Sunbeams illuminating a coastal forest in Port Orford, Oregon

Chuggnutt!

Tag: Social Networking

  • Mastodon notes

    So I’ve been using Mastodon a bit for the past few months, and with the latest influx of users via the great Twitter Migration of Late 2022 I thought I’d jot down some of my notes on the platform.

    I have two active accounts, on different servers:

    • My personal one, @chuggnutt@mastodon.cloud, which I originally created in 2018 when Twitter’s dysfunction was becoming increasingly apparent.
    • The Brew Site account at @brewsite@mastodon.online, created earlier this year to start hedging my social media bets in earnest and also to work to expand the beer blog’s reach and learn the new platform in the process.

    The first thing all new users encounter when creating a Mastodon account is server (or “instance”) selection, which can be confusing and mystifying. It took a minute to get my head around the concept, but once I did, I realized that except for a few caveats, it doesn’t matter which server you choose. Here’s why:

    • Each server is running its own instance of the core software, and has its own set of rules.
    • All of them can connect and share data in a manner similar to RSS.
    • This interconnectivity, known in Mastodon parlance as federating, essentially consolidates it all into a more-or-less seamless social media experience, just like you’d expect without knowing anything about different servers at all.

    Now, here are those caveats I mentioned:

    • Because a server instance can be run by anyone, including bad actors, unsavories, and deplorables, you’ll want to check the rules of a given server before deciding if you want to join. Many of these “bad” servers end up being blocked by the good ones, and these good ones have rules of conduct. Pick one with good moderation and content policies.
    • With the spotlight on Mastodon and the big growth surge that’s been happening recently, some servers are undergoing growing pains and performance issues. For instance, the mastodon.online server that I have The Brew Site on is one of the popular ones, and its performance had slowed quite a bit at one point, seeming to be about 12 hours behind in updates. (Of course the next day it was much improved and working in close to realtime again.) It’s hard to know ahead of time which servers are going to perform better but it’s something to keep in mind; you may want to pick a smaller, newer instance to join that isn’t getting hammered.
    • If you decide you don’t want to be on that particular server, you can move to a new one and the process for doing so it supposed to be fairly easy, though I haven’t done it. One thing I’m unsure of for this process, however, is if you can move any content you created (posts, photos, etc.) to the new server as well, and if so how that works.

    I’ve been using both the website interface and the official Android app and find both to be perfectly usable and fine. For the web, I activated the “Enable advanced web interface” setting and I like it better than the default interface; it sets up multiple configurable columns for easier viewing and seems to be more responsive. You can enable this in “Edit Profile,” “Preferences,” and “Appearance.”

    Overall I like it so far; the multiple servers issue I mentioned above isn’t an issue for me at all (other than occasional performance) as my home timeline shows me posts (“toots” in Mastodon parlance, as opposed to “tweets” on Twitter) from every user I follow, regardless of what server they are on, and I can favorite (“like”) and boost or reblog (same as retweet) any of those posts just fine.

    I don’t notice any algorithm issues, because there are none; that is, there’s no algorithm showing you customized content. To be fair, I always view my Twitter timeline in chronological order and don’t let the algorithm mess with it, so there’s no change for me there.

    But hashtags (words prefixed with the “#” character, like “#hashtag” or “#craftbeer“) are super important on Mastodon, because the search features are more limited, and hashtags are one of the few things you can search for. So if you want any of your content searchable, liberal use of hashtags is key. Also, you can follow specific hashtags, similar to following people, which is something I’m still exploring.

    When posting images, two things to be mindful of: you should include descriptive “alt” text for the image, which is important for screen readers for visually impaired users; and images which could be considered sensitive should be flagged as such, which allows for people to decide to click to reveal an image they may not want appearing directly in their timeline for whatever reason.

    The alt text is simply another term for “text description” and it’s pretty straightforward to add a description to an image—either via the “Edit” button on the image, or even an “Add image description” option (or something similar). It’s good practice to caption all of your imagery this way to make your posts more accessible.

    I’ve been making sure to caption all images I’ve posted in this way, and so far have only flagged one image as sensitive on my @chuggnutt account; there’s probably an argument to be made about flagged pictures of beer as sensitive on @brewsite but I haven’t done much of that, except for setting “content warning” on my Beer Advent Calendar posts (emulating a surprise reveal each day).

    A lot of these best practices and FAQs can be found on Fedi.Tips, by the way, which I’ve found to be a useful resource.

    Content Warnings are the other area of note. I’ll just quote the Fedi.Tips site for these:

    Content Warnings (CWs) are optional Fediverse features which hide the content of a post behind a warning message. The post can be revealed by clicking on the warning.

    Content warnings are for any kind of content where the person reading may not want to read it right that minute, but they may want to read later. It could be something serious like upsetting news, or less serious like film spoilers. There’s also a very strong Fediverse tradition that those who are able to should use CWs when talking about emotive topics such as politics or religion. It is also often used for potentially “not safe for work” content such as gore or nudity.

    They’re very easy to add when you’re writing a post, and are entirely optional, though considered polite and considerate to use them.

    So is Mastodon going to replace Twitter? Yes and no. “Yes” in that many Twitter users, disgruntled with how the service and safety have degraded under the new management, are migrating to Mastodon as a potential alternative. But “no” because Mastodon is its own beast (so to speak), similar but different and isn’t trying to be Twitter. It’s just another step in the ongoing evolution of social media.

    I noted this fact on Twitter even, not long ago:

    Everything ends. And nothing is as ephemeral and transient as social media.

  • Twitter cleaning

    I figure I need to clean up my @chuggnutt Twitter account (and probably the @hackbend and @brewsite ones as well).

    Not that I have an extraordinary number of followers, or people I’m following—522 and 425, respectively—but I realized there’s a fair amount of “noise” on what amounts to my personal Twitter account and there are accounts I’m also following on either @hackbend or @brewsite, and I don’t really need to see redundant tweets.

    So I’ll be going through my personal Twitter account and weeding out accounts I’m following, and figure if anyone’s using something like who.unfollowed.me and gets offended that I unfollow them, I can at least point to my criteria:

    • If the account hasn’t had an update in 2 months or more, unfollowed.
    • If I’m also already following that account on @hackbend or @brewsite, I’ll unfollow on @chuggnutt.
    • Unless it’s someone I know personally, or have interacted with on @chuggnutt more often, then I’ll keep the (redundant) follow.
    • Of course there are accounts I just find interesting even if I never interact with them, so I’ll keep following those.
    • If the account seems spammy, or keeps posting repetitive tweets, unfollowed.
    • If the account is something like a brewery that I’m not already following on @brewsite—or a Bend business or similar I’m not already following on @hackbend—I’ll follow on those respective accounts and unfollow on @chuggnutt.

    I’m not too worried about the followers to my account; it’s been awhile since I’ve had to do a bot/porn sweep and block accounts, and I haven’t really seen any I’d consider blockable come through lately.

    …I should probably go through and clean up my Facebook sometime, too.

  • Ning

    By now the geeky part of the blogosphere and, er, web-o-sphere has been rocked by the announcement of Ning two days ago. Check it out. Their one-line description reads “Ning is a free online service (or, as we like to call it, a Playground) for building and using social applications.”

    What this means is they’re hosting a service/platform that allows people to build their own social software applications… things like online voting/polls, dating services, bookmarks, review sites. In theory the level of complexity in creating these ranges from point-and-click Clone-N-Theme all the way up to Advanced PHP Developer.

    Yup, PHP. It looks like they’re opening the doors to the system and letting you code the apps directly. “Uh-oh,” I thought. “I hope they have PHP sandboxed.” And sure enough, it says in the FAQ that they do. Sounds iffy to me (let’s just say I’m glad I’m not responsible for running this service!), though I’ll give them points for innovation and guts here.

    Looks like they offer up an API for their developer environment, all running under PHP 5. And from what I’ve been seeing, they’ve assembled a team of some of the top PHP people out there to put this together, so that’s impressive.

    It’s all very Web 2.0, especially with tags (and the annoying/clever convention of showing the relative popularity of various tags with different font sizes). I don’t know, it looks interesting, and it’ll be hot for awhile, but I gotta wonder just how valuable it is to have hundreds of crappy variations of “Which is cuter,” most of which were created as throwaway examples and abandoned by idly curious people (like me)…

  • Friendster goes PHP

    An item I saw yesterday but forgot to blog about: Friendster goes PHP. Pretty cool.

    Finally on Friday we launched a platform rearchitecture based on loose-coupling, web standards, and a move from JSP (via Tomcat) to PHP. The website doesn’t look much different, but hopefully we can now stop being a byword for unacceptably poky site performance.

    I haven’t had much of a chance yet to use Friendster to see if it truly is faster, so I can’t personally comment on that aspect. And predictably, this is going to bring all sorts of people out of the woodwork arguing over the relative merits of Java/JSP (which was old Friendster) versus PHP… just look at the comments on the link above to see it already happening. And while debate and disagreement can be healthy and productive, how about a quick reality check to everyone:

    PHP is good. Java is good. Both have their merits and disadvantages. Loudly complaining that [Java|PHP] is the only true way and the other is crap is boring and uninformed.

  • Shakespeare Social Networks

    This is an amazing link: Shakespeare Social Networks.

    PieSpy is a tool designed to infer and visualize social networks on Internet Relay Chat (IRC). It works by applying simple heuristics to work out who is talking to whom. This information can be used to produce a visualization of the social network, essentially showing which users are connected and how strong those connections are.

    As PieSpy matured, it became obvious that IRC was not the only suitable testing ground. By feeding PieSpy with the entire texts of Shakespeare plays, it became possible to produce drawings of the social networks present in his plays – it is now possible to visualize the relationships between the characters in his works.

    So it treats a Shakespeare play as an extended IRC session. Brilliant. I love thinking outside the box!

    Of course, it doesn’t have to be limited to Shakespeare. You could feed the program any play, script, or written work that looks enough like dialogue from a chat session. Jeez, or law enforcement agencies could use it to draw social network diagrams of people based on wiretaps…

  • Social software again

    All the hooplah over Orkut last week got me thinking more about this “social software” phenomenom from sites like Orkut and Friendster. You may remember I’ve ranted about Friendster before. My conclusions at the time were that I could see some value to it, but didn’t know what I could actually do with it.

    Several months later, same results. What do I do with this type of software? I don’t need a date. I get bored with searching for people I don’t know when all I can do is search. They’re poor at facilitating communication compared to other technologies. I already have an address book—several, actually—of people that I do know and keep in touch with. So?

    So, all of these social networking sites seem to me to be half-baked: they’re a framework built upon an interesting idea, but they’re not done yet. Honestly, I’m not even sure I can tell what the end goal is—having an interesting idea doesn’t guarantee success.

    The interesting thing about Orkut is that it’s an invitation-only service—meaning, that every user is linked to every other user in one big network—unlike Friendster or the others where there are “pockets” of networks, existing independently. Having everyone linked in some way is inherently more valuable to me; stand-alone networks diminishes the value of the system.

    But what system? Still a problem. I suppose it would be interesting to be able to crawl or browse the network of people—the big one, like Orkut does—and be able to drill-down into user data to varying degrees, based on the proximity in the network that user is to you. But there would have to be more than just user data; I’d want to drill-down into their online presence/identity/platform—the blogs, the photo galleries, the web pages and XML files of metadata, their trail of public interactions across the web (like on forums, or weblog comments)… As an example, a user browsing/crawling me would be able to drill-down into chuggnutt.com, which is becoming more and more the platform which defines my online existence. From here they could read my weblog and the archives, follow the links to any projects I’m working on (that I choose to share), see what sites and blogs I read, play with any apps I develop, etc.

    (I realize as I write this I’m also envisioning some of the online experience David Brin wrote into his near-future novel, Earth. But I haven’t read it in a long time, so I may be way off.)

    But, I can accomplish a lot of that now anyway, why another service for it? As far as I’m concerned, the real social software has been around for quite awhile now: BBSes, email, IRC, Usenet, instant messaging, weblogs. There’s more, but you get the idea.

  • Social networking backlash

    The topic du jour this week in the weblogs I read seems to be backlash against social networking services, particularly Orkut, the new one from Google. Interesting, but it’s not like you couldn’t see it coming. I’ll have more to say on this soon.

  • More Friendster Notes

    I’ve noticed from the referrer logs that my earlier Friendster post is the #3 result on Google for the search phrase “Friendster is slow“, so I figured it was high time I revisited Friendster and poke around a bit more, to see what I could find out.

    It was still slow, but not as fatally slow as the first time I was playing with it. I had previously created a profile for myself and uploaded a picture, but I had not invited friends to join. I was curious to find out if I could use Friendster without any friends (irony! irony!), and the answer is “yes,” albeit conditionally.

    About the only thing you can do when you don’t have any friends—apart from inviting some—is search for other users. However, I’ll save you some time on that right here: you can only search for users from your personal network—that is to say, friends of friends of friends (ad nauseum); if you don’t have any friends, and by extension no network, then you’ll always end up with 0 users found on the search results.

    This wasn’t obvious to me from the way the site was set up, but for sake of argument let’s say I’m socially stunted and overlooked the fact that a site that’s designed to network among friends wouldn’t naturally let you search for strangers… anyway, maybe it was obvious in hindsight and I missed it. Moving on.

    I invited some friends. Five that I could think of that (hopefully) wouldn’t think I was too weird in sending them emails inviting them to my Friendster network. Okay, nothing to do after that but log off and wait.

    A little while later, my brother had registered with Friendster and suddenly I had a friend! But then I ended up asking myself, “What now?” There still wasn’t any obvious benefit to this system that I could see.

    Then, later in the day, another friend registered on the site (I got an email notifying me of this). Didn’t have time to check it out at the time, I was heading home from work. Also didn’t figure there would be any more to do with Friendster with two friends instead of one, so it wasn’t a big priority.

    But by the time I logged back into it from home, my jaw dropped: I suddenly have 400 people in my personal network! It turns out my brother linked to two more friends, who in turn link out to friends, who link to more friends, etc. Very six degrees of separation.

    Now I can see the value in what’s going on here. I have access to a network of people that I can browse, search (by demographics or by interests), contact. (Noting, of course, recent stories about how a lot of Friendster accounts are fake as people assume different identities online or are just playing around.) Very interesting. I haven’t decided what I’ll actually do with Friendster yet, aside from figuring it out.

    Here’s something interesting, though: When I logged on and found my network of 400 people, Friendster seemed to run faster than when I had none. This is counter-intuitive; it should run more slowly when it’s sifting through larger data sets (ie. larger networks). The only thing I can figure is that their data queries are either highly unoptimised—perhaps brute-force searching through all the users to find out none were in my network?—or when dealing with zero-user networks (ie. no friends), the database/system/whatever is dealing with NULLs improperly. And any good database tech can tell you that NULLs can be a killer. It’s very odd.

  • Friendster

    I signed up for a new online tool/technology today called Friendster. Maybe you’ve heard of it; it’s “an online community that connects people through networks of friends” for meeting new people. So far I haven’t really figured out what it’s supposed to do for me, because the site is still very much in beta: most of the pages were slow-loading, the people search didn’t give me any results (they’re rumored to have 300,000+ members, so I’d expect some results), and the site just stopped responding to me after several minutes of use each time I tried.

    Perhaps the slowness is due to increased exposure to curious users after the write-up it got in Wired by Xeni Jardin (that’s such a great William Gibson-esque name), though I doubt it. I’ll play with it some more, and report what I find.

    Interestingly, what got me to Friendster was a link on Robert Scoble’s weblog for Tribe.net, which is another beta social/community website that’s making the rounds—and Xeni Jardin (there she is again) on Boing Boing talking about Tribe.net and writing that she won’t be “ditching her Friendster account anytime soon”—all of which made me curious. So I’ll probably go and try out Tribe.net now, too, because Friendster is slow.

    How’s that for making connections and providing links? I think the ultimate social software application is the blog.