Month: December 2022

I don’t know if it was meant to be pejorative or not, but someone compared the state of Mastodon three months ago to LiveJournal. And complained that it seemed very much like it was meant to be a private space for like-minded people, unsuitable for viral activism of the kind that took off in 2020.

Which, at the risk of seeming insensitive: well, duh.

Mastodon was not intended as a Twitter replacement. It was intended as a Twitter alternative. The features it eschewed were specifically those that had been used to harass and troll the sort of people who defected from the birdsite, and it was meant to reduce reach: reduce dunk-quoting, reduce brigading and dogpiling, provide something that would be a safer space while still social. And the interoperability between instances was a bonus convenience – one gets the impression that the main focus was on intra-instance activity, where the specific rules and norms of the instance would prevail.

Phony Stark bought Twitter because that was the only way to build a hugely successful right-wing troll site with plenty of potential victims. As with anything in modern conservatism, the cruelty and domination was the only point, and the failing of Gab or Truth Social or Parker was that potential victims were unlikely to migrate there – leaving them with only their own kind posting pictures of their own feces. So Musk merely bought Twitter and handed it over to the worst in humanity, and did so in a manner so financially unsustainable that it’s tanked the primary business he’s supposedly built his genius on.

but back to Mastodon. It’s not in its final form, and probably never will be. But it started off as a phenomenon built for people who wanted top opt out of Twitter and the prevailing social media, which made it explicitly unlike Twitter. And now that people are trying to reproduce Twitter, it’s becoming apparent that there is a conflict between people who expect thing to work like they used to and those who don’t want that.

There are actually good arguments on both sides. the problem, as with so many things, boils down to the fact that technical solutions for cultural problems are a myth. There’s no way to build encryption that only the good guys can break, and there’s no way to build viral enhancements that allow the public to dunk on assholes without making it possible for assholes to dunk on innocents.

At some point, there has to be human moderation, and it feels like the Slashdot system needs to be tried again: after a while, random trusted users occasionally receive mod points to boost or bury a reply, and their mods are themselves meta-moderated for correction and future mod privileges. If you do this for replies (and presumably quotes as well), pretty soon you will locate, identify and bury trolls – not with an algorithm, but with the aggregated consensus of the community, randomly sampled repeatedly.

This could be a per-instance thing, modifying posts from other sides – one user repeatedly flagged? Block them. One instance as a constant source of downvoted posts? De-federate them. One person constantly making bad mods? Cut them loose. And by doing it on a per-instance basis, each instance is shaped by those who use it, and you can move around to one that is as freewheeling or heavily mannered as you like. (To some extent, this has happened already, with certain thoroughly racist instances cast into the void to yell at each other.)

Too many people are going for the TELSTAR approach – Terminate Elon, Let’s Start Twitter Again Right – but trying to use Mastodon as the new Twitter is like trying to use your Camry to plow the field. It’s going to take some serious modifications, and at the end of the day it may not be the best tool for the job. I’m getting more comfortable with Mastodon, but it’s not Twitter. Then again, it took years before Twitter was Twitter. I suspect we may speed-run the uptake process this time, but there are a lot of teething pains ahead.

For a brief moment this afternoon, I could almost see a 3D-shadow effect on the white letters on a slate blue background in my laptop menu bar. I don’t know if it’s deliberate, or if I hallucinated it, but I was suddenly put in mind of Kaleidoscope.

Kaleidoscope was a project by Greg Landweber, a Harvard hacker who famously cooked up Greg’s Buttons as a landmark piece of Mac customization shareware. It gave you options to change colors and fonts and the like in the classic macOS in the early-to-mid 90s. But Kaleidoscope was a leap beyond that – originally called “Acid,” it proved to be the fulfillment of something Apple was promising in Copeland: a way to customize the entire windowing system.

System 7.5 was no place to try to tinker with your OS and expect stability, but God knows I was doing by best. RAMDoubler, Speed Doubler, any number of things to try to max out the performance of a PowerMac 6100 on a grad student’s budget. but I couldn’t help customizing the look. He had separate extensions to try to mimic the appearance of the BeBox or of Copeland itself, but I always ended up with something in black and gold or graphite and silver or some other wild combination, and I stuck with Kaleidoscope all the way to the coming of MacOS X.

And then there were the various appearance themes for that, even. Some built in, some less so, but you could use Unsanity’s ShapeShiftter to get similar results, or even find one or two stray Apple beta themes – but those were gone for good with OS X 10.4 and later, it seems like, and that was an end of Mac customization. And nothing of the sort ever appeared for iOS at all, until the coming of iOS 16 and the handful of color and font options for the Lock Screen.

While I’m all for consistency, I would almost rather have some sort of tools for tweaking up the look of the OS than I would an external App Store framework or some of the other nonsense that’s apparently going to be forced on Apple by the EU. I don’t have any intention of opening up my phone to un-gatekept software, if only because every hack of iOS I’ve been aware of depends on jailbreaking and I like being secure. But it would be nice to be able to trick up the look with more than just a bunch of Shortcut icons. Moreso even than the PowerBook of yore, what’s on your iPhone is you. (Although to be fair, I never found anything that really suited my requirements for customization on Android 5 with my Moto X. Maybe it’s different now.)

And you may as well. It’s not like it’s going to scratch the CPU capability. Open iOS to arbitrary third party code and appearance consistency will be the least of your worries, so why not make it official? Then again, whimsical customization might keep me on my mini another year instead of sighing and biting the bullet and buying the iPhone 17 Pro whose smallest size is 6.4” and starts at $1199…and it’s hard not to think this ends with an Apple Watch Ultra on my wrist as the remote control for the ridiculous-size phone I never take out of my jacket…

By 2013, I was already making a habit of going up to the city during that break between Christmas and New Year’s. In fact, we generally went up earlier in December, to see the Christmas lights and see the Fairmont gingerbread house and stay in the St Francis like we did on our honeymoon. I could get a drink in the Clock Bar, or Irish coffee at the Buena Vista as we rode the cable car to the end of the line, and when I made my solo trip there would be a drink at Zeki or Fireplace Bar or the Mucky Duck on the way out to an inevitable end at the Riptide, where I could sit by a wood fire and read quietly two blocks from the beach.

It was different back then. There were half a dozen cocktail establishments I wanted to frequent – Bourbon and Branch, Local Edition, Rickhouse, Swig, you name it. There were places I aspired to shop – Wingtip, Unionmade, the little shoe shop in Noe Valley where I kept eyeing the steel-toed Blundstones I wouldn’t buy until 2017. The search for American-made wardrobe was still in its early days, and I hadn’t been gifted the Aldens or turned over my entire daily wear to American Giant above the waist and LC King below. Hell, I’d only just settled on an actual surplus peacoat to replace the ill-fitting Gap one.. A surprising amount of my outerwear – the Filson, the Rickson, the tweed, the M-65 and all the AG work shirts – were still in the future.

The city was different back then. The Valley was different. We hadn’t fallen into the bottomless dumb-money pit that made this place the new Wall Street. Maybe it was because I hadn’t quite turned 40, but I was not yet overrun by the sense that this place was no longer for the likes of me. Could have been wishful thinking on my part, or it could have been that the city was scratching an itch that was going unsatisfied after the Europe trip and not realizing we wouldn’t be abroad again until 2015.

Or maybe there was something there I just wanted to connect with by staying at our friend Doug’s place in China Basin and getting around entirely on MUNI before going home on Caltrain. Even in DC, my experience was more genuinely suburban than urban – living in Ballston was more like life in the Avenues, if we’re being honest, and my upbringing was far more vehicle-exurban than I ever realized at the time – and to live in San Francisco, however briefly and temporarily, felt like picking up on a bit of the road not taken.

I don’t know exactly when the wave broke and rolled back for good – maybe in 2015, when Santacon pursued me all the way up on the train and then all the way down the California line when I’d rather have been watching the Army-Navy game in front of a fireplace with a maple old fashioned. Or maybe in 2016, when we began the new tradition of the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus matinee Christmas show in an attempt to push back against the encroaching dark. But the combination of layoffs (and an end to the winter break) and the ensuing pandemic put paid to it for good – there are no random galavants around the city after January 2019, because the opportunity isn’t there any more. It’s a pity, but that’s the size of things when the 4 rolls over to a 5.

I bailed off Twitter today. I announced my departure and where to find me on Signal, Insta and Mastodon, and yanked the ripcord.

It’s transparent at this point. GamerGate, the alt-right, the whole Trumpiss ecosystem is all of a piece. There is no daylight between QAnon and Elon Musk and antivaxxers and the whole miserable miasma. And I am tired of being even tangentially complicit.

I’m down to only about half a dozen people I don’t really have available in another social media. It sucks, because the friends in my phone have been the bulk of my friends in recent years as everyone moves away. And it doesn’t feel good to go back to Insta, even protected by the mobile web interface. But what Twitter brings to the table isn’t worth what it takes off any longer.

It’ll suck, it’ll be difficult, but at some level it also feels like my soul just took a three pound shit. And now we wait to see what happens – because the future survival of Twitter depends on what people are willing to countenance and what comes of their willingness. At this point, though, it’s safe to say it will probably be necessary to destroy Twitter in order to save it.