If you see someone asking for help with using Mastodon and the wider Fediverse, please feel free to tag me into the thread.

I'm especially trying to help new or non-technical people who want straightforward easy-to-understand advice 🙂

(Also feel free to message or reply if you want help with something yourself!)

#FediTips

Do you remember the surprise announcement of a new social network in Davos this past January? Something that promised to be the "first" European social network?

Its name is #WSocial and it's a fork of #Bluesky. Its founders have ties with European politicians - but there is no official involvement by the EU.

You wouldn't know any of this from media reports because they all rehashed their talking points. So I wrote a post about it, dispelling some myths:

https://blog.elenarossini.com/w-social-uncovered-the-reality-behind-the-hype/

#OpenWashing

Came across a weird new-to-me kind of object at the thrift store. 45 RPM single with a handwritten label, "take 5" after the song title. I looked it up and it seems this is from a studio that did direct-to-vinyl lathe cut recordings - they got a band into the studio and had them perform the same song a bunch of times, with each take being cut to a vinyl exactly once during the recording process itself.

Sound quality is pretty bad, but it's a cute concept.

VANISHING CULTURE is out now 📚

We tend to think the internet is permanent, but the new book from the Internet Archive starts with a simple reality: our digital memory is far more fragile than we think 🕳️

Vanishing Culture looks at legal pressures, platform restrictions, and limits on tools like the Wayback Machine already affecting what can be preserved.

This isn’t future risk, it’s happening now.

📖 Download & read: https://archive.org/details/vanishing-culture-2026
🛒 Purchase in print: https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/vanishing-culture-a-report-on-our-fragile-cultural-record-9798995425014/new

🆕 blog! “Adding human.json to WordPress”

Every few years, someone reinvents FOAF. The idea behind Friend-Of-A-Friend is that You can say "I, Alice, know and trust Bob". Bob can say "I know and trust Alice. I also know and trust Carl." That social graph can be navigated to help understand trust relationships.

Sometimes this is done with complex cryptography and involves…

👀 Read more: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/03/adding-human-json-to-wordpress/
⸻
#AI #humans #WordPress