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**Mikeal Rogers:** I think that MySpace customizations were kind of like that too, right? You were just customizing your page and then it was like, "Oh, what's this thing?" |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah... Customizing your page is one thing, but you used MySpace not just for customization; you went to your friend's page and you're like "How the heck do they have a gradient background with rounded corners?" and then you had to learn... Or "Does this button resize AND have rounded corners? Are they... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** That said, the reason why we probably don't use MySpace today is because the visual damage that that did to people and the site in general. |
**Alex Sexton:** I mean, that's why MySpace was fun, right? I said it in the chat, but I've actually found that since MySpace died a while ago, the generation of programmers that are coming into jobs and open source projects that I have often are talking about customizing their NeoPets page. I think they actually end u... |
**Rachel White:** Yeah. |
**Alex Sexton:** WordPress is what Adam's saying in the chat... Which I could see. There are one-click WordPress installs and then you get into themes and then you wanna update... I actually think that maybe the fact that a lot of people listen to podcasts and SquareSpace sponsors every single podcast in the entire exi... |
**Rachel White:** I think a lot of the older natural code exploration that people did with MySpace and NeoPets wasn't out of necessarily a desire to learn how to code; it was pretty much more of a necessity for wanting to make something look cooler, and then that just ended up having to also be code... I don't know wha... |
I've never messed around with SquareSpace, so I don't know how specific you can get. I don't know, that's a weird thing. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I think just the act of saying, "I have a website" - not a Facebook profile, not a Twitter profile, not something in a social network, but literally like "This is my domain name" is really far down the path of like "Oh, you're basically gonna start programming pretty soon", just because of where the ... |
**Rachel White:** \[36:33\] There's not really that need of necessity to do it yourself anymore, because so many places have come along to just do it for you. |
**Alex Sexton:** I think that's a more fun way to learn. If instead of MySpace there was like "Here's a hosting platform where you can host a profile that connects with other people's friends" - that's GeoCities WebRings, or whatever, and that was successful, but not as successful as MySpace, right? I think going at it... |
**Rachel White:** Yeah, but I don't think there's that many places that do it anymore. I don't remember seeing any sites recently... You used to be able to just totally customize your own CSS in and drop it into some places. You can't really do that anymore, but I guess -- Erik's saying Tumblr... Tumblr's definitely, I... |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, it's fine... |
**Rachel White:** And a lot of custom Tumblr pages actually evoke those early-mid-2000s design aesthetics, too. |
**Alex Sexton:** Sure. |
**Rachel White:** Maybe I'm just old, but they're also very small type, and the cute little animations and stuff, so it's kind of like how it was however long ago that is now. |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Awesome. Alright, I think we're about to take a break now. When we come back, we'll talk a little bit about Mastodon. |
**Break:** \[38:26\] |
**Mikeal Rogers:** And we're back! Time to talk a little bit about Mastodon, the GNU social-compatible microblogging server. What the hell does that mean? |
**Rachel White:** Servers! Servers! I will tell you what it means. |
**Alex Sexton:** Federated. |
**Rachel White:** Yeah, so Mastodon is a social network, and it is compatible with GNU social, but what it's doing is if you look at it, I think that the UI is very similar to how TweetDeck used to be, so it is definitely trying to be an alternative to Twitter. The cool thing about it and the reason that everybody is s... |
\[40:13\] There are certain quirks to that. The main one is mastodon.social. This is the original one that has been in development for a bit. There's also mastodon.xyz. We'll talk about those two first. |
What they are is separate servers, but they're also separate federations, and the way that I like to compare these federations as a concept is how Star Trek has federations. Basically, there's a greater code of conduct, a greater agreement across the whole entire Mastodon network as a whole. That agreement is pretty mu... |
The main Mastodon social code of conduct actually explicitly says "No nazis" and "No Holocaust denial", no stuff that is against certain laws in Europe, which is "Hey, what place has a ton of nazis and we don't wanna hang out with them? Twitter!" |
So a ton of people have made the jump over to Mastodon this week. The other really great thing is it's open source. It's primarily written in Ruby, the frontend's in JavaScript... There's a ton of different instances now -- there's a Witches team, which is a French base instance that's for people that identify with que... |
The way that the federations work too is you have an account on one federation - I am mastodon.social/oho, but I have a friend on Witches team, and her name is Kelsey; she's witches.team/@kelsey, and I can talk to Kelsey because both of our federations have agreed that "Yes, we have similar values and they're good, so ... |
That being said, Mastodon is young, it is new (kind of a pun)... People are still trying to struggle with moderation, so there are some people that are coming in and are being shitty, as they do on the internet... But one thing that I noticed is everybody is pretty much super nice. Everybody is nice, really encouraging... |
**Alex Sexton:** Via the prediction I'd say that it seems like it will gain some steam, and it may even rule the countryside for a few thousand years, but it will eventually go extinct. \[police siren sound in the background\] |
**Rachel White:** \[43:58\] Oh, these cops are coming for you. \[laughter\] |
**Mikeal Rogers:** That was the fun police. Okay... So the UI looks a lot like TweetDeck, it's very similar to TweetDeck. It seems kind of optimized for power users at this point... |
**Rachel White:** Yeah... There's also though some really great mobile applications for it. I downloaded one for my phone and it works great. That's for iOS... If you go to the main Mastodon repository, there's a whole entire list of apps already. Let's see - there's already apps for Android, and then there's stuff for... |
People are already making tools... Darius (@TinySubversions) made one for helping with OAuth with Mastodon... People are really excited about being able to have their hands in something that they're using as a community, and not have it being controlled by companies. The cost to run a federation is the same cost as it ... |
Right now, I think that they're still trying to figure out the best way to have the main federations, which is .social and .xyz, get other people's instances added into those... It's a whole process, but the issues page of Mastodon has a ton of stuff that you can find; if you're interested in contributing, you don't ne... |
They even tag stuff that's fit for newbies, which I think is really great. I don't know, I hope it succeeds... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** It looks interesting. There's been a lot of attempts at doing a federated social thing, every time people get upset at Twitter, or whatever. |
**Rachel White:** Well, I think that the thing is this has been being developed for a while, though. I don't know how long the GNU social has been working -- I guess I could google it, or bing it... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** It's also built on a lot of APIs that they've been trying to do forever, like the Open Social APIs, the PubSubHubbub stuff, all of which people have been developing for some of these coming on ten years now... And a lot of the products that originally -- those were being used and didn't really take o... |
One of the annoying things about federation though is just... I wanna subscribe to Nolan Lawson, I don't wanna subscribe to NolanLawson @ whatever random instance that he happened to do. And how do I know that that's the right Nolan Lawson and it's not the Nolan Lawson at some other of those that is trying to be with t... |
**Rachel White:** True. |
**Alex Sexton:** Well, you know because he's verified, his GPG private key, against other online assets. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** So you just lost like 99% if all users of the internet... \[laughs\] |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah... So it's called -- what is the... Web of Trust? Circle of Trust? Web of Trust. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Web of Trust... |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, I honestly think Web of Trust stuff is GNU's GPG's favorite term to throw around, but I think that works a lot in the favor of one of these federated networks, and it works for the nine people who use GPG key servers as well. |
\[47:59\] If you've used Keybase, that's a good example of knowing that Nolan Lawson is really -- if you could verify yourself on Keybase, along with on Mastodon... Maybe they should implement that. Then you could know that this was verifiably, provably via math the correct Nolan Lawson. Does that make sense? |
**Rachel White:** Sort of... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, enough. |
**Rachel White:** Well, one thing that I do wanna point out that I think is important is if -- I don't think that Mastodon is trying to be a Twitter replacement. I think that Mastodon is filling a void that a lot of people need. They don't want to interact with people that think trolling is fun. The explicit, very stri... |
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