Bill Thompson

@billt
5 Followers
130 Following
41 Posts
Hack, pundit, broadcaster (Digital Planet, BBC World Service), BBC R&D. he/him
Freed up 50G by moving stuff to cloud. And my desktop is pristine.
Saturday morning here and I have realised it's time to sort out the crap on my hard drive and do some filing and filleting... repaying clerical debt,. I suppose.
One thing that was super common on Mastodon / Fediverse prior to this mass migration was adding image descriptions to help be accessible to our many blind and partially sighted users here. Many people won't boost posts without them.
Please consider adding alt text to your images when you can. 
Any #Wittgenstein researchers know if there is a list of jokes that Wittgenstein either enjoyed, mentioned, or otherwise referenced anywhere? For research purposes. Thanks! @philosophy #philosophy #academia #research
I've seen a lot of people asking about DMs here. I wrote an article about this today, but thought it'd be more useful to just say it in a post: Privacy is not the purpose of DMs. DMs are a courtesy to your followers. You’re communicating with another user directly because the information is of no value to anyone else, and there’s no reason to flood other people’s timelines with irrelevancies. Do not use DMs to discuss personal or sensitive information. (Use Signal).
Interesting analysis of how things are getting tricky for Twitter in terms of system reliability - echoes a conversation I had over the weekend.. https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/08/1062886/heres-how-a-twitter-engineer-says-it-will-break-in-the-coming-weeks/
Here’s how a Twitter engineer says it will break in the coming weeks

One insider says the company’s current staffing isn’t able to sustain the platform.

MIT Technology Review

This one is for all the new people on #Mastodon: did you know that the #fediverse has more than just a microblogging replacement? And that they can all interoperate with your Mastodon account?

Check them out!

DSH Social

When it came time to reckon with social media’s failings, nobody ran to the “web3” platforms. Nobody asked “can I get paid per message”? Nobody asked about the blockchain. The community of people who’ve been quietly doing this work for years (decades!) ended up being the ones who welcomed everyone over, as always.
The sky above the port was tuned to the color of Candy Crush loglo.
Bootstrapping an (internal) wiki is a tedious tedious dance with distraction. Slowly getting there.