🔖 What a Former Republican Calls “The Conspiracy to End America” - Teri Kanefield
🔖 required reading – The Supreme Court has divided the country to please conservatives - The Washington Post
One More Try – live gospel version 🎵
George Michael recorded some amazing covers of songs by the likes of Elton John, Stevie Wonder, and Queen, (just to name a few), and his renditions were frequently better. He also knew how to improve upon his own efforts; one of the most shining examples is this live performance of One More Try with a gospel choir. It’s nothing short of stunning.
Few songs take me back to the summers of my childhood as completely as this one. It’s a WHAM! Album track and B-side, and in my opinion, it’s one of the most underrated WHAM! Tracks.
All we have to do now
Is take these lies and make them true somehow.
All we have to see
Is that I don’t belong to you, and you don’t belong to me.
One of the most moving and beautiful songs George Michael ever wrote in my opinion, and it’s based on his real-life experience. The song is about his uncle, Colin.
Stand Against Bigotry 🏳️🌈
#The current surge of bigotry in the United States against the LGBTQ+ community is heartbreaking, and is yet another stain on our nation’s history of shamefully cruel intolerance.
We should be better than this by now. We must be better than this.
This Pride Month, show your colors. The other side is certainly showing theirs.
🔖 Shocking how this pamphlet from 1945 encapsulates the modern GOP
🔖 And incredibly accessible with VoiceOver, too. – Mona: A Unique Mix of Customization Options and Features You Won’t Find in Any Other Mastodon App - MacStories
🔖 Every single word of this is accurate. It breaks my heart that the people who need to read this the most, won’t. – Americans Are Now Experiencing the Everyday Reality of Authoritarian Collapse
An app on my phone has an update. The release notes just say, “Bug improvements.” Nice. I am always hoping for better bugs than the ones I have now. 🤪
It’s like this was written just for me. 💜 *The Apple II Age 📚
looks at the calendar. Probably too early to break out my summer playlist. 🎵
🔖 Heartbreaking. 💔 – Students want new books. Thanks to restrictions, librarians can’t buy them. - The Washington Post
🔖 Maryland 9-year-old finds rare ancient shark tooth Christmas Day : NPR
Finished reading: The Unbreakable Bladesong Druid by Annette Marie ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 📚
🔖 I’m late finding out about this, but damn this is cool. Annette marie is the best urban fantasy author right now, is doing amazing things, and I wish I were her. 😂 – A new Guild Codex project in the works… 📚
Finished reading: The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 📚 Continuing my reread of Mistborn. What can I say? So good!
I Like Mastodon, but I Have Some Criticisms
#Like many, I have been saddened to watch Twitter’s descent into madness over the last few months. For all its problems, it had been a place of mostly positive interactions for me over the last fifteen years—whether that was as a place to connect with readers of my novels, tech enthusiasts, Masters of the Universe fans, or members of the visually impaired community, just to name a few. While I’m maintaining my account on Twitter, I have moved a lot of my social media presence to my Mastodon account. This has come with both good and bad, as one would expect. Some Mastodon users are really touchy about even the most constructive criticism of the service. After a couple of months on Mastodon, I have some thoughts about it, and offer both positive and negative comments here. The positives are my personal observations, and your mileage may vary; the negative is offered as constructive criticism.
Despite what some Mastodon enthusiasts will tell you, Mastodon is not immune from the ills that plagued Twitter over the last decade. Most of the ways in which Mastodon is clearly better than Twitter at the moment are only a result of it having far fewer active users. If it continues to grow as it has recently, it will worsen over time. This is not a failing of Mastodon itself, per se; humans are humans, and terrible humans exist in any group or social media platform anywhere. This is just the reality of the world. I have gotten every bit as ignorant or obnoxious responses to things I’ve posted on Mastodon as I ever did on Twitter. So it goes. That said, there is a much higher ratio of pleasant, friendly, and helpful people on Mastodon at present, which, for the time being, is undeniably a mark in its favor.
Mastodon has somewhat sidestepped the issue of moderation by allowing instances (servers) and users to block individuals or entire communities, as well as making it extremely difficult to find much of anything outside your own sphere by choosing not to implement a robust search function. Together, I feel like this largely insulates users, for both good and ill. If you want to avoid the worst of humanity who may be posting on Mastodon, you can do so, but the chances you’ll end up locked into an echo chamber is much greater than it even was on Twitter, where it was definitely a problem. This also has the result of leaving users like me, who have many interests that vary widely, with a difficult choice to make: either you create many accounts across special interest instances, or you join a general interest instance where your access to special interests you may have is limited, difficult, or in the worst cases, non-existent.
What is perhaps Mastodon’s greatest shortcoming is also one of the most volatile to mention on the service—the inability to quote posts. The creator of Mastodon explains his reasoning in a post here. Here is what he has to say:
I’ve made a deliberate choice against a quoting feature because it inevitably adds toxicity to people’s behaviours. You are tempted to quote when you should be replying, and so you speak at your audience instead of with the person you are talking to. It becomes performative. Even when doing it for “good” like ridiculing awful comments, you are giving awful comments more eyeballs that way. No quote toots. Thank’s
I find this to be flawed logic at best. Can quote tweets be used in this way on Twitter? Absolutely. Is it the only, or even most common way they are used? No. Disallowing this feature because it can be used in a toxic way is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Just posting on social media can be toxic. Singling out this one feature is arbitrary, since virtually all of the most common social media features can be used in terrible ways.
Deciding that quoting posts is not going to be an option results in some negative outcomes.
It means my timeline fills up with boosts—Mastodon’s equivalent to retweets—that have no context whatsoever. They are like empty calories. I often see the same posts boosted over and over without adding anything to what I’m reading. Why should I care about a new app that has been released? As part of the visually impaired community, it might be that said app happens to be remarkably accessible with screen readers—but the user doing the boosting can’t add this context, so I have no idea. Is someone boosting an announcement about a great new book they read and enjoyed, or did they just see a post about a book and decide to give the author a lift? Who knows! And these are just two examples of countless ways that quoting a post can be used positively.
One of the responses to this criticism I received when I mentioned it on Mastodon was, “Just turn off boosts.” The problem with that is that they are often the only way to find other accounts or posts of interest, since you can’t really search properly on the service.
I am not alone in lamenting the lack of boosting with context. Many others have been doing the same. Declaring the whims/decisions of a single developer made years ago as absolute and above question is no different than what’s been happening with Musk and Twitter, and yet that has been the response from some Mastodon enthusiasts.
For many of the same reasons the brilliant Teri Kanefield has noted in her posts about Mastodon here and here, I like the service and believe it could, and probably should, be the future of Twitter-like social media. That’s why I felt compelled to write this post. I want Mastodon to succeed; it doesn’t have to be a clone of Twitter, but I think we need to acknowledge that it will have many of the same problems, and the developers working on the software should learn from the mistakes Twitter made in dealing with them.
Right now, overall, I like Mastodon and will continue to use it. I want it to succeed, and I’ve already made some worthwhile connections there. I hope it stays that way.
🔖 Twitter v. Mastodon v. Post v. Other Possibilities - Teri Kanefield
🔖 Fantastic piece. – Elon Musk, Fox News, and Free Speech Absolutism - Teri Kanefield