Here's your irregular reminder that:

Twitter was a multi-billion dollar company with thousands of employees.

Mastodon is a niche hobbyist product run by volunteers

The fact that we're being seen as a viable alternative to them is an admission that a federated, decentralized future is not only possible, but desirable.

Mastodon is not one thing, or one place. It's a network of many things and many places. We don't have a spokesperson (I mean, there's me. I'm the official spokesperson for 💯 of the fediverse, but beyond me there is no spokesperson) we don't have consensus on moderation or blocking or tools or what is good and what is bad. Some of us are professional SREs and Sysadmins, some of us aren't. Some of our instances have been around for 5+ years, some won't be here in six months.

And that's good! All of it, every last bit of it is good.

We're wrestling power away from the billionaire class, in real time, and reclaiming it for the People.

@Mastodon @Gargron @ruud Would like to acknowledge the great free service that I'm getting from Mastodon. (And there are no ads, and my data is not being sold or anything like that either.) 👍👍

I note we can support our host server. For my server contribution methods are listed at
https://mastodon.world/about
https://opencollective.com/mastodonworld

Other servers will have similar pages.

WSJ: "Cryptocurrency lender Genesis was seeking an emergency loan of $1 billion from investors before it told clients it was suspending redemptions this week..."

https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-news-today-11-17-2022/card/crypto-lender-genesis-sought-emergency-loan-of-1-billion-by-monday-573TThK17Ke15FYwJzLR

University of Aberdeen announces new "rights retention" policy aimed at making all research published by its researchers open access

https://www.abdn.ac.uk/news/16538/

"The University of Aberdeen was established on a foundation to be ‘open to all and dedicated to the pursuit of truth in the service of others’.

More than five centuries on this commitment continues to be at the heart of the University’s activities. "

Babe, wake up, a new #JWST image just dropped.

Light from the protostar L1527 escapes above and below an edge-on protoplanetary disk (the dark line at the center of the image), creating an hourglass shape. This illuminates the cavities carved as ejected material from the star collides with the surrounding, dusty nebula.

Dust scatters shorter wavelengths of light, so blue areas are where the dust is thinner and orange areas are where the dust is more dense.

https://webbtelescope.org/contents/news-releases/2022/news-2022-055

#astronomy