do anything about it. And if there's enough problems with an instance where someone says, we don't believe this instance does any moderation, um, and their, their users or spammers or whatever, you can block the entire instance from federating to your network, protecting your users from it. There's all of these extra options that you can bring to bear on the problem. That's more sort of community-minded. [00:40:19] Katherine Druckman: So I do have one question and it goes back to the school. Did the kids know that you were writing out the stuff that they looked at or did they not know? [00:40:27] Shawn Powers: Uh, I mean, what they found out afterwards when they got in trouble and like, [00:40:32] Kyle Rankin: oh God, [00:40:33] Katherine Druckman: I have all kinds of fields, all kinds of ways about that. But anyway, I know we hadn't worked out these things yet, [00:40:41] Shawn Powers: man. Yeah. Please don't hire somebody whose job it is to look through hate speech or anything all day long. Yeah. At least not until we have universal health care. That includes mental health. [00:40:53] Kyle Rankin: I know. Yeah. I mean that's so yeah, I don't like that idea. And so I'm like, well, what's, it's not that it's great to also say, well then the community has to look at all this stuff, but the thing is, the community is already seeing some of that stuff. The CUNY might and the other. So it combines with my other thought about it, which is to not put content in someone's face that they didn't opt into. So how would you see this objectionable content? If you're not, if you don't have an algorithm showing you things to see if you don't have a live stream, that's the reasonably disabled Feder for that we disabled, the timelines is then you would see someone else on my instance, posted this horse porn or whatever. And now I have to see it. Um, I would only see that if someone. Either did it themselves or boosted it or someone commented. Right. And in all of those instances, I'm either opt into something or I have my own moderation abilities on, if someone comments, I can either block that person, if they do that, um, or then report them and do all of that. Or if it's someone I follow and if I keep following someone who posts stuff, I don't like, then I can stop following them. And then I won't see it. Yeah. [00:41:56] Shawn Powers: I think it will not help with, um, depolarization though. I mean, because you're going to find the things that you like, whether they're good or bad and, uh, see less of the things that you disagree with. And I mean, that's already an issue that this isn't a Mastodon problem, but I mean, it's, it's certainly isn't going to help with, uh, polarization because it's just going to keep [00:42:18] Katherine Druckman: happening. It's early Twitter back before the timeline was quite as manipulated. It's literally just who you are, you followed and that's it in crisis. [00:42:27] Shawn Powers: Do you remember when Twitter was so new that you could actually just watch the public. Yeah, [00:42:33] Kyle Rankin: because [00:42:33] Shawn Powers: it wasn't. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it was just like you had your, your followers, twitter.com. [00:42:39] Katherine Druckman: Right. And like, it was just all the tweets, E [00:42:43] Kyle Rankin: T R T w T T [00:42:44] Shawn Powers: R or something like that. Yeah. You could just watch the stream in real time of all tweets happening. Yeah. [00:42:51] Katherine Druckman: Weird. But yeah. Um, but I kind of, that's the thing that I kind of like about, um, the fed rivers is that it feels like it feels like early Twitter or, you know, even IRC or, or, you know, the things that, that we, as nerds are more used to, in that it'd say it's kind of a nerd space. The general public has not caught on. And it's, it's, it's small. And, and, um, and I kind of liked that. I liked that there's a slight barrier to entry and that you have to want to use it. Uh, a little bit more than you want to use Twitter. Well, there's also [00:43:28] Kyle Rankin: like there's more, there's a different sort of cultural sense to it. You know, it's not, it hasn't, it's not gamified in the same way. Like it's not about getting extra likes and getting all that. There's just not like the dopamine hit in the same way, uh, in encouraged sort of manipulated timeline feeds and all of that stuff. And so there's just like a different, like, if you're going there, because I want to go there and then get a big following and then make a lot of money somehow. Like that's not necessarily the platform to do such a thing. It's not necessarily about that. It does [00:44:01] Shawn Powers: bring up another, another issue though that, uh, this isn't a good issue or a battery too. Just something to think about. Um, you know, you mentioned that if, if I do spin up an instance with a domain that I own and you know, that I own the domain, so obviously it's pretty clear that it's my actual account. Uh, verification, uh, verification on Twitter is stupid now. Yes, I have a blue check mark, cause I'm just so super cool, but. Uh, that process is challenging and difficult, and it's so easy to set up a fake account, uh, with Mastodon. There's no form of verification other than maybe, you know, spinning up your own instance with your own domain. So, um, [00:44:37] Kyle Rankin: that's so out of it's an out of band thing, so it's, it's an, it's a [00:44:42] Shawn Powers: key to see if it's [00:44:43] Kyle Rankin: really me kind of thing, that kind of thing. Or like go to my, go to my blog. There's some other means at which, you know, I I'm me. [00:44:51] Shawn Powers: Yeah. That's kind of what I was getting at, you know, like the thing that's public go to my website or go to my email signature or something. [00:44:56] Kyle Rankin: Yeah. That means the same thing. Like when I'm giving talks and someone wants to know what my Twitter is, it's like on my slide or whatever, you know, like that's how you would know is legit and. If there are multiple people with the same name, even on Twitter, that's kind of what you would have to do. Uh, you know, I mean, they have the verified thing, but you know, you got one, I guess, but I I'm sure there's plenty of people who would like one that will not get one ever, you know, and even then it's sort of like, well, what about the two people with the same name? You know, the same real name that have some variation of it? I don't know. So, so [00:45:29] Katherine Druckman: let's, can we talk a little bit about how to host your own? [00:45:33] Kyle Rankin: Um, if you go to join mastodon.org, they have a whole section just sort of talks you through it. Yeah. I'm pretty sure there's even difficulty. It's like a one-click digital ocean kind of deal or something. Yeah. Is [00:45:44] Katherine Druckman: it safe to assume that if you're listening to this podcast, you can probably figure it out pretty [00:45:48] Kyle Rankin: easy. It's like a real set from what I remember. Okay. I I'm pretty sure there's a [00:45:53] Shawn Powers: Docker image. [00:45:54] Kyle Rankin: All ready to go. Yeah. Yeah. It's one of those things like it's, it's popular enough, enough. People have done this, that it's all. Yeah. It's just sort of, it's like WordPress kind of thing where you just sort of follow the steps kind of happens. [00:46:05] Shawn Powers: You're running Docker. Just want to say. [00:46:07] Kyle Rankin: Yeah, well, persistence, you know, persistent [00:46:10] Shawn Powers: before, so, okay. This is completely off topic, but with a WordPress has this weird thing where it forces a SSL, which sounds like a good thing, but when you try to run it in Docker, Docker has a, you know, the weird networking stuff. So you generally have a reverse proxy that handles SSL. And so they do have the, the Docker image that disables SSL by default, um, and accepts the reverse proxy headers. But if you just try to put a standard install of WordPress on a server behind. A reverse proxy. It it's really challenging. It's a pain in the butt. Anyway, that's a whole, sorry, that's a whole side topic, but anyway, [00:46:55] Katherine Druckman: I do really enjoy the idea of hosting your own as a verification measure. I, I liked that. I liked the idea of being, you know, catherine@catherinedruckman.com or whatever, because, you know, it's definitely me, you know, it's me. I mean, I guess [00:47:10] Kyle Rankin: people know, I mean the same thing with an email, right? If you see Kyla tile ranked that in or whatever, and you've know that that's a website that I post my stuff on, then it kind of, you know, it's, you know, it's like a legit domain or whatever. Yeah. [00:47:23] Katherine Druckman: I feel like I'm kind of inspired now and I want that to be my weekend project maybe, except I have like a really long list of other ones. I've got a lot going on, but yeah, I think that, you know, I think it's worthwhile, I think, um, so that's actually going back to the original question is what, you know, what's gonna happen to Twitter when Elon Musk takes over. That's one of the things he mentioned is verification for everyone, which is controversial because you know, maybe that maybe there are people who want to remain anonymous. You know, verification is great for people who want it and for people who want other people to be verified, but not everybody does, you know, so [00:47:57] Kyle Rankin: I wouldn't foresee it being a requirement. I mean verification for [00:48:02] Katherine Druckman: all the one. It makes sense. [00:48:04] Kyle Rankin: Yeah. I imagined that that was more like a, almost like a chicken in every pot kind of thing here for vacation, for everyone who wants it, you know, once I'm in charge, all [00:48:13] Katherine Druckman: these things you can have, there are people who would push for mandatory verification because some people believe that that is a way to deal with misinformation. I think that that is [00:48:24] Kyle Rankin: false. Well, it's also a great way to deal with monetization. I mean, that's why Facebook wants to have, wants to have individuals be verified to some degree that it's an individual worth more. Yeah. Yeah. [00:48:38] Katherine Druckman: So Shawn shared with us some of his frustrations. I wondered, um, maybe Kyle or, you know, I, I use it. I don't use it as much as you do, but you know, I use it a little, a fair amount of, you know, since, um, Since we spun off the podcast, uh, from the external, we, uh, we've posted all of the episodes when, um, eMASS did on account. I use it fairly regularly, but I'm not a, I'm not a power user, but it does have a lot of really nice features. Maybe we can talk about all the reasons why it's, you know, it's more fun than Twitter. [00:49:12] Kyle Rankin: Sure. Well, I will say the one feature I just learned about like today that I don't use yet. Cause I just learned about it today, but apparently if you go to any account, like the URL to go to their account, like Mastodon dot instance slash at username and you add dot RSS, you get the RSS feed for that person. So of all the things that can feed and act on RSS, you could potentially script or set up or do all of that stuff. Um, but that's not why I use it. Cause I just learned about that feature. I, yeah, I've been using it. I've had a leg in both it in Twitter for a couple of years now where I've been basically cross posting it. I post once and Twitter and once the mess on, and the thing is I always post in Twitter first, not because I prefer it, but because it only has a 280 character limit on the posts. So I have to make sure it's going to fit there first, because there's a, there's plenty of cases where, cause Mastodon has a 500 character limit proposed. So there's plenty of cases where I could write it in mass it on first and then, oh, it doesn't fit in Twitter. And there's there's scripts and bots and different things you can use that will help you cross posts. And it will turn it into multiple posts and all that stuff. I just have like, yeah. Yeah. But yeah, so I post once in one and the same thing in the other, and I just try to post twice to maintain both. I have to say while it is certainly the, the only thing I prefer about. It's just, there are more people that I follow better on there. I would prefer in general, if all of the people that I follow on Twitter were on Mastodon. I wouldn't have a reason to use Twitter anymore myself, because I just liked, I liked the site better. I liked the assurances. I get about it better. I like the fact that I, if I were using an official app, I wouldn't have to constantly fight the chronological versus recommended timelines for things. Um, and I, I liked the culture better of like the there's a couple of extras, interesting features. I like the way that it allows you to wrap text in a content. So you can say, if something's not safe for work kind of thing, you can wrap it in a, not safe for work content, warning, where you can post it and you have to click on it to see it. People use that a lot, not just for that particular type of thing, but for example, a spoiler, if you want to type something and then want to embed a spoiler, um, for people that maybe you're talking, for example, let's say that you're talking about the latest episode of whatever show, and there's a spoiler that you want to talk about. You can wrap that in a content morning and then people who follow you, who also watched the show can open that only after they've seen the episode, but they can see that you've posted about it, you know, that sort of thing. Um, so I think that's a really powerful feature. That's really useful that, um, the other one I really like is at least the clients that I use, they automatically post up whenever you post an image, the accessibility features so that you can write, uh, a descriptive text. [00:52:07] Shawn Powers: Actually recently changed in Twitter. So you can add alt tags pretty easily now. Oh, that used to be, it used to be more challenging to do and look for it. Yeah. And, um, I, that was an issue for me because I, I should be putting all tags and all my comics with a description of all the texts that's on there. And I don't, so that's something I really want to start doing. And the only reason that I realized that is because Twitter made it easier to do, but yeah. [00:52:29] Kyle Rankin: Yeah, I mess it up on my mess on, on client. It's just like, if you upload an image on my phone. Yeah. On my phone, I use something called I think, um, tootle. Uh, but anyway, yeah, it, it automatically opens the tab. Once I, it uploads, it goes to the next tab and it's like a form. It just automatically says, what's the old text. If you want to add it. And it just assumes that you would, you know, and there's a lot of things like that, where just because it's a more community minded approach, the incentives behind the features that are added are different than the features that you might be incentivized to add in a commercial product that is proprietary, let's say. And so, I don't know. There's a lot of things like that, that like the RSS feed thing, or like all of that sort of thing, the community behind it, like a lot of people that are on it don't want it to necessarily be just like Twitter was. And so they resist a lot of the negativity. That you can, at least on the instances that I'm on and the people that I follow. I'm sure there are plenty of other instances out there that have people that want it to be awful and are awful on it, but I don't have to see those people because they're not thrown in my face. [00:53:39] Shawn Powers: I'm curious, I'm kind of browsing in another window here about, uh, Twitter, Mastodon bridges to see like what degree of interactive, interactive ability. I think that's a word I made up, uh, you know, too, you can pull in your timeline apparently to Mastodon you can't interact with it directly from Aston. And so I'm, I'm going to look at that because I, I mean, I sounded like I was complaining about Mastodon for this whole episode. I think again, I really, really liked mastered on, I want to, I want it to be the thing that I, that I use in love. It's just, there's some hurdles for me personally, that make it difficult. [00:54:10] Kyle Rankin: So, well, for instance, I don't know if you traditionally used if this, then that or not, but if you did, I believe you can get RSS inputs for it. And if, and if you can, then you could potentially have like a, something you post on mass set on automatically show up on Twitter or whatever. [00:54:30] Shawn Powers: Yeah. It's like cross posting stuff. If this, then that got weird. Now it's a fully paid service. You can have like one or two automations. [00:54:39] Kyle Rankin: Yeah. There's, there's, there's free software projects out there that allow you to create a brief, you look up Twitter, messaged on bridge, literally want, yeah, there's a few that do various parts of it and some of them are home. Some of them are self hosted and it's all free software for the most part. Yeah. Um, yeah, I don't use one. I keep looking into it every now and then I'm just sort of like, eh, like I, I had never crossed the threshold of wanting to set one up because I just posted, I just copy paste every single one. So it's, I just sort of deal with it. Well, [00:55:08] Shawn Powers: this, this talk has only solidified my, my original. Thought that in order to really feel good about using Mastodon, I need to have my own instance. So I think that'll be something that happens as I also start hosting all of my own email servers coming very soon to a micro data [00:55:26] Kyle Rankin: center near me. Well, so what would be amazing? Imagine if Twitter were already using the same protocol Mastodon and say you just called it Musca Dawn, and you could imagine if it were already federated, how we wouldn't even have to have this conversation, it would just sort of be like, yeah, I've on my particular Mastodon instance. I follow, you know, your name@twitter.com and it's no different than anything else. And it all just sort of fit. I mean, it would just, it would solve the problem and it would be nice, you know, and that's how the rest of it is. And that's how it, ideally Twitter should be. They keep talking about creating some sort of open protocol, but what's interesting is that project is not into, they're not saying we're going to use, uh, activities. They're saying we're going to come up with basically a new standard that then everyone else can copy us and use our thing that we come up with instead. [00:56:14] Katherine Druckman: Right. I, uh, I think the question, Sean though, is which, which domain are you to, how do you decide? Which one? [00:56:23] Shawn Powers: Yeah, I know the, yeah, I honestly don't bring him sean.com. nerdlings.net. Sean powers.com with the zero for the oh, all of these things could be penguin journal.com, which I also own, [00:56:37] Katherine Druckman: I don't know any of them would be great. [00:56:39] Shawn Powers: Oh, thanks. Now I can't decide which one of my own domains to use. Thanks a lot, Catherine. [00:56:45] Katherine Druckman: I know. Sorry. [00:56:46] Shawn Powers: That's a whole new paralysis [00:56:47] Kyle Rankin: of choice. Well, you just create 70 mastered on instances and have forwards on all 69 of them to the wind. Yeah. Yeah. Each one every day. [00:57:03] Katherine Druckman: Yeah. Oh, that's funny. Um, yeah. I, you know, I, I, I would like to see it take off. There are, there are some things about the, their use of small usability things that just make it almost very easy to use, but not quite there. There are a few little clunky things, right? You, um, if somebody follows you, it's really easy to follow them back, but if you, if you want to go look for somebody sometimes it's, I, I don't know the, the follow, or if you follow somebody on their, on their, their actual Mastodon. Profile page wherever they are. Um, the follow interface is a little strange. It's a little clunky I find. And I just wonder if all of these things kind of add up to, you know, to be a slight barrier for entry. But again, I, I wonder if that's a problem. I mean, if I could go in and edit my, the people I follow on Twitter to just kind of whittle it down to just the people who would feel comfortable and mastered on it would probably improve it a little bit. It's kind of like email and then I've basically declared bankruptcy. I can't, I don't look at everything on Twitter because how could I possibly, um, so yeah, I, you know, I don't, I don't know that it's such a bad thing [00:58:19] Kyle Rankin: that clunky. I do see everything on Twitter. I probably use Twitter in a different way than a lot of people do. I don't. Um, I, every single, uh, the reason I have, I follow so few people on Twitter is that I see every single post I may, in some cases, people that retweet, like it's just a stream of retweets. I meet sometimes I blocked, I blocked the retweets from those people, but if I want to see what they have to say, I followed them. And there've been instances where there are people that I like perfectly well and then followed them. And want to hear what they have to say, except they post so frequently. And because I don't have an algorithm filtering out there, like may post 300 posts a day sometimes, and it just floods my feed. So I really do treat it like a chat room where I see every single post that someone makes on the platform that I follow, uh, and same things on same thing on methadone, of course, but mastered on it's more sort of designed to be that way where it is only showing everything I followed. Uh, but yeah, I, I imagine most people don't, I know a lot of people probably partially in the interest to get a lot of followers sort of the game is you follow a lot of people so that they will follow you back and then you do that enough and then you get like a high follower count and that's, and then you. Twitter or whatever you win the Twitter. Yeah. Somehow. Right. And now, now you're, now you're an influencer or something because of that. But, but then you have 5,000 people posting stuff that you have to read, you know? And how do you, then you just mute everybody and then, then it's, it's fast follower [00:59:56] Katherine Druckman: or you just don't look at it [00:59:57] Kyle Rankin: randomly. Yeah. You're like, I'm following everyone, but I never see what they have to say. Cause I muted them all because they're 5,000 people where I just unmute the three people that I actually wanted to follow. In which case you could have just followed them to begin with yeah. [01:00:09] Katherine Druckman: The creepily enough. Or you can do lists, but creepily enough, Twitter seems to know who I really want to see and I'll get an alert. They're like this person tweeted that and I'm like, oh, how did you know stop at? Yeah, it's a feature [01:00:23] Shawn Powers: and never gets it right for me. [01:00:25] Katherine Druckman: I didn't get, it always gets a ride from me. Well, not always. It's just, [01:00:29] Kyle Rankin: that's the thing. That's the other thing that makes me wonder is how many things on Twitter have I posted that people that follow. I didn't get the C because it didn't Twitter. Didn't Bain to put it in their timeline. Even if I posted it when they were using Twitter at the moment that they actually see it, have they only seen half of the things I have to say. And, you know, because I, for all of the various algorithmic reasons where I know a Mastodon, if I post something and someone's following me, unless they muted me or something that they S they see it, you know, and it's chronological if they're at, if they are using Mastodon at this moment and I post something and they follow me, they will see it right there. Yeah. [01:01:07] Katherine Druckman: I know. I get, like, I know nobody's saying what I post on Twitter because I get very little engagement. I used to get a ton, you know, in the early days, but then I stopped using it as much and, you know, Twitter punished me by hiding all of my stuff. [01:01:20] Kyle Rankin: Yeah. [01:01:21] Katherine Druckman: So, yeah. So that's the thing. So is there anything we haven't covered really? I'm sure there's a ton, but I, you know, any kind of like main bullet points about Mastodon that, I mean, ultimately I think anybody who's living. If you're not using it yet, you definitely should. Because it's, [01:01:38] Kyle Rankin: it's the [01:01:38] Shawn Powers: way I have like five different accounts on many different instances, all over I'm up here, messed it [01:01:45] Kyle Rankin: on whore. Well, what just happened is all of the, all of the prior, uh, mass exoduses from Twitter, that culturally everyone was a part of, you probably create, like, I should really, you, I'm going to go ahead and do that. And then you created one and then you used it for you posted two things like Mo what happens with a lot of things, you'll do it. You'll post two things. And then, then the controversy about Twitter will go away and then people go back to Twitter and start using it or whatever. I don't know, a [01:02:11] Shawn Powers: little bit strange. So, uh, I created, uh, an account on, um, mastodon.online, apparently, which I don't know why I did that. I thought it was a.social, but anyway, on April 25th, on April 25th, 2019, I created a, uh, an account on some other instance, [01:02:33] Katherine Druckman: Yeah. So apparently on holiday. That's [01:02:35] Shawn Powers: my mask. That on holiday. Yeah. [01:02:37] Kyle Rankin: I don't know. Celebrate it next year with your new branded instance. Yeah. I can't wait [01:02:43] Shawn Powers: that long for email because a Google is going to start charging me through the nose for email if I don't switch. So yeah, a [01:02:52] Kyle Rankin: huge bummer. Yeah. I, [01:02:57] Shawn Powers: I guess we've been talking over an hour. I know [01:02:59] Katherine Druckman: we totally have no, it's good though. Cause you know, like, Hey join us when mastered on that's the bottom line because um, we have cake, [01:03:07] Kyle Rankin: um, we totally, oh you know what we should do. So I am, well, we can chunk into it yet, but so I am@kyleatliebrum.one. Oh yeah. [01:03:16] Katherine Druckman: I am@catherinedatliebrum.one. Change that to catherine@catherinedruckman.com or something, [01:03:23] Kyle Rankin: but [01:03:25] Shawn Powers: every [01:03:26] Kyle Rankin: instance, well, and you can post a catheter maybe on the show notes or whatever, like the link, because it's about the topics with people. This is like another way to have a verified, you know, it's legit thing. [01:03:36] Katherine Druckman: Yeah. That's true. Yeah. Tell us which one you want to use and we'll put that there or none at all. [01:03:43] Shawn Powers: And this goes live tomorrow. So yeah, I won't have it done by then. [01:03:46] Katherine Druckman: Yeah. Well I can, you know, what is great about having your own. Um, website is you can edit it. I can add it anytime I want. That's great. Um, yeah. Well, cool. Um, well I think we've about covered it, then join us on the Fediverse. [01:04:08] Shawn Powers: Oh, so I think we should mention how awesome Kyle sounds with his new music. Oh, yeah, we didn't mean I'm pretty great notch, buddy. Well, I [01:04:17] Kyle Rankin: thank you very much. I appreciate coats [01:04:18] Katherine Druckman: profesh as the, I don't know who says that, actually I, no, I don't think they do at all. I, yeah, I don't, I don't, I wouldn't know. So yeah. Thanks for joining us. Follow us on, on the fediverse, wherever you can find us and, um, host your own because Hey, maybe we're all going to do that too. Uh, so yeah, until next week when we talk about something else, and we welcome Doc back, um, we will talk at you then.