Back in August I had read about a recently-completed land art work in Nevada created by Michael Heizer called, simply, City (found in the Artnet article After More Than 50 Years, Reclusive Artist Michael Heizer Is Finally Ready to Unveil ‘City,’ His Life’s Work. Here’s What It Looks Like). It is a sprawling, 1-1/2 mile by 1/2 mile area in the desert consisting of several large-scale and widely-spaced concrete abstractions, precisely sculpted mounds, and wide paths. I immediately reacted to images of it with an ineffable and religious awe. I imagine walking through it would be like being transported to a city 10,000 years in the future. The structures and intents would be beyond understanding but still intimate a hidden meaning. That feeling hasn’t gone away.
(Here we are in the future debating the quality of our online social experience as opposed to 14 years ago when the debate was about whether online relationships can even be considered healthy and “real”.)
((Unrelated-but-related: this is my new account at Mastodon, the Twitter-like FOSS website.))
Back in Aug 2010 I had my eye on a website called Diaspora, which would be released two weeks later. Diaspora was/is(?) an open source platform that had all of the features of Facebook but, since it was federated, none of the… Facebook-ness. At the time I had been interested in the open source social media and social media-adjacent platforms that were being developed. And there were many. The primary reason for hosting my blog and my other web sites on my own servers is so that the semi-arbitrary pulling up of tent posts and monetary collapse of tenuous business plans didn’t degauss my entire web presence. I treat my web identity as my personal fidelity and Blue Check™, and control over the hosting server is the most basic way to do it.
(I understand the absurdity of the possibility of this approach being available to the general populace. <insert commentary on the techno-elite here>)
It’s interesting that the Facebook hate existed so long ago, even before insurrections made it a societal necessity. I think the general interest at the time was specifically that Geeks Hated Facebook, but it may have been more socially pervasive than within that one group. I know people today who still use FB and, though it’s reasonable for the non-technical, it’s baffling to me that people in my industry still do. However: sociologists never judge (to a fault) and I should instead be questioning why they continue affiliating with such a corrosive entity. The existence of activity justifies the reason for an activity. You can only investigate why it exists.
Back to Mastodon.
I really can’t add any insight to the Musk-buys-Twitter discussion than is already out there. He is and was a horrible person–let’s ignore of the fact that I praised his “quirky innovation” at times–and his treatment of people-as-people and as-workers is horrible. What he has done w/r/t Twitter post-purchase in such a short time is almost absurdist in its ineptitude. He has created nothing in his life and is merely ars gratia artis but with money replacing art. (It’s humbling to have so many individuals whom you once admired be unmitigated assholes).
Ok, now back to Mastondon.
I have no idea whether Mastodon is The One. Twelve years ago I had great hope that one of those many federated sites would be The One that would achieve the simple task of turning the underlying infrastructure of a social networking platforms into what email is. My email provider doesn’t restrict me from sending to another email provider. But it was not to be. At least in 2010 it was not.
A similar sequence of events happened with chat networks. AIM and MSN and ICQ and Skype should have been a frontend for their own networks but a client of a universal protocol. They garden-walled their protocol and the unfortunate, ultimate result was Slack. It glommed ICQ, Usenet, FTP, et al. into a proprietary protocol even as XMPP was being solidified as a universal protocol. I’m sick at the waste of potential that capitalism has corrupted within a free network.
How to move from one Mastodon server to another: Moving or leaving accounts. You’ll need to export/import, but this will create a redirect from your old to your new.
Server – Mastodon – Like the old-timey web directories, but with Mastodon servers categorized.
Export
Download Twitter Followers – Very easy. “Export Twitter followers list for free (first 2,000 followers), Export Twitter following/friends list for free (first 2,000 followings). I had 1,032 so it was free and they emailed it instantaneously.
How to Export Twitter Following List to CSV/Excel? – Going through the process right now and it’s supposed to take 24 hours. Went back in to check the status and got this message (screencap below) when attempting to verify via 2FA: “You have hit the limit for SMS codes. Try again in 24 hours.” Hilarious. Either they didn’t pay their bill (likely) or tens-of-thousands of people are attempting to get out (also likely) or there have been so many fake accounts signing up that they hit the limit (?!?). Choose your dumpster file.
Debirdify – Finds people on you Twitter account that have a Fediverse account name included in their display name, bio, website, or pinned tweet and exports those account names to CSV.
Instructions on using IFTTT to create a crossposter applet: Sync your Mastodon back to Twitter. You can only create one applet on the free tier, so this would be the only one ya cheap-o.
Mike Masnick has a great writeup on Some Tricks To Making Mastodon Way More Usefulthat includes a good tutorial on getting started (though there are a million out there now, including from major publications) and a few tools to make the Mastodon interface a little easier. Mastodon’s in a formative state now so, like any website, it has much to improve on.
One area that both Twitter and Mastodon fail at is list management. To fix that for Mastodon (and because it’s based on the open source protocol ActivityPub it can be fixed) there’s the Mastodon List Manager. It is very basic but gets the job done.
Another area that is confusing is the process of following people from other servers. Most of the time, when you click Follow the page will display a dialog with a URL that you must copy and paste into the search box on your server’s page. Most of the time. (Although I follow many account, I haven’t figured out when this is and is not required). Anyway, there’s a browser extension called FediAct that simplifies the process. It also has several other utility functions. I haven’t yet used it, but I’ve heard new users struggle with the follow process or even abandon Mastodon altogether because of it, so it’s definitely needed.
Updated 5 Jan 2023
Teri Kanefield’s article Twitter v. Mastodon v. Post v. Other Possibilities is a comprehensive and insightful overview of the current state of Twitter-replacement social media platforms including Mastodon, Post.news, Counter Social, and Sproutable (I hadn’t heard of that). She is in on Mastodon primarily (and her blog), but cross posts to Twitter to support her followers there, with a wait-and-see on what Twitter becomes and how much migration occurs. Post.news has problematic owners and Counter Social has toxic administrators and members. Her criticisms of Twitter are the usual but well expressed: a capricious owner selling faux free speech and using algorithms to spread the most divisive of speech.
I have a slightly different take w/r/t the “divisiveness” caused by an influx of Nazis to Twitter. Our presence as passionate moderates legitimizes a social media site that’s in moral disrepair. Rational users allow defenders to declare “See! There are a range of views!” as the Nazis seed chaos. In a similar manner that TFG didn’t affect my life as a citizen but his toxicity was unbearable, Musk’s and his band of idiots may not affect me but for all who it does affect, it’s unconscionable to allow. The difference is that leaving the US is of farm more consequence than leaving a micro-blogging website.
Another good article is Journalists (And Others) Should Leave Twitter. Here’s How They Can Get Started from Dan Gillmor (https://mastodon.social/@dangillmor) at Techdirt. His concerns include the capriciousness of a morally corrupted landlord, but he also emphasizes that communities, news outlets, corporations, and government agencies now have an opportunity to escape the walled garden of Twitter. Even though you can export your data in both Twitter (and I have) and Mastodon, the arbitrary rules of a single owner can be limiting, whereas since you/community/news outlet/corporation/government can spin up their own instance with Mastodon, you have absolute control over your data.
The Hershel Walker thing has prompted a minor revelation.
The most egregious laws (ok, a subset of egregious laws) are those that are regularly broken without repercussion. These are the “soft” laws that include jay walking (illegal) or driving over 55 (illegal). Everyone does it; everyone is a criminal. But the exercise of them and subsequently the exercise of subsequent “probable cause”s are a convenient path to selective enforcement. When the police can choose who they deem criminal, above a low bar of criminality that is regularly ignored, the police have the power and not the laws.
The canonical example for me is the 55 mph speed limit. I don’t know how many times or for how long I’ve broken the law. As has (let’s face it, a far majority) everyone else. So its ubiquitousness is such that we seldom consider that it’s a breach of the law. Nine times… ninety-nine times out of a total there is no consequence and no expectation of consequence.
Unless you’re black.
So, yes, we are wary at 59 mph and above, but let’s face it: when you’re in a group of cars all going the same illegal speed you’re not too concerned.
Unless you’re black. Or brown (let’s be realistic).
So this recent completely-expected-but-still-absurdly-frustrating situation where Herschel Walker is not only forgiven for his ongoing lies and endemic Religious Right Defined amorality is a point of both befuddlement at best and un-surprise at worst… since even though we don’t expect morality from the self-appointed gatekeepers of morality we still can be aghast-by-proxy for their brazenness. It is crazy-making.
So now we have Walker’s seed spreading peccadilloes. Just what you’d expect from the moral majority to racewash to their convenience.
And this seems the reciprocal of the 55 mph law: you define a restriction that everyone will naturally elide from their moral vocabulary because it is a societal norm, and that then allows you to selectively enforce. To your own benefit.
The conservatives, and any Moral High-Grounders, have always used this approach to subjugate the Other while absolving themselves. Transgression becomes perversion for those they want to dehumanize but redemption for themselves. Walker has said he regrets his choices and has chosen a new, moral path.
This is just an example of selective law enforcement manifest as selective morality and it works to demonize a group or a race or a gender. This is an ageless problem but as it is, America as a country will not survive it’s current virulent manifestation.
It’s an almost mundane trope now that DALL-E will obviate the need for visual artists and illustrators.
The most relevant counter to this is to look back at the advent of photography and its positive affect on artists, acting as a force compelling countless new approaches to visual expression. The effortless realism of photography changed the game–even if it was, at the beginning, crude realism. Artists came up with responses such as “vision”-base styles (Impressionism, Pointillism), psychologically-influenced styles (Symbolism, Expressionism, Fauvism), and then progressively further away from realism throughout the 1900s. Realistic and photorealistic works were still being created (Chuck Close’s work, certain periods of Gerhard Richter), but realism was now a choice. Influenced by the level playing field that photography provided, most anyone could afford their own portrait.
Driven by or co-incident with photography, “manual” visual artists also moved to more pedestrian subjects. Subjects such as boxing matches, picnics, and street scenes were added to the more rarified choices of portraits of the wealthy, scenes from mythology or religion, and the royal exploits such as hunting and whatnot. There were similar influences of subject matter prior to photography, but making realism almost effortless accelerated the direction of creativity in these areas. Rather than destroying the visual arts, photography prompted a Cambrian explosion of creativity.
I became interested in the genre of New Complexity in modern music, then became familiar with the Major Names of that genre in both composition and performance along with those I appreciated the most, then–this being the world that it is–found that some of those Major Names are online, then I “kept informed” on social media of those that are active on social media. (Side note: I often contemplate with the gravity of history the fact that as a boy of five or nine I could have met Stravinsky or Shostakovich, respectively, despite my oblivious and underserving status at the time and their importance to me today.)
Ian Pace is a pianist and composer (see A week of “The History of Photography in Sound”) who is one of the above artists who are active online and who has at several times referenced the artist and composer Jim Aitchison. Mr. Pace had commissioned several works from Aitchison and posted photos and, though I can’t find those posts right now, they resonated strongly.
Jim Aitchison, Architecture of Landscape (psychiatric hospital and gallery), oil pastel, ink, and acrylic on heavy paper, ca. 2021
