The majority of posts on Mastodon right now are about how to get started, discussions about various features or making fun of the dumpster fire that is the birdsite. This is mostly unavoidable
as new people sign up, but I've tried to keep using Mastodon as an actual social network by not posting about "meta" things unless necessary. That said, I have enough thoughts though that I should say something, so here it is.
I first wrote about Mastodon in February 2020 in "Twitter's tools help online harassers" (I was probably one of the first people to ever get their Mastodon handle in newsprint!),
examining the flaws of Twitter that Mastodon has attempted to fix. I think this framing, "a better Twitter", is a good first introduction but misses the bigger picture.
In 2005, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales gave a talk in which he outlined 10 areas for us to free.
(His slide concludes by promoting Wikicities, later renamed Wikia, later renamed Fandom. Given that communities had to escape Wikia, I'd say that didn't
end up freeing them. A topic for another day...)
I've been unable to find a working video of his talk, but the general point is clear: people should be in charge of their communities, not companies. We should dictate the terms of who we include and
exclude, what we find acceptable for people to say in our spaces, and most importantly, how we make those decisions. We shouldn't need to report trolls to opaque content moderators who can't make correct decisions because
they lack sufficient context; we should just boot them ourselves. It's incredibly empowering to be in communities that have agency to make these decisions for themselves.
(Tangent: this is a good time to plug Mako's 2018 LibrePlanet keynote, "How markets coopted free software’s most powerful weapon", discussing how companies monetized "peer production"
features. In this case Twitter is monetizing our posts, thoughts, experiences, commentary, etc., relying on the masses for content and curation.)
Mastodon kind of gets us to running our own communities, though it's far from perfect. I think it's a much better representation of how online communities have historically worked, you have groups of people who are tied together by
some common interest (some project, geographic location, etc.) but have open doors so you can easily be in multiple communities at the same time. Shoving everyone into one space... I don't think it really worked out that well.
It will take some time for people to unlearn the bad habits that Twitter continually reinforced. There's some meta discussion happening on how journalists should engage on Mastodon (some instances have already started blocking the new
journa.host). I attribute this friction to switching from using social media to drive up engagement to the established culture on Mastodon to actually engage with people! I think it's entirely doable,
in the past I reported on Googleville developments, Elsevier negotations, and a bunch of other things on Mastodon without getting a single complaint.
The hardest part of Mastodon is finding the "right" server (read: community) to join. There's probably a good chance the server doesn't even exist yet! Given that you hit this problem as you try to signup and don't actually know
how anything works yet, the UX is baaaaaad. (No, I don't have any proposals to fix this, I just think it's important to acknowledge that this is a significant hurdle to onboard new people.)
Like most other community-based projects, I expect the UX will improve gradually over time through careful refinement and feedback from a large and diverse group of users. Getting through the poor UX now is merely an investment in
the future. Many servers have also been struggling on the rapid increase in people signing up and posting, so some performance/scaling improvements are in order hopefully.
Is Mastodon ready for the masses? Probably not yet, but now is a great time to try.
Techdirt covered how Twitter previously had a very strong free speech stance, especially when
it came to protecting users' anonymity. One of the downsides of having small community-run instances is that they have much less legal infrastructure and protection. How many Mastodon server administrators would have simply given in
when faced with state demands for private user data? Or been able to assemble a legal team to put up a winning defense?
I sometimes forget how ingrained Twitter is in our current society and infrastructure. I went to look up the Caltrain timetable yesterday and to get service alerts if a train will be more than 5 minutes late you have to check
@CaltrainAlerts on Twitter. Or get updates on whether you should evacuate because of a fire, you check Twitter.
Because of its federated nature, I don't think Mastodon can (currently) replace something that's so dependent on real-time updates. And I doubt most organizations/sites that are currently using Twitter can implement their own website
or app or whatever to provide instant notifications in a manner that was as usable as Twitter.
I'm very excited to see where Mastodon goes next. More than the software, I have thrived in free communities for years now and hope even more people can experience the liberation that comes from joining one.
I'm putting my money and time
where my mouth is by co-adminning a Mastodon server for wiki enthusiasts. We're growing rather slowly (about 1 new account per day), which I hope will help build a real community instead
of just importing one from somewhere else. If you need help, contact me by whatever means we normally use, I'm very happy to help.
Recently mastodon.technology announced it was shutting down at the end of the year. It's been a great home for my postings and a bunch of people I follow.
My mastodon.technology handle was even printed in my college newspaper (normally reporters' Twitter handles were used).
To fill the gap, Taavi and I have launched wikis.world, a Mastodon server for wiki enthusiasts. Please reach out to one of us for an invite!
Originally our plan was to self-host Mastodon and recruit a team of volunteers to share sysadmin duties, but we didn't get enough volunteers (pretty understandable!). Nemo
suggested using a hosting service like masto.host, which is exactly what we ended up doing. Once we had the domain name, it was pretty straightforward to get set up and start customizing.
Our plan is to apply for a "Rapid" grant to cover the cost of the domain name and hosting.
Looking forward I'm expecting another influx of people joining the Fediverse as Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter continues. Hopefully Wikis World can be a good starting point for all of our friends who are involved in
wikis and need a place to start!
I recently did a short sprint on Scribunto, the MediaWiki extension that powers templates written in Lua. It's a very stable extension that doesn't see very many changes
but given how useful it is to making most wikis work, I thought it could use some love.
Add mw.loadJsonData() (T217500), optimizes the loading of JSON data. This should make it
easier for module authors to store data separately since it doesn't need to be written in Lua tables anymore.
Add strict.lua to replace "Module:No globals" (T209310), makes the Lua extra "strict.lua"
available to module authors as a way of making sure all variables are properly scoped and not accidentally used in the global scope. There's already an on-wiki "Module:No globals" that does this, and it's used across 32% of
pages on the English Wikipedia, so it'll be a nice small performance improvement too.
Add redirects for modules (T120794) by DannyS712 in 2020, rebased, adjusted formatting of the redirect and improved
the test case so it would actually fail if the code was buggy.
This was definitely fun and has given me some ideas of other improvements that can be made. But I'm most likely going to switch focus to something else that needs some love.
SELECT
DISTINCT `page_title`
FROM
`revision`
INNER JOIN `page` ON `revision`.`rev_page` = `page`.`page_id`
INNER JOIN `actor` ON `revision`.`rev_actor` = `actor`.`actor_id`
WHERE
`page_namespace` = 4
AND `page_title` LIKE 'Requests_for_adminship/%'
AND `actor_name` = 'Legoktm'
ORDER BY
`rev_timestamp` DESC
It's really nice having type definitions for all the tables and columns. My initial impression was that the function calls were harder to read than plain SQL, but it's very quickly growing on me.
I'm also interested in what it means to have SQL queries in a more easily parsable format. Recently there was a schema change to the templatelinks table that basically required everyone (see Magnus's toot)
to adjust their queries (example). What if we could have a macro/function that wraps each query and applies these types
of migrations at compile/run time? Some let query = fix_my_query(query) type function that automatically adds the correct join and updates columns based on whatever schema changes were made in MediaWiki (as much as is
technically possible to automate).
Lots of possibilities to consider! And mwseaql is just one of the components that make up the bigger mwbot-rs project.
If this works interests you, we're always looking for more contributors, please reach out, either on-wiki or in the #wikimedia-rust:libera.chat room (Matrix or IRC).
Unfortunately, I didn't make it onto the Wikimedia Foundation board, you
can see the full results.
In the first round I was behind by ~280 votes, which is pretty close
considering nearly 6,000 votes were cast!
I already said it, but I'm really thankful to everyone who supported me,
whether you campaigned for me or just cast a vote. If there's anything
I can do to help you out, you know how to find me :-)
What's next? First, it's time for me to get back to work, I only have a 4-month backlog of bugs and patches to get through. And then continuing to agitate for change to make the WMF and Wikimedia a better place.
P.S. I'm also planning to be much more involved with the awesome people in Wikimedia New York City in the coming year.
