The thing about Twitter is that it really lacks a lot of the features you'd expect from a true Mastodon replacement. For example, there's no way to edit your toots (which they, confusingly call "tweets"—let's face it, it's a bit of a silly name that's difficult to take seriously). "Tweets" can't be covered by a content warning. There's no way to let the poster know you like their tweet without also sharing it, and no bookmark feature. There's no way to set up your own instance, and you're basically stuck on a single instance of Twitter. That means there's no community moderators you can reach out to to quickly resolve issues. Also, you can't de-federate instances with a lot of problematic content. It also doesn't Integrate with other fediverse platforms, and I couldn't find the option to turn the ads off. Really, Twitter has made a good start, but it will need to add a lot of additional features before it gets to the point where it becomes a true Mastodon replacement for most users. #twitter #mastodon #twittermigration
Anyone got any ideas for a small #indieweb project that might be useful for a small group. I have a super open-ended coding assignment for a class, and could probably stand up something usable in that time if i could find a niche that isn't super full of better-supported projects.
@grahamsz@indieweb.social It could be transformational for many to have a micropub client/service such that a person could log into it and either authenticate to a variety of services APIs (or as a failsafe plug in an RSS feed from services) and then have all of their siloed content automatically copied over to their personal website as it was posted. Essentially PESOS as a service.
“Breaking bread” as a tool for thought, particularly in communal settings or how nourishing your body can simultaneously improve the nourishing of your mind.
https://blog.mahabali.me/pedagogy/pedagogical-snacking-transforming-classroom-dynamics/
I can follow Mastodon users individually via RSS, but is there a mass RSS output for either all of the people I’m following or for individual lists I’ve made?
Dr. Miller mentioned in class tonight that his Winter quarter math class at UCLA will be on ring theory. Prepare yourself to commute (or not).
Dial yn yr cwympo means something different than dail yn yr cwympo.
If they were book titles, I’d rather read the first though.
The Steelcase Vintage Quidditch Chair
It was overdue for re-upholstery, so I picked up some material yesterday and recovered my 1950’s Steelcase chair. The finish on this one is in okay shape, but I really want to refinish both it and its twin which I spent a bit of time cleaning up yesterday.
It’s now been redubbed the Quidditch chair by the household.
Do not remove this tag under penalty of law.
Looking at some rough statistics for the Fediverse tonight and it appears that since November 4 that there are now 1,785 more instances or nodes in the network. About 60 of those are WordPress-based sites!
The volume of what I read online spiked substantially from 2017-2020 while I worked at Longreads. Before that, I was in publishing and the book industry for years. I've been thinking about how writing reaches a general audience for nearly a decade.
My question is not:
How stupid am I?
or
How stupid are millions of people, who all lived under a rock until last week?
My question is:
What publication or website would I have needed to be reading in 2017 that covered new fediverse developments so regularly and exhaustively that if I so much as looked at it that year, I would not have missed the work you were all doing?
@cusick It’s definitely not about stupidity, but time, effort, and attention which we already start off not having enough of. Paying attention to the bleeding edge of even a small handful of areas takes a LOT of work.
Personally, as a favorite major source, I’ve been reading and keeping up with the IndieWeb community (indieweb.org, their wiki, newsletter, and chat) since about 2014. Their community, while relatively small, is large and diverse enough that I’ve seen and been exposed to a variety of technologies, online movements, and even social movements in the last several years that I’m sure I would have never seen in the mainstream until after the sea changes had already occurred. Without an insignificant amount of attention they also manage to do it all with a flourish of kindness and care.
The secondary issue isn’t just seeing or hearing about it, but also having the bandwidth to delve into it, explore it, make sense of it, or even do something about it. I might posit that IndieWeb is working on something even more powerful and subtle than the Fediverse idea, but that it’s not quite ready for mass consumption (yet).
If I had to choose a single source to optimize for time and attention across a variety of sources and topics, I might recommend following Kevin Marks (also at @KevinMarks) who consistently sees and finds some of the best in technology that’s out there.
On the flip side, I’m sure that there are a variety of your own sources that you consume that may prefigure other changes and shifts. If you throw them over, it’s possible that you’ll missing seeing something else that may have otherwise been more obvious. Again, you have to adjust your time and attention to things which matter most to you.
A little while ago, one of the followers of my Hypothes.is account where I actively mark up my reading with highlights, annotations, and notes asked me why I was tagging seemingly random sentences with “wordnik” and other odd tags that started with “hw-“. Today I thought I’d write out the explanation of the habits around one of my side hobbies of word collecting.
Some background
In the book The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, Simon Winchester describes the pigeonhole and slip system that professor James Murray used to create the Oxford English Dictionary. The editors essentially put out a call to readers to note down interesting every day words they found in their reading along with examples sentences and references. They then collected these words alphabetically into pigeonholes and from here were able to collectively compile their magisterial dictionary. Those who are fans of the various methods of knowledge collection and management represented by the index card-based commonplace book or the zettelkasten, will appreciate this scheme as a method of collectively finding and collating knowledge. It’s akin to Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine’s work on creating the Mundaneum, but focused on the niche area of lexicography and historical linguistics.
The Professor and the Madman is broadly the fascinating story of Dr. W. C. Minor, an insane asylum patient, who saw the call to collect words and sentences began a written correspondence with James Murray by sending in over ten thousand slips with words from his personal reading.
Wordnik and Hypothes.is
A similar word collecting scheme is currently happening on the internet now, though perhaps with a bit more focus on interesting neologisms (and hopefully without me being cast as an insane asylum patient.) The lovely folks at the online dictionary Wordnik have been using the digital annotation tool Hypothes.is to collect examples of words as they happen in the wild. One can create a free account on the Hypothes.is service and quickly and easily begin collecting words for the effort by highlighting example sentences and tagging with “wordnik” and “hw-[InsertFoundWordHere]”.
To create accurate animations, we generate the speech, run it through our in-house speech recognition and pronunciation models, and get the timing for each word and phoneme (speech sound). Each sound is mapped onto a visual representation, or viseme, in a set we designed based on linguistic features.
So I clicked on my handy browser extension for Hypothes.is, highlighted the sentence with a bit of context, and tagged it with “wordnik” and “hw-viseme”. The “hw-” prefix ostensibly means “head word” which is how lexicographers refer to the words you see defined in dictionaries.
Then the fine folks at Wordnik are able to access the public annotations matching the tag Wordnik, and use Hypothes.is’ API to pull in the collections of new words for inclusion into their ever-growing corpus.
Since I’ve collected interesting new words and neologisms for ages anyway, this has been a quick and easy method of helping out other like minded word collectors along the way. In addition to the ability to help out others, a side benefit of the process is that the collected words are all publicly available for reading and using in daily life! You can not only find the public page for Wordnik words on Hypothes.is, but you can subscribe to it via RSS to see all the clever and interesting neologisms appearing in the English language as collected in real time! So if you’re the sort who enjoys touting new words at cocktail parties, a rabid cruciverbalist who refuses to be stumped by this week’s puzzle, or a budding lexicographer yourself, you’ve now got a fantastic new resource! I’ve found it to be far more entertaining and intriguing than any ten other word-of-the-day efforts I’ve seen in published or internet form.
Yes, I live in Altadena, CA. Yes, I’ve purchased lottery tickets from Joe’s before. No, it (sadly) wasn’t me that won 2.04 billion dollars in the Powerball Lottery.
Zotero with a side of Ditch Twitter
I switched from Mastodon to Twitter to look something up and noticed they’re trying to entice me back with trending topics they know I’ll love.
Back to Mastodon…
Seeing privileged Westerners complaining about their miniscule issues relating to their reactions to an online dictator in #TwitterMigration, makes me extra mindful of war, climate, and other human refugees who need to physically relocate their homes from one country to another and don’t have any support systems at all.
A great thread. Though why not use the web as your platform? Micro.blog can do the work to help you own your identity & data, and as @EthanZ suggests it will also allow you to crosspost to both Twitter & Mastodon to stay in touch with the people you chose.
Long thread – buckle up. TL:DR; yes, you should join Mastodon. But you should stay on Twitter as well. What we need are more and different online communities, not just an exodus from a troubled platform.
— Ethan “no blue check before it was cool” Zuckerman (@EthanZ) November 4, 2022
Cusick (C.IM)
The Professor and the Madman is broadly the fascinating story of Dr. W. C. Minor, an insane asylum patient, who saw the call to collect words and sentences began a written correspondence with James Murray by sending in over ten thousand slips with words from his personal reading. 
