Both Mastodon and BlueSky have the concept of "self-verification". Rather than trust a central authority to assess your notability and then bless your account (as Twitter used to do), they let anyone self-attest using Domain Verification. What does that mean? You tell the service what your website is. The service gives you a secret code. You upload that secret code onto your website. The service checks the secret code is on the website. If it is, the service says your domain is verified. …
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What does it mean to block someone on a social media site? Way back in the mists of time, we dealt with trolls on Usenet with the almighty PLONK - PLaced On Newsgroup Killfile. It meant your newsreader never downloaded their posts. They could rant at you all day long, and you'd never hear from them. It's what we would nowadays call "Mute". But, whether you're on Usenet or a modern social network, muting someone doesn't actually stop them replying to you. The miscreant can still see your…
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It is sometimes useful to embed the contents from one website into another. For example, you may wish to quote a post from a microblogging site like Twitter, Threads, BlueSky, or Mastodon. All of them offer an "embed" button which will copy a snippet of code for you to paste into your website. Here's how they compare: BSky In my considered opinion, BlueSky is the only modern service which does embedding correctly. The full text is placed in a <blockquote>, with a link back, links to any…
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Vague thoughts as they enter my brainbox. The BlueSky social network has introduced "Reply Gating" - it looks like this: You can write your hot take on Taylor Swift and not be inundated by weirdos replying to you. Nifty! This is nothing new. Twitter has it. Facebook has the concept of "audiences" to restrict who your post is visible to. And, of course, blogging has this! There is a comment form at the bottom of this page - and I moderate it. If you post something stupid, I don't have to…
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One of the reasons I'm still on the original Mastodon.social instance is that I am vain. I joined shortly after the project was announced and, as a consequence, I have a "joined" date of 2016 and a user ID of under 10,000. This doesn't make me an "elder statesman" and is rarely useful beyond bragging rights. If I moved to a different server, my "birthday" would be irrevocably lost 😢 But… what if I moved to a self-hosted Mastodon instance? Why! Then the database would be under my complete cont…
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The inimitable Simon Willison has a brilliant presentation all about managing side projects: It is all good advice. But I gently disagree with the slide which says: Avoid side projects with user accounts If it has user accounts it’s not a side-project, it’s an unpaid job I get the sentiment. Storing passwords securely is hard. Dealing with users changing their names is hard. Updating avatars is hard. GDPR is hard. It's just a lot of pain and suffering. But I still have user accounts on…
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I do not care for the game of Rugby. After many wet and cold days on the school sports field, I had any latent enthusiasm for it beaten out of me. There is nothing you or anyone else can say which will convince me to take an interest in it. You may feel the same way about a specific sport, or the Great British Bake Off, or Linux. That's fine. We're all different. This can be a problem on social media. You might be following someone for their insightful takes on RuPaul's Drag Race but can't…
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About a million years ago, I was discussing the FOAF (Friend of a Friend) ontology with its early proponents. It allowed you to define a machine-readable semantic relationship like "Alice is married to Bill" and "Bill is Carol's child" and "Carol works for David". That sort of thing. At the time, all the FOAF relationships were defined in terms of positive sentiment. There wasn't (and still isn't) a FOAF representation for "divorced" or "estranged" or "fired by". I thought this was a failing.…
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If you hang around on a social network long enough, you'll find the same tropes being repeated again and again. So, I thought I'd document some of the ones that I personally find annoying. This blog post is an extension of my moderately popular Twitter thread - with a bit more detail about why they are irritating. The Thief of Words .social-embed{all:unset;display:block;}.social-embed *…
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Several years ago, I applied for my dream job. Not quite ice-cream tester on the International Space Station, but pretty close. I was astounded to get a first interview, and crushed to flame out at the second round. That's the way it goes sometimes. Better to have tried and failed than never to have tried at all. In the past, that would have been the end of it. I'd have moved on with my life and gradually forgotten about it. But fucking LinkedIn… A few months after the interview, one of my f…
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All humans can be divided in two groups - those that love categorising things, and those that like criticising other people's categorisations. It seems that humans have an in-built desire to put things in firm categories. This causes a great deal of arguments. Let's have an argument today! Here's an excerpt from a recent IOPC press release: Misconduct proceedings to follow social media investigations A total of five police officers from different forces will face misconduct action…
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I received a rather distraught DM from a Twitter friend last week. They were upset that I was following an account which did nothing but spew out racist bile all day long. Did this mean that I endorsed their hateful views. I was confused. I didn't recognise the specific account, and didn't recall seeing any of their tweets - but I was following them. How? Why? Was it a hack? I did a little digging, and finally it twigged... The account belonged to someone I met at an industry event several…
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