Oh no. Pat Patterson, who I know from the #monktoberfest community has passed away. Pat was a kind, thoughtful, and caring human first in addition to a technologist.

This sucks. LinkedIn link because it’s all I have for reference.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kinlane_api-evangelist-conversation-with-pat-patterson-activity-7434947526916665344-tWwO

The video for my #monktoberfest 2025 talk on trust as infrastructure is now up:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WF7J7qtZ8TA

Slides are here:

https://speakerdeck.com/bcantrill/trust-as-infrastructure

I live-posted while watching conference talks on Twitter for years and have done quite a bit of it on Mastodon (as well as last year's #Monktoberfest on both Mastodon and Bluesky). This week was my first time live-posting only to Bluesky, though, and it was an interesting new experience!

- Compared to last year, the rise of custom domains on Bluesky has made handle discovery REALLY hard; it just doesn't do well finding people who aren't on bsky(.)social. Mastodon meanwhile has been getting much better in this regard, and I think my usability preference may flip there soon.
- Once you think you've found a person, though, Bsky is much easier to confirm on than Mastodon still. I've tried a bunch of clients and they all show the autocomplete suggestion text about the same size as the text you're typing at largest, with a very small photo. The larger photo size is SO helpful while also trying to summarize key points and listen.
- I really like the Mastodon clients' handling of pasted-in hashtags, where the full details don't pop up and obscure text like on Bsky. I usually keep "- @handle #event" in my clipboard throughout a talk to start every post with, and that was kinda annoying to navigate in the Bsky client. I think old-Twitter was still the best at this.
- Quote posts remain one of my favorite means of engagement, and I'm very excited to soon not have that as a deciding factor in where to post.
- When adding alt text, I very much prefer Mastodon; the image you're describing is way bigger in my client, and it's easy to read text on a slide to type out. The stability of the alt text editor feels a bit better on Bsky though.
- I couldn't scroll up more than one post when replying to my own thread on Bsky, which made continuity quite difficult. I'm pretty sure Mastodon is stronger here, and old-Twitter definitely was.
- I was really shocked how many people I thought I was already following but turned out to not be. Oops!

Overall, I think Mastodon is still mostly a during-conferences platform for me, but it's gotten really notably strong for that. Thanks, everybody who's been working on it! ✨