Peter Williams (hibernating)

Innovation Scientist of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, and the American Astronomical Society. Mastodon test: @[email protected]. He/him.

[Peter Williams (hibernating) @pkgw]

I seriously wasn't expecting to feel this decisive about it, but if Trump is on here I'm not very interested in hanging around. I'm leaving the app installed but am gonna default to Mastodon: @[email protected]. See you there?

[Peter Williams (hibernating) @pkgw]

The way it's done it looks like you could (ab)use the feature to act as a basic subject line. No sense as to whether that's considered OK or not.

[Peter Williams (hibernating) @pkgw]

From my brief experience thus far, it looks like Mastodon and Twitter are very similar in features (not counting the whole "federation" model). The one novelty I've noticed is built-in content warning support.

[Peter Williams (hibernating) @pkgw]

For every, er, toot you can enter some brief text for a content warning. It shows up in the UI with a "show more" prompt to reveal the actual content.

[Peter Williams (hibernating) @pkgw]

I've been advised by a few people that Tusky is probably the client to use on Android. So, I'll switch to that.

[Peter Williams (hibernating) @pkgw]

OK, today I am going to give Mastodon a spin! I'll post some notes and commentary for my astro-folks as I go.

[Peter Williams (hibernating) @pkgw]

Looks like the app doesn't know how to use the phone's camera, so, oh no, I have to post a saved doggie pic instead of a fresh one. Let's see how it embeds in Twitter!

https://t.co/n1IDuPHwDe

[Peter Williams (hibernating) @pkgw]

Mastodon note: looks like I should have used https://t.co/WhoZX8vL8P as a tool to pick up Mastodon handles from my Twitter follows. Works pretty nicely and found a few that I missed!

[Peter Williams (hibernating) @pkgw]

@powersoffour Yeah, I was ignoring those...

[Peter Williams (hibernating) @pkgw]

I'd love to read a good discussion of why there seems to be no *for-profit* Twitter competitor that's sprung up. Seems like a no-brainer play in a world that's awash in capital?

[Peter Williams (hibernating) @pkgw]

(When you're the Innovation Scientist, you can tell yourself that tweeting about Mastodon is service work.)

[Peter Williams (hibernating) @pkgw]

@clegoues Yeah, there totally are, and I'm sure the folks running the show have a huge list of things they'd like to do! Running an open-source project is all about being told "You should do X!" and being like "Yes I know and I agree but also I don't have 1000 spare hours right now"

[Peter Williams (hibernating) @pkgw]

(Where "turn around" in this case is changing in a way that I think is very bad! You know what I mean.)

[Peter Williams (hibernating) @pkgw]

FWIW, I mostly agree with Fake Twitter Nixon. The wheels are falling off the bus here but the Twitter servers are not going to literally explode. And I'm no galaxy-brain but if you spend $44bil on something, you're probably gonna give it more than a few weeks to turn around.

[Richard M. Nixon @dick_nixon]

I understand feeling the lights will go out. And I believe the experts who say it will. But I don’t think that will be the end, because there is no viable alternative.

[Peter Williams (hibernating) @pkgw]

@cosmos4u For this kind of thing I tend to think that the features hardly matter — much more about ease of onboarding, reliability, lack of papercuts. Unfortunately those are things that are hard to do well in the open-source/non-profit mode ...