KD^3C^3 - 20250302 Sweet dreams from ABC land
A coworker asked if I was on any social media last week, and I made the mistake of saying “Only one but you’ve never heard of it” which had the unintended effect of making me sound like both a hipster and a giant dweeb simultaneously. When I say “You’ve never heard of it,”that’s not because I am too cool for school, but rather because I run my own, and if I haven’t told you about it you would have never heard of it.
I don’t know the first time I heard about Twitter, but I do remember when I first heard about facebook, and it was from a friend a couple years older than me who had gotten access hen they went to college. I’m pretty sure it came up in an AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) chat because that’s how we talked to each other at that time. It’s weird to think about the fact that AIM and Facebook overlapped on the timeline, but they did. Myspace was still a big deal, and Facebook was only available to folks with a .edu email and mostly existed so you could find people in your classes.
I’m getting off track (what else is new?) I’ve talked before about ho I switched to Mastodon, joining a server in about 2017 and switching a couple times until I found one that felt right. If you’ve heard me talk at lengths about mastodon, you can skip the next bit, or you can read ahead and hear it all again. Mastodon runs on a system called ActivityPub, which was designed to allow different social networks to talk to each other. Because the thing about facebook and myspace and AIM (and others) is that each one isn’t really a network. Yo can make a network of people on them, but the software is siloed. You want to follow your friend who only has facebook, but you’re on Myspace? Hope you like making another account to be on that website too. Because each website having their own walled garden that locks people in is to their benefit. They can serve you ads and control what you see, and if al your friends go to one website, they’re much less likely to move somewhere else. It takes a lot of social capital to get 50 different people to switch platforms at the same time. But with ActivityPub, you can move between websites much easier. because (theoretically) anyone can set up a new system and it can connect to all the others.
So ActivityPub allows for networks to be social. Something posted from one network running ActivityPub can be seen by any other network running the same ActivityPub protocol. This means you can follow a goodreads-like book tracking network from your microblogging platform, or even your youtube-like video platform. instead of these being run in silos, they can see each other and even send content back and forth.
Up above, I said anyone could theoretically set up their own server. The theoretical is doing a lot of work there, because it does take some technical knowledge to get it one up and run-in.g I probably couldn’t set up a Mastodon server in my spare time without learning more about how computers work. But there’s a smaller, similar software called GoToSocial, which is much newer than Mastodon, but is designed for small user bases of generally 1-10 people. That is somewhat easier to get up and running, and almost within my skillset.
Another hurdle with setting up a new ActivityPub based network is the cost. People are so used to social networks being free and supported by advertising that we often forget ti costs real money to host all that data and run the software to manage it. In the fediverse (the term for all the networks connected by ActivityPub) there’s a regular refrain of “Support your admins!” meaning, if you can, help pay for the cost of hosting the server you are on. Many servers make it known what their monthly expenses are and ask users to help chip in. Generally smaller servers are cheaper, and some of the largest servers have costs in the thousands of dollars a month range. Most servers run on a pay-what-you-can mindset, which means they tend to be just scraping by, but enough people care about these interconnected systems that it mostly all works. It helps when you know your donation is going to an actual person instead of a faceless company or (even worse) the pockets of a billionaire.
But solutions exist for that too. One company has put together a relatively turnkey solution to spin up a GotoSocial server for under four dollars a month. You have to already have a domain name, but I’ve got a few of those kicking around. So at the end of last year, I plunked down my digital cash and spun up social.catastrophic.horse* which is a social network so obscure you’ve never heard of it, because I just told you about it. I am the only user (there’s an Administrator account, but I also run that.)
*longtime readers will also recognize Catastrophic.horse as the website for my on-permanant-hiatus Fiasco Actual Play podcast.
The coolest thing about it is I can still connect with the network of people I developed while spending years on Mastodon. I can follow them and they can follow me, and their experience isn’t any different has it was before. I still see everything they post and they see everything I post, but I also now fully control and own all of my own data. And of course I don’t see any ads. If I want, I can also add friends to my server, although nobody has taken. me up on that yet, not that I’ve seriously offered, and they could follow anyone else in the fediverse, just alike anyone in that vast network of networks and follow me.
I should mention BlueSky, not because I want to, but because I know it’s where a lot of people have fled to from twitter. But to my mind Bluesy is just another twitter waiting to happen. It’s a central server. I can’t follow anyone on BlueSky without setting up an account there. It’s like we’re back in the days of facebook and myspace, even though the technology has grown a lot since then. The space is owned by a single company and there’s nothing to stop a billionaire from buying it up again. Technically it’s possible to set up a separate relay, which is their version of a new server, and could be controlled by a different company while still seeing everything on the network but the costs are literally a million times higher than what it cost me to set up a gotosocial server. How do I know that? Because there’s a group out there trying to do that. They took BlueSky at it’s word that a second (or third or fourth) relay could exist, and set up a go fund me to do just that. The mount of money they’re trying to raise? Four million dollars.
I find it very funny that their slogan is “Free social media from billionaires” but the accidental subheading there is “And give it to millionaires.” I don’t have four million dollars, and it looks like a lot of other people don’t either, because the campaign has been running for six weeks now and has not even broken 100k.
But I’ll be over here on the social network I control for four bucks a month posting about movies and telling mediocre jokes.
I don’t know the first time I heard about Twitter, but I do remember when I first heard about facebook, and it was from a friend a couple years older than me who had gotten access hen they went to college. I’m pretty sure it came up in an AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) chat because that’s how we talked to each other at that time. It’s weird to think about the fact that AIM and Facebook overlapped on the timeline, but they did. Myspace was still a big deal, and Facebook was only available to folks with a .edu email and mostly existed so you could find people in your classes.
I’m getting off track (what else is new?) I’ve talked before about ho I switched to Mastodon, joining a server in about 2017 and switching a couple times until I found one that felt right. If you’ve heard me talk at lengths about mastodon, you can skip the next bit, or you can read ahead and hear it all again. Mastodon runs on a system called ActivityPub, which was designed to allow different social networks to talk to each other. Because the thing about facebook and myspace and AIM (and others) is that each one isn’t really a network. Yo can make a network of people on them, but the software is siloed. You want to follow your friend who only has facebook, but you’re on Myspace? Hope you like making another account to be on that website too. Because each website having their own walled garden that locks people in is to their benefit. They can serve you ads and control what you see, and if al your friends go to one website, they’re much less likely to move somewhere else. It takes a lot of social capital to get 50 different people to switch platforms at the same time. But with ActivityPub, you can move between websites much easier. because (theoretically) anyone can set up a new system and it can connect to all the others.
So ActivityPub allows for networks to be social. Something posted from one network running ActivityPub can be seen by any other network running the same ActivityPub protocol. This means you can follow a goodreads-like book tracking network from your microblogging platform, or even your youtube-like video platform. instead of these being run in silos, they can see each other and even send content back and forth.
Up above, I said anyone could theoretically set up their own server. The theoretical is doing a lot of work there, because it does take some technical knowledge to get it one up and run-in.g I probably couldn’t set up a Mastodon server in my spare time without learning more about how computers work. But there’s a smaller, similar software called GoToSocial, which is much newer than Mastodon, but is designed for small user bases of generally 1-10 people. That is somewhat easier to get up and running, and almost within my skillset.
Another hurdle with setting up a new ActivityPub based network is the cost. People are so used to social networks being free and supported by advertising that we often forget ti costs real money to host all that data and run the software to manage it. In the fediverse (the term for all the networks connected by ActivityPub) there’s a regular refrain of “Support your admins!” meaning, if you can, help pay for the cost of hosting the server you are on. Many servers make it known what their monthly expenses are and ask users to help chip in. Generally smaller servers are cheaper, and some of the largest servers have costs in the thousands of dollars a month range. Most servers run on a pay-what-you-can mindset, which means they tend to be just scraping by, but enough people care about these interconnected systems that it mostly all works. It helps when you know your donation is going to an actual person instead of a faceless company or (even worse) the pockets of a billionaire.
But solutions exist for that too. One company has put together a relatively turnkey solution to spin up a GotoSocial server for under four dollars a month. You have to already have a domain name, but I’ve got a few of those kicking around. So at the end of last year, I plunked down my digital cash and spun up social.catastrophic.horse* which is a social network so obscure you’ve never heard of it, because I just told you about it. I am the only user (there’s an Administrator account, but I also run that.)
*longtime readers will also recognize Catastrophic.horse as the website for my on-permanant-hiatus Fiasco Actual Play podcast.
The coolest thing about it is I can still connect with the network of people I developed while spending years on Mastodon. I can follow them and they can follow me, and their experience isn’t any different has it was before. I still see everything they post and they see everything I post, but I also now fully control and own all of my own data. And of course I don’t see any ads. If I want, I can also add friends to my server, although nobody has taken. me up on that yet, not that I’ve seriously offered, and they could follow anyone else in the fediverse, just alike anyone in that vast network of networks and follow me.
I should mention BlueSky, not because I want to, but because I know it’s where a lot of people have fled to from twitter. But to my mind Bluesy is just another twitter waiting to happen. It’s a central server. I can’t follow anyone on BlueSky without setting up an account there. It’s like we’re back in the days of facebook and myspace, even though the technology has grown a lot since then. The space is owned by a single company and there’s nothing to stop a billionaire from buying it up again. Technically it’s possible to set up a separate relay, which is their version of a new server, and could be controlled by a different company while still seeing everything on the network but the costs are literally a million times higher than what it cost me to set up a gotosocial server. How do I know that? Because there’s a group out there trying to do that. They took BlueSky at it’s word that a second (or third or fourth) relay could exist, and set up a go fund me to do just that. The mount of money they’re trying to raise? Four million dollars.
I find it very funny that their slogan is “Free social media from billionaires” but the accidental subheading there is “And give it to millionaires.” I don’t have four million dollars, and it looks like a lot of other people don’t either, because the campaign has been running for six weeks now and has not even broken 100k.
But I’ll be over here on the social network I control for four bucks a month posting about movies and telling mediocre jokes.