#introduction

My name is Evan Prodromou. I'm an Open Source software enthusiast, best known for my work in wikis and in social software.

I work as Director of Open Technology at the Open Earth Foundation.

I live in Montreal, love to garden with native plants, make wine, cook, and live an examined life.

As a non- #blind person I secretly enjoy reading the image descriptions people post. It is a nice way to see what is important to them and how they put it in words.

Hover over the images - it is fun. 🙂

I wrote this three years ago:

“One day, Twitter and other publishing platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or Medium will indeed die, like so many sites before them. And every time this happens, we lose most of the content we created and with it a fair amount of our collective cultural history.”

Own your content.

Publish on your own site.

https://matthiasott.com/articles/into-the-personal-website-verse

Came across this excellent #Firefox add-on which removes one of the main aspects of clunkiness about Mastodon's #federation presently - it lets you follow someone from a different Mastodon server _without_ having to type in your full username and server and get redirected first!
(it automatically handles the redirection for you so you just need to click "follow")

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/mastodon-simplified-federation

"Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. But the goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.

We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.

Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results.

In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want".

Quote: Sergey Brin / Larry Page, from the seminal 1998 paper that kickstarted the #PageRank algorithm - and #Google with it (see Appendix A).

Reading the paper that started it all after so many years is a quite interesting experience. 25 years ago they knew *exactly* what a search engine may have become if it chose the path of an ads-based business model. They were very aware of the conflict of interest that arises when you have to provide relevant results to the users, but also boost those that pay your bills.

In other words, were warning us about the risks of the business model that their own company eventually decided to embrace.

http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf

My number one recommendation to all new (and old) fediverse server administrators is: make your registrations closed, however your software allows for it. For Mastodon I think "registration with a review step" is the minimum level you should be locked down. Open-registration instances are

1) going to get overwhelmed with computing needs
2) likely to break down socially, you have no guarantee that the people signing up are a good fit for your existing people
3) going to host spammers