three Masto lessons

The first lesson of course, it’s not all Mastodon. Even myself is on a fork of Mastodon, Hometown. Mastodon is probably the best-known protocols but there are: MissKey (big in Japan) or its fork Calckey (up for a rebranding and is actually the second biggest protocol in the fediverse by membership), Akkoma, Pleroma, Lemmy, Moshidon, Hubzilla, Friendica… the list goes on. And that’s the point of ActivityPub: as long as they all speak the same programming language, federation is not just possible but inevitable. There is interoperability. The navigation still feel janky as you find yourself browsing across forks and protocols but I can live with that friction (for now?). It feels quaint.

(Just realised I haven’t even mentioned the any number of clients from which you can browse your respective instances and your timelines, and they tend to include functions that are either impossible to include or maybe taking its own sweet time to. To use Tumblr language, what’s better than one Xkit? TWO Xkits. Or missingE, if you’re really that old.) 

There is also talk of having some kind of nomadic identity, something like OAuth back in the day but now pegged to an ownership that doesn’t have to be synonymous with a corporation-managed space. Some people really like carrying all their belongings like a tortoise. 

Lesson two: welcome to International Relations and Standards Setting baby. Did I sign up for a LARP of The Dispossessed? No, but here I am. The ongoing contestations and negotiations of the norms can get tedious but I still very much enjoy observing it. Maybe I’m just born with the rubbernecking gene. Maybe this is why I’m partially in civil society. This particular lesson for me is about the sociocultural aspect of it all, but that also exists in relation to the technical functionalities, or affordances as I’m learning to say, the stuff that “overdetermines” certain choices available. Overdetermine… is there a more beautiful example of historians and statisticians talking to each other? You don’t want to say certain legacy or environmental factors practically constraints your options, because that sounds brutal, or stuff is happening because it’s fated or karmic because that’s fatalistic, so you just say certain conditions are overdetermined. Beautiful.

And thirdly… be careful of who you follow because there are some truly interesting people here in the Fediverse. I’m glad I splurged on a new phone with more RAM because do you know how many open tabs I’m still left to read?? I have a raindrop.io now, so if you want to check in regularly on the stuff I did actually read/listen, here’s the list: looking for something?

Two podcast recommendations

My raindrop bookmarks aren’t all from my Fedi follows but a significant number of them are! Two I want to share for now is this episode from Sarah Taber’s podcast, Farm-to-Taber. From her I’ve been learning about the great economic ‘scam’ of being an American small-time farmer. More to the point for me, it’s been giving me great fits of laughter imagining this dimension in any reboot of Clark Kent’s Kansas backstory. Now there’s a hook. 

The other one is finding out that Dr Russell Barkley has set up his own YT channel. He really has been a great resource in public for ADHD research, and is genuinely a great help for me. He’s doing regular check-ins where he presents recent research related to ADHD (the most recent one). From his presentations, I am both learning and relearning stuff. Like:

• ADHD being a condition of understimulation
• ADHD subtypes is outdated medical position – there are three ‘presentations’ because they are conditional and not static.
• Autism and ADHD are common comorbidities. For ADHD-ers with comorbid autism, they tend to be of the less-disabling (some people say ‘higher functioning’) type, and the incidence rate does vary depending on research but in a range of 20-30%.

One post of nothing

I threatened friends that my first post post-nuking the old site was going to be on FastX. Oops.