Austin Kocher, PhD 🌎Nov 9, 2022

What’s different about Mastodon? Here are some cultural observations that I’ve noticed through my own “digital ethnography” over the past two weeks or so.

I’m sorry that this is a thread and that feels a little Twittery but that’s how I have to roll on this one, friends.

Show threadAustin Kocher, PhD 🌎Nov 9, 2022
1. Superficial attention seeking is deprioritized (by design) and also somewhat stigmatized by the community. People will not respond well if you try to import Twitter norms. You may not even realize you’re doing it, so be mindful. Be more authentic.
Show threadAustin Kocher, PhD 🌎Nov 9, 2022
2. I think some longer-term Fediverse users may be feeling a mix of sudden excitement and also what I might call digital displacement or digital realignment (smaller group of long-term users face sudden wave of newcomers reconfiguring social space). Norms may be changing with scale of user base. Curious to hear from longer users about this.
Show threadAustin Kocher, PhD 🌎Nov 9, 2022
3. Hashtags are the local currency. That’s probably not going to change, at least not any time soon. Even if you don’t like it, take time to understand *why* universal search is not a feature. (Spoiler: it’s not because devs don’t know how to do it.)
Show threadAustin Kocher, PhD 🌎Nov 9, 2022
4. Content warnings! Yes, everyone is talking about it. There is a strong (legacy?) preference for using CW for topics that are political charged or likely to generate controversy. It reminds me of when I used to attend a liberal Mennonite church, actually. Progressive crowd, but didn’t want to ruffle feathers. This has pos and neg consequences, but it also contains (potentially white-biased) normalized assumptions about what counts as “political.” Regardless, just be aware that it’s a thing.
Show threadAustin Kocher, PhD 🌎Nov 9, 2022
5. Invisiblization of labor appears to be happening in terms of who gets credit now that Mastodon is hot. Please keep in mind that (a) this Fediverse/ActivityHub project is bigger than one person, (b) many brilliant people built this thing for us and we should find ways to acknowlege them all, and (c) many NEW people are likely to now contribute to the project and we really need to find ways to support their contributions and labor.
Show threadjosh buermannNov 9, 2022
@austinkocher Whoever did the hard labor of getting ActivityPub through the W3C consensus process deserves a really big shoutout.
Show thread♾️ Yuki (스노 雪亮) 🐬 🦣Nov 9, 2022

@buermann

That would be Evan Prodromou, primarily.

2008: he launched #identica powered by #OStatus protocol (a #WebStandard)

2010: #Friendica launched (by Mike Macgirvin)

2010-2012: #identiverse became #Fediverse

2013: Evan started #PumpIO with the #ActivityPump protocol

2014: Evan, et.al., created a @w3c working group for #ActivityPub based on ActivityPump

2016: #Mastodon first came out with OStatus and early ActivityPub support

2018: ActivityPub became a web standard

@austinkocher

Show thread♾️ Yuki (스노 雪亮) 🐬 🦣Nov 9, 2022

@buermann Disclaimer: That is so far what I was able to remember and gathered.

I'm not sure who, if anyone, kept a more complete record of the journey. I only started listing the timeline today (some might need a correction).

Show threadjosh buermann

@youronlyone That was a more complete rough first draft of history about a relatively obscure bureaucratic process than I think anybody could have hoped for.

I would imagine there are meeting notes filed away for posterity?

Nov 9, 2022 at 3:54amWeb
Show thread♾️ Yuki (스노 雪亮) 🐬 🦣Nov 9, 2022

@buermann There should be. I think the W3C ActivityPub working group kept a record, or probably their mailing list?

Maybe @w3c can give us more info how to access.