Social Media – Terence Eden’s Blog

Adding "Log In With Mastodon" to Auth0

@edent — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 12:34:48 +0000

I use Auth0 to provide social logins for the OpenBenches website. I don't want to deal with creating user accounts, managing passwords, or anything like that, so Auth0 is perfect for my needs.

There are a wide range of social media logins provided by Auth0 - including the usual suspects like Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, Discord, etc. Sadly, there's no support for Mastodon⁰.

All is not lost though. The Auth0 documentation says:

However, you can use Auth0’s Connections API to add any OAuth2 Authorization Server as an identity provider.

You can manually add a single Mastodon instance, but that doesn't work with the decentralised nature of the Fediverse. Instead, I've come up with a manual solution which works with any Mastodon server!

Background

Every Mastodon¹ server is independent. I have an account on mastodon.social you have an account on whatever.chaos. They are separate servers, albeit running similar software. A generic authenticator needs to work with all these servers. There's no point only allowing log ins from a single server.

Fortuitously, Mastodon allows app developers to automatically create new apps. A few simple lines of code and you will have an API key suitable for read-only access to that server. You can read how to instantly create Mastodon API keys or you can steal my PHP code.

User Experience

The user clicks the sign-in button on OpenBenches. They're taken to the Auth0 social login screen:

The user clicks on Mastodon. This is where Auth0's involvement ends!

The user is asked to provide the URl of their instance:

In the background, my server contacts the Mastodon instance and creates a read-only API key.

The user is asked to sign in to Mastodon.

The user is asked to authorise read-only access.

The user is now signed in and OpenBenches can retrieve their name, avatar image, and other useful information. Hurrah!

Auth0

Once you have created a service to generate API keys, it will need to run on a publicly accessible web server. For example https://example.com/mastodon_login.

Here's what you need to do within your Auth0 tennant:

Authentication → Social → Create Connection
At the bottom, choose "Create Custom".
Choose "Authentication" only.
Give your connection a name. This will be visible to users.
"Authorization URL" and "Token URL" have the same value - the URl of your service.
"Client ID" is only visible to you.
"Client Secret" any random password; it won't be used for anything.
Leave everything else in the default state.

It should look something like this:

Click the "Create" button and you're (almost) done.

Auth0 Icon

You will need to add a custom icon to the social integration. Annoyingly, there's no way to do it through the web interface, so follow that guide to use the command line.

Done!

I'll admit, this isn't the most straightforward thing to implement. Auth0 could make this easier - but it would still rely on users knowing the URl of their home instance.

That said, the Mastodon API is a delight to work with and the read-only permissions reduce risk for all parties.

Auth0 did blog about Mastodon a few years ago but never bothered implementing it! ↩︎
I do mean Mastodon; not the wider Fediverse. This only works with sites which have implemented Mastodon's APIs. ↩︎

Social Media Payments and Perverse Incentives

@edent — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 12:34:23 +0000

At the recent "Protocols for Publishers" event, a group of us were talking about news paywalls, social media promotion, and the embarrassment of having to ask for money.

What if, we said, you could tip a journalist directly on social media? Or reward your favourite creator without leaving the platform? Or just say thanks by buying someone a pint?

Here's a trivial mock-up:

Of course, this hides a ton of complexity. Does it show your local currency symbol? Does the platform take a cut or does it just pass you to the poster's preferred platform? Do users want to be able to tip as well as / instead of reposting and favouriting?

But I think the real problem is the perverse incentives it creates. We already know that relentless A|B testing of monetisation strategies leads to homogeneity and outrage farming. Every YouTuber has the same style of promotional thumbnail. Rage-baiters on Twitter know what drives the algorithm and pump out unending slurry.

Even if we ignore those who want to burn the world, content stealers like @CUTE_PUPP1E5 grab all the content they can and rip-off original creators. At the moment that's merely annoying, but monetisation means a strong incentive to steal content.

When people inevitably get scammed, would that damage the social media platform? Would promoting a payment link lead to liability? Now that money is involved, does that make hacking more attractive?

And yet… Accounts add payment links to their profiles all the time. Lots of accounts regularly ask for donor and sponsors. GitHub sponsors exist and I don't see evidence of people impersonating big projects and snaffling funds.

It is somewhat common for platforms to pay for publishers to be on their site. If you're starting up a new service then you need to give people an incentive to be there. That might be as a payer or receiver.

Personally, I'd love a frictionless way to throw a quid to a helpful blog post, or effortlessly donate to a poster who has made me laugh. Selfishly, I'd like it if people paid me for my Open Source or (micro)blogging.

I don't know whether Mastodon or BlueSky will ever have a payments button - and I have no influence on their decision-making process - but I'd sure like to see them experiement.

Or, feel free to send me a tip!

You did no fact checking, and I must scream

@edent — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 11:34:23 +0000

I'm neither a journalist nor a professional fact checker but, the thing is, it's has never been easier to check basic facts. Yeah, sure, there's a world of misinformation out there, but it doesn't take much effort to determine if something is likely to be true.

There are brilliant tools like reverse Image Search which give you a good indicator of when an image first appeared on the web, and whether it was published by a reputable source.

You can use Google Books to check whether a quote is true.

You can use social-media searches to easily check the origin of memes.

There are vast archives of printed material to help you.

The World Wide Web has a million sites which allow you to cross-reference any citations to see if they're spurious.

Now, perhaps all that is a bit too much effort for someone casually doomscrolling and hitting "repost" for an instant dopamine hit. But it shouldn't be. And it certainly shouldn't be for people who write for trusted sources like newspapers.

Recently, the beloved actor Patricia Routledge died. Several newspapers reposted a piece of viral slop which I had debunked a month previously. Let's go through the piece and see just how easy it is to prove false.

Here's that "viral" story. I've kept to the parts which contain easily verifiable / falsifiable claims.

Wikpedia says that her birthday was 17 February 1929. She would have turned 95 in 2024.

Open up your calendar app. Scroll back to February 2024. What date was 17 February 2024? Saturday. Not Monday.

Now, OK, maybe at 95 she's forgotten her birthday. What else does the rest of the piece say?

In 1968, Patricia Routledge won Best Actress (Musical) at the Tony Awards - she was 39. I don't know if I'd consider appearing on Broadway as provincial stages.

Keeping Up Appearances was first broadcast in 1990. Patricia was around 60, not 50, when she was cast.

While she may have thought it would only be a small series - even though it was by the creator of Open All Hours and Last of the Summer Wine - there's no way that being the lead character could be described as a "small part". She wasn't a breakout character - she was the star.

Wikipedia isn't always accurate, but it does list lots of her stage work. She was working steadily on stage from 1999 - when she hit 70 - but none of it Shakespeare.

I was able to do that fact checking in 10 minutes while laying in bed waiting for the bathroom to become free. It wasn't onerous. It didn't require subscriptions to professional journals. I didn't need a team of fact-checkers. It took a bit of web-sleuthing and, dare I say it, a smidgen of common sense.

And yet, a couple of newspapers ran with this utter drivel as though it were the truth. The Independent published it as part of their tribute - although they took the piece down after I emailed them. Similarly The Express ran it without any basic fact-checking (and didn't take it down after being contacted).

Both of them say their primary source is the "Jay Speak" blog. There's nothing on that blog post to say that the author interviewed Patricia Routledge. A quick check of the other posts on the site don't make it obvious that it is a reputable source of exclusive interviews with notable actors.

The date on that blog post is August 2nd, 2025. Is there anything earlier? Typing a few of the phrases into a search engine found a bunch of posts which pre-date it. The earliest I can find was this Instagram post and this Facebook post both from the 24th of July - a week early than the Jay Speaks post.

To be clear, I don't think Jay Speaks was deliberately trying to fool journalists or hoax anyone. They simply saw an interesting looking post and re-shared it. I also suspect the Facebook and Instagram posts were copied from other sources - but I've been unable to find anything definitive.

I would expect that professional journalists at well-established newspapers to be able to call an actor's agent to fact-check a piece before running it. If they can't, I would have thought they'd do a cursory fact check.

But, no. I presume the rush to publish is so great that it over-rides any sense of whether a piece should be accurate.

This is irresponsible. Last week saw the BBC air an outright lie on Have I Got News For You. A professional TV company, with a budget for lawyers, fact checkers, and researchers - and they just broadcast easily disproven lies. Why? Maybe hubris, maybe laziness, maybe deliberate rabble-rousing.

The media have comprehensively failed us. They will repeat any tawdry nonsense as long as it keeps people clicking. It's up to us to defend ourselves and our friends against this unending tsunami of low-grade slurry.

I hope I've demonstrated that it takes almost no effort to perform a basic fact check. It isn't a professional skill. It doesn't require anything more than an Internet connection and a curious mind. If you see something online, take a moment to check it before sharing it.

Stopping misinformation starts with you.

A few thoughts on domain verification for social media

@edent — Sun, 01 Dec 2024 12:34:24 +0000

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 Verification⁰.

What does that mean?

You tell the service what your website is.
The service gives you a secret code¹.
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.

On Mastodon, that gives you a green tick next to your link. On BlueSky, it gives you the ability to change your username to your website's name.

This is reasonably strong proof that you are the owner of that website. I don't have the ability to add the secret file I've been given to bbc.co.uk, so I cannot impersonate them.

But it isn't all sunshine and roses. There are some important issues with this process.

Revocation and Revalidation

Let's say an employee has validated alice.big_company.com - what happens when Alice leaves²?

Well, you just delete the secret code from your website, right?

In theory yes. But in practice, no.

From BlueSky:

We're working on adding the ability to revalidate these handles periodically.

And Mastodon:

Verified links are currently verified at each time the profile is updated, but they will only be verified once, when initially entered.

So, at the moment, there is a risk that revalidation isn't completed and revocation never happens³. Accounts which were once trusted may stay trusted, even when they're no longer trustworthy.

Copy Cat Domains

You're chatting with your credit card company's social media account. You see that they've verified the domain.

Wait?! Are they really mastercrrd.info ✅?

There are several practical attacks against humans trying to validate a domain name. A simple misspelling is easy to overlook. There are thousands of top level domains, and you may not be sure if your bank uses .com, .uk, .tech, or something else. It only costs a few quid for an attacker to buy a domain which contains a politician's name.

International domain names mean that homograph attacks are possible.

Humans aren't very clever

Recently, several prominent journalists on BlueSky embarrassed themselves by pronouncing fake accounts to be real. The journalists - with all their resources and contacts - didn't bother to actually verify if the person who registered @KemiBadenoch was really the Leader of the Opposition.

They could have checked her website to see if it linked to the new account. They could have rung up the Tory press office. They could have checked to see if she have verified her account. Or they could have done a dozen other things to verify the facts before posting. They didn't.

These aren't random users blindly reposting. These are highly educated, thoroughly trained fact-finders. Their mission is accuracy and their livelihood depends on being able to report the truth. And yet they just assumed that no one would lie on the Internet.

Would a journalist be able to spot that tailer-swift.fartotron.xyz was an impersonator? I highly doubt it⁴.

Hacks Happen

Even when Twitter was validating celebrities correctly, it didn't stop the accounts getting hacked.

An attacker might compromise your social media account or your domain name registrar.

Just because an account and domain appear verified, it doesn't mean they're legitimate. Is that politician you follow really posting about dietary supplements?

It might be too difficult for large organisation

I've written An Easy Guide To BlueSky Verification. It can be as simple as uploading a single file to your website. Although I have some sympathy for claims that managing the process for hundreds of employees might be difficult.

Based on my calculations around 5% of active BlueSky users have verified their domain.

The alternative isn't much better

Verification is hard. Can an over-worked verification team spot that I've photoshopped a passport so that it looks like someone else's?

There are hundred of famous people called John Williams - which one do you verify?

Also, what are you verifying? In my post on Rethinking Twitter Verification, I pointed out that the ambiguity of verification leads to some weird and non-obvious outcomes.

Final thoughts

There are no simple technological fixes to complex social issues.

But I'm naïve enough to believe that, with time, we can train people to be better at assessing the information they are given.

It is a lot more complicated than that - as per this essay by Christine Lemmer-Webber. ↩︎
Secret in the sense that they only generate it for you. It isn't private. Nothing bad will happen if other people see it. ↩︎
Let's assume she's naughty and doesn't remove the validation herself from her profile. ↩︎
It appears that it takes BlueSky around 2 hour to detect and revoke verification. ↩︎
Prove me wrong. Seriously. So many journalists seem utterly credulous. ↩︎

Social Media Blocking Has Always Been A Lie

@edent — Tue, 24 Sep 2024 11:34:48 +0000

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 posts, interact with them, quote them. And everyone on that service can see their abuse. Perhaps they will also join in?

Most modern social networks now have the concept of "Block". When Alice blocks Bob, it means Bob cannot see Alice's posts. The service doesn't deliver her content to him. If he goes looking, he can't find it. She is invisible to him.

Except, of course, that's a lie. If Bob logs out of his account, he can see Alice's public content. If he logs into an alternative account, he isn't blocked.

The block is a social signal backed up with mild technical restrictions.

What do I mean by that? Ordinarily, you will have no idea that you have been blocked by someone. They will simply vanish from your screens. You do not receive an alert that you've been blocked. Technical restrictions mean you won't see their posts, nor replies to them. The only way you might know is if you deliberately look for the person blocking you.

Seeing that you have been blocked is a "social signal". It lets you know that your behaviour was unwanted, or that your contributions weren't valued, or that someone just doesn't like you. For most people, that sort of chastisement probably induces a little shame or grief. For others, it is enraging.

Again, it isn't impossible for a blocked user to see content - but technical restrictions means it takes effort. And, it turns out, for all but the most obsessive abusers - a mild bit of UI friction is all that it takes for them to stop.

On a centralised social media platform, like Twitter and Facebook, your blocks are private. The only people who know you have blocked Taylor Swift are you, the platform, and T-Swizzle herself.

On decentralised social media platforms, it is more complicated.

Mastodon / ActivityPub lets you block a user. In doing so, you have to tell that user's server that you don't want them seeing your messages. That means your server knows about the block, their server know, and the user knows. But, crucially, there's nothing to stop a malicious server ignoring your wishes. While your server can mute all the interactions from them, there are only weak technological restrictions on their behaviour.

BlueSky / AT Protocol takes a different (and more worrying) approach. BlueSky tells everyone about your blocks. If Alice blocks Bob - the system lets everyone know. This means that if Bob starts replying to your posts, other clients will know to ignore his interactions with you. I've written more about the dangers of public blocklists over on BSky.

But, crucially, none of these systems actually block users. This isn't like that Black Mirror episode where people are literally blurred out from your eyeballs.

In all cases, a user can log out and see your public posts. They can sign in with an alternative account. And, in the case of decentralised social media, they can choose to ignore the technological restrictions you impose.

Social networks have a responsibility to keep their users safe. That means having enough friction to prevent casual abuse.

But blocking is only a social signal. That's all it ever has been. It is a boop on the nose with a rolled up newspaper. It is a message to tell someone that they might want to adjust their attitude.

You should block - and block often. You should feel empowered to curate an environment that is safe for you. But you should also understand the limitations of the technical controls which underpin these social signals.

Comparing Embeds from Short-Form Social Media Sites

@edent — Mon, 02 Sep 2024 11:34:55 +0000

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

, with a link back, links to any attached content, and the datetime of the post. It is then progressively enhanced with JS to show the full content:
   This is a test to compare how BSky, Mastodon, Twitter, and Threads do HTML embeds.
      😊
      example.com
      👻
      #Testing

      

      [image or embed]
   
   — Terence Eden (@edent.tel) 
   Aug 19, 2024 at 22:23
It might be nice to have a smidge more semantics in there - but the overall experience is good. Hashtags, links, and user mentions could probably be linked. If the JS doesn't load, the text and essential information is available.

Mastodon

I'm not a fan of the Mastodon embed. It's an and nothing else. If the service goes down, the content of the message isn't preserved.
Mastodon's position is - reasonably - that authors can edit and delete their posts. Sites shouldn't hold on to outdated or destroyed data.

Note, some Mastodon sites present an embed button even if they have a CSP which prevents cross-site embedding.

Threads

Easily the worst experience. All you get is an of the logo, the name of the person who posted, and a link back to the content. All mixed in to some
soup.
 
    
      
          
            
          
         
            Post by @_edent_
          
          
            View on Threads
         
      
   
Twitter

Twitter is adequate. The full text is preserved in the blockquote, it looks like media is linked to, but there's not much else.
   I've unfollowed everyone I once knew.


   If you're still following me here, please don't. There are other social networks which aren't run by a race-baiter.


   Come join us.


   Twitter was lovely for a while. But it is time to leave for good.


   If not now, then when?— Terence Eden is on Mastodon (@edent) 
   August 6, 2024

 
What about Open Graph Protocol?

I've previously written about the moribund Open Graph Protocol standard. All of the sites except Twitter provide some of the contents of the post in the elements of the page. That can be used to scrape the contents of the post, but it is a bit fiddly.

What's The User Need?

There is an inherent tension here. Different users have different needs, and there's no single right way of embedding.

Social media sites want their look-and-feel preserved - hence the need for progressive enhancement or iframes. They also often want to track users across the web.

Embedding websites want the content preserved if the original disappears. They also want something which looks recognisably like it comes from the social media site.

Users of social media sites want their edits and updates to be shown on the sites which are embedding them. They may also want their content removed from embedding sites when it is deleted.

Readers want to see the content - and they may not want their reading habits tracked by a social media site.

So, what to do?

Personally, I think BlueSky's approach is closest to optimal. Embed the full content, including media, and then enhance.

The ideal, I think, is to make a fully semantic HTML embed which can either have its own stylesheet and / or be progressively enhanced with a JavaScript.

Something like this:
    
        
            
            
                Full Username
                @username
            
        
        
    
    
        Text
         
    
    
        
            ❤️ 20
            💬 5
            🔁 71
            17:51 - Fri 09 August 2024
        
    
That ensures a full and semantic version of the post is included - even if the original site is unavailable or the user doesn't have JavaScript. If they do have JavaScript, it can be upgraded to the latest version of the post and the latest look & feel.

Thoughts?

Who can reply?

@edent — Tue, 25 Jun 2024 11:34:08 +0000

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 subject my audience to your inanities. I can (and do) block users from commenting.

ActivityPub doesn't have this (yet). It's much more like a public mailing list. I can block or mute you - which stops me from seeing your abuse - but doesn't stop anyone else from seeing it.

Should ActivityPub have something similar? Yeah, I reckon so. I'd like to be able to say "Anyone I know want to go to the pub tonight" and only have mutuals reply. I want to prune away spam or repetitive replies. It would be helpful to have a conversation in public that other people can't interrupt.

The UI would be complex. And the social model needs a bit of work. And there are some technical challenges around syndicating which replies should be included.

But, ultimately, social media should respond to the needs of its users.

On The Fediverse, No One Knows You're A Liar

@edent — Wed, 30 Aug 2023 11:34:02 +0000

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 10,000⁰. 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 control and I could put whatever data I wanted in there. I could even lie about things!

Surely no one would be that silly though?

The other day I was chatting with someone whose follower count was so high that it temporarily broke my client.

To be clear, the account @admin@mastodon.adtension.com is being deliberately provocative here. I don't think that they expect anyone to believe that they have more followers than the entirety of humanity, nor that they started using Mastodon last century.

This isn't a problem limited to Mastodon and ActivityPub. Twitter controls its own database and could, if it wanted to, inflate follower numbers for insecure people.

And, before you get too excited, this isn't a usecase for BlockChain! In theory, multiple servers could write statistics to a ledger (1,000 people on example.social follow @edent@whatever.social) but they have no way of verifying each others' statistics. So a determined user could have multiple fake instances writing fake data to the chain.

Chasing status is a mug's game. Anyone can hire a sports car for the afternoon and rent a fancy suit - that doesn't mean they're a celebrity. Similarly, anyone can lie on the Fediverse and make you believe they're a social media superstar.

Don't believe the hype!

Anyone else remember Slashdot? ↩︎

You can have user accounts without needing to manage user accounts

@edent — Tue, 13 Dec 2022 12:34:29 +0000

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 one of my side projects while avoiding all those issues. Here's how it works on OpenBenches.

Use Auth0

The Auth0 service is a multi-vendor OAuth provider. That means I can offer a button which "login" which leads to this screen:

Auth0 has around 60 different social login providers. I picked the ones which best suited my users' demographic.

So the user hits "Sign In With Twitter⁰", gives Twitter their username, password, blood sample, and 2FA token. Twitter gives OpenBenches an authentication token with read only access.

This is important. Even if I were hacked and the tokens stolen, an attacker wouldn't be able to alter the user's account on a different platform.

But, as it is, I don't store the token. So it can't be stolen.

Only store the essentials

Here's the database which contains my user "accounts":

CREATE TABLE `users` (
  `userID` bigint(20) NOT NULL,
  `provider` varchar(64) COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci NOT NULL,
  `providerID` varchar(64) COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci NOT NULL,
  `name` varchar(128) COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci NOT NULL
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8mb4 COLLATE=utf8mb4_unicode_ci;

The userID is just an internally-used key which is incremented. I guess it could be a GUID or something.

The provider is a string like twitter or facebook or linkedin etc.

The providerID is the publicly available ID assigned by the social login service. Twitter gives everyone a number, LinkedIn gives everyone a random string, etc.

The name is the string that the provider calls you. My Twitter name is @edent and my LinkedIn name is Thought Leader Terence Eden.

That's it! I don't store any access tokens. I don't store a date of birth. I don't store any data unnecessary to running my project.

What about updates?

I don't store URls to avatar images. Instead, I use Cloudinary's Social Avatar service. That's usually as simple as calling res.cloudinary.com/demo/image/twitter/1330457336.jpg - I have to fuss around a little for GitHub and Facebook. So as soon as the user changes their avatar with their provider, it changes on my site.

Sometimes people change their names. Every time they log in to OpenBenches, I check to see if their name has changed - and update it if it has.

Most services don't let you change your internal ID. So that's fixed.

Where it goes wrong

It isn't all sunshine and roses though. Here are two things which might give you cause for concern.

What if a user wants to merge their accounts? On OpenBenches we sometimes get users who set up two accounts - and then want data from each of them merged. So far, my answer has just been "no".

What if a user wants to delete their account? Well, they can delete it with Twitter or whoever. If someone asked, I'd probably delete their username from the table. But it hasn't happened yet.

Should you do this?

I'm not your real dad. It isn't my job to tell you how to live your life or set up your side projects.

Generally speaking, user accounts are bad news. We resisted having them on OpenBenches for the longest time - people were anonymous. But we had lots of users who wanted a leader board so they could show off how many benches they had uploaded. The only way we could build that is with user accounts. So we added it. You can see the Leader Board in action.

Building side projects can be a bit lonely. So it is sometimes nice to develop a community of people who want to use your stuff.

This blog post was written before Alan turned off the 2FA from Twitter. Then turned it back on. Then fired everyone. Then rehired them. Then whined about how much food they ate. Anyway, I've left Twitter. Come join me on Mastodon! ↩︎

A Quick Guide to Filters on Mastodon

@edent — Fri, 02 Dec 2022 12:34:16 +0000

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 be bothered with their opinions about football. In my ideal social network that wouldn't be a problem - people would post to "Channels" which you could subscribe to. We're not there yet, so we have to do with keyword filtering.

Here's a quick guide to setting up a filter on the Mastodon social network.

Each Mastodon instance has a different domain name, but the filter section is usually in /filters - if in doubt, click the ⚙ icon to go to your settings. From there, you can create a new filter. The page is a bit complex, so let me explain it to you.

Title - this is useful for remembering why you filtered something. It can optionally show up when a post is filtered.
Expire after - do you just want to mute "Eurovision" for only an hour or forever? Different servers may allow for more settings.
Filter contexts - you might want to mute the phrase "Papa Smurf" unless someone mentions it to you directly.
Filter action - you can choose to never see the filtered post, or have the filter's title displayed. For example, this is what it looks like when a sports message is filtered for me:
Keyword or phrase - you might want to mute a hashtag like "#rugby" or a phrase like "Linux sucks".
- The "Whole Word" option is interesting. If you filter "Linux" and select "Whole Word" it will only filter posts containing "Linux" - but won't filter out "Linuxy" or "Linuxs" etc. If you uncheck "Whole Word" it will filter out any post which has the filter as a sub-string.

Hit the "Save Changes" button and your filter will apply immediately.

You can have as many filters as you like. And you can edit or delete them easily.

I use mine to filter out sport. And Wordle. And "Fwd: FWD: fwd: FWD: LOL!". And a few other things which other people love to post and I don't enjoy reading.

There's nothing wrong with filter-bubbles.

Why is there no Semantic Ontology of Sentiment in Academic Citations?

@edent — Sun, 10 Jul 2022 11:34:46 +0000

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. I understand why we all might want to play nice on the Internet. But sometimes it is useful to know about "negative" relationships.

For example, I want to organise a seating plan for my wedding - it's helpful to know that Alice and Bill divorced and can't be on the same table, Carol doesn't talk to David. Bill is in a relationship with David and wants to keep it secret. Ellen would like to know Alice better. That sort of thing.

More modern versions of FOAF have properties like enemyOf and wouldLikeToKnow. Which I think makes a great deal of sense.

And so we come to Academic Citations.

Using Google Scholar (or any other knowledge graph) I can find just about any academic paper. More importantly, it lets me see every paper which references that paper.

Great! I can see if something has been cited lots of times, or very few times. That gives me a weak signal about its "importance".

But it tells me nothing about the sentiment of those citations.

Suppose I've just read (Smith, 2015) and I want to know whether the consensus is that the paper is a work of genius or absolute horseshit. What are my options? I can find all the citations of it, then manually read each one to determine whether the author thinks Smith is off their rocker or not.

Wikidata has support for this. The Cites Work property can have roles like "objection" and "endorsement"

This means, in theory, someone could build a knowledge graph which says "Smith's argument rests on Jones' paper, but Xi's paper and Zhang's paper both object to Jones. Hook disagrees with Zhang's analysis, but these 500 papers disagree with Hook."

Why is this important

One problem that modern social media has is that its algorithms have no knowledge of sentiment. Whether you share a cute kitten video to make your friends smile or share a hateful message by a bigot in order to whip up a frenzy against them - the algorithm sees the same signal; +1.

This means the outrage economy grows quickly. All "shares" are seen as positive sentiment. The algorithm sees lots of shares, interprets that a positive signal, and then further promotes the content - or similar content. There is very little way that a social network can filter content by "agrees with" or "disagrees with".

Things like Facebook attempt to map sentiment with a series of emoji.

In theory, you could tell Facebook not to show you posts which have more than 10% of anger reactions. Or only show you posts with positive sentiment. I say "in theory" because Facebook profits off your rage, so has no interest in helping you moderate your emotions.

Popping back to academia for a moment. I recently read a paper that I disagreed with. I wanted to know if I was alone in my objection. This is currently no way for me to find all the citations which also disagree with the paper.

Why this will never happen

The first thing that stops this is that it is a lot of extra work for a human to perform. With hundreds of citations per paper, it would be a massive burden to categorise every single paper mentioned in passing. Most academics can't even be bothered to write alt-text for their images, so any extra labour is likely to be resisted.

The second problem is that sentiment is hard! Can it be boiled down to just "agrees with" and "disagrees with"? What about "Agrees with methodology but not conclusion" or "Disagrees with some definitions but supports others"? There are hundreds of different sentiments. Even just positive and negative probably need degrees of strength associated with them.

In the glorious future where DEEP AI and MACHINE CLEVERNESS rules, it might be possible for a computer to read an academic paper and determine whether it concurs with the papers referenced therein.

Perhaps we need an army of (paid?) dogsbodies to manually go through every paper ever published and assess the sentiment behind each citation?

But, for now, we have to make do with weak signals and uncertain sentiment.

Towards a Taxonomy of Twitter Tropes

@edent — Wed, 23 Mar 2022 12:34:19 +0000

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

Twitter is an Alternate Reality Game where players get points based on how many likes, retweets, and comments they get. Thankfully, there's no monetary reward (yet) for "doing numbers". Remember when you were a teenager and you heard a stand-up comedian telling jokes, and then you passed off their words as your own in the playground? Yeah, that's all that's happening here.

The Quote Grabber

Similar to the above. Twitter gives users the ability to "quote tweet" - which embeds the original text in your comment. The above person wants to give credit to the author - which is nice - but doesn't actually want the author to see or receive any of that interaction. Sometimes that's sensible - if you don't want to encourage abuse. But all it does is add a little friction to people who do want to engage.

The Obscurer

There are loads of "big" accounts which gained their following by ripping off others. It's usually easy to find the originator of a funny photo, video, or meme. All this person is doing is (obliquely) claiming the prize for someone else's hard work.

The Troll

Back in the day, the saying was "don't feed the trolls". Sadly, Twitter rewards any engagement - be it positive or negative. So people write deliberately incendiary messages in the hope that you'll spread their poison. And people fall for it every time.

The Ghost Writer

It is public knowledge that some accounts hire funny people to post on their behalf. Perhaps that's acceptable when it is obviously a marketing account. But there's an unwritten expectation that people post for themselves on their personal account. That dude you think is funny is just using a bunch of writers who are tasked with increasing engagement. There's no authenticity. It's just turning Twitter in to pay-to-win ARG.

The Branter

Ugh! Quirky brands can piss right off. Perhaps it was funny, once, when a couple of brands spontaneously started shit-talking each other. But now it is about as innovative and entertaining as any "word from our sponsors".

The Lack of Due Diligence

This is becoming more unbearable during the war in Ukraine. A seemingly sensible and sober journalist will find an outrageous Tweet claiming to be a "deep source" and treat it as though it were gospel. All notion of critically investigating sources goes out of the window in the race to be "first" with breaking news.

The "Journalist"

News aggregator accounts are nothing new. But there's a pernicious type of Tweeter who screams "THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA AREN'T COVERING THIS!" while linking to a two-day old story. These sort of accounts add no real value to your experience - but they give you a fake sense of urgency and they tickle that part of your brain which craves new and/or secret information. Just follow a news outlet directly.

The Bias Confirmation Engine

This is one of the few Tweets where I had a specific person in mind! There's a type of account which posts fan fiction about current events. Utterly made-up stories about people from "the other side" of a debate. All it does is make you feel smug and secure that the people with a different viewpoint are bad. No proof is ever offered, just a long stream of unverifiable annecdata.

The "helper"

Lots of people disagree with me on this one! Personally, I see it as a form of pollution, at worst, and virtue hunting at best. Every time you share something false, outdated, or irrelevant you are decreasing the signal-to-noise ratio of useful information.

The Holier-Than-Thou User

It me! Using a social network effectively is a skill. Understanding complex media is a skill. These skills take time to learn, and there are very few teachers. Media literacy is a critical part of interacting with the world and there are very few resources to help people.

That was the end of the original thread - but I couldn't resist adding a few more.

The Desperate For Attention

As I've said, Twitter is an ARG where the score is based on interactions. Posting "Cats are better than dogs. RT if you agree!!!" or "Who thinks sports stars should set a good example to kids?" is a cheap and lazy way to gain interaction. Shortly after your 30th birthday, you'll find yourself in a pub saying "who remembers ?" as a quick way to get a conversation started. Happens to us all!

The Mansplainer

I've moaned about this guy before! Men - and it is usually men - seem to think any question is directed to them. They are physically incapable of seeing a question-mark without taking it personally. It is downright disrespectful to assume the person asking the question hasn't done a cursory Google. And it's even more infuriating when you blunder in with your unfounded speculation. If you don't know the answer - don't engage.

And on and on…

In truth, I could have added a dozen more of these. And, also in the spirit of truth, I'm sure I'm guilty of most of them.

I'll reiterate - social media is a game and that means there will be people who will use all sorts of tricks to get the highest score. Part of your role in this game is to ensure that you don't reward the grifters, scammers, cheaters, and grinders.

Spend your attention wisely and - as ever - play nicely.

The existential terror of LinkedIn

@edent — Tue, 15 Feb 2022 12:34:24 +0000

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 former colleagues posted an update saying how delighted and excited they were to be starting a new role as - you guessed it - my dream job.

Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies. It is doubly worse when they succeed at something you've failed at.

For the last few years, I've had to put up with their smug grinning face dropping in to my feed - explaining how brilliantly the job is going, and what a difference they're making to the world. To be absolutely clear - I hold no personal grudge against them. They really are well suited to the rôle. Would I have been better? I obviously wasn't as impressive at interview but, ultimately, it doesn't matter.

I know the job isn't perfect - they've ranted enough on Facebook to convince me I probably wouldn't have enjoyed it.

I can't imagine what it is like to be, say, an actor - and see your dream job go to some talentless hack. Or to be in the running for CEO - only to lose out to someone who crushes it quarter after quarter. Is it better to see your friends succeed where you failed? Or better to indulge in schadenfreude when they fail?

For most of us, the jobs we fail to get slowly fade from our memory. That's the way it should be. But there's no escaping the viral poison that is the LinkedIn mindfuck.

I know the obvious thing is to stop visiting LinkedIn. But then, how would my my friends know how well I was doing at the jobs they wanted?

What is "Social Media"?

@edent — Sun, 31 Oct 2021 12:34:56 +0000

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 after two separate investigations by the Independent Office for Police Conduct into social media messages …

… we looked at allegations that seven officers from several forces breached standards of professional behaviour when they used the Signal messaging platform to share information …

The IOPC is continuing to investigate the conduct of five officers … who allegedly sent discriminatory messages as part of a WhatsApp group …

Independent Office for Police Conduct

(Emphasis added.)

The first thing to note is that this discussion of what counts as Social Media is utterly trivial compared to the matters being discussed by the IOPC. Please take a moment to think about how you can tackle sexist and abusive behaviour.

When I read the headline, I automatically thought the officers had been accused of sharing things publicly. But that doesn't seem to be the case.

Are Signal and WhatsApp forms of Social Media? Let's see what people on the Social Media platform of Twitter have to say:

My instinct was to say that they are not Social Media. One-to-one messaging may count as socialising, but it isn't SM!

But, of course, all those private messaging platforms have a group chat function. Is a family chat on Signal part of SM? What about organising your pub quiz team on WhatsApp? They are, in a sense, private. You have to be invited to join.

Just like some of the groups on Facebook. The world's biggest social media platform…

What about Telegram? They have thousands of open groups anyone can join.

Argh! This is all so confusing!

Let's take a step back and see what we mean by "media" - without the social.

TV, magazines, newspapers, radio. They're a monologue. A team of professionals create a message and then broadcast it. There's no right of reply. There is a high barrier to entry.

The letters section in a newspaper is an early form of Social Media - but even that is highly curated.

Social Media - newsgroups, blogs, email lists - are a dialogue. Or perhaps a polylogue. Multiple people - often amateurs - publish their messages and replies. There is little to no moderation. There are few barriers to entry.

Early email lists are a good example of this. Archived on the web so anyone can read. Conversations are not curated. Anyone can join in.

I think what's tripping me up is that I expect Social Media to be public. Anyone can read a newsgroup or blog. Anyone can comment or reply.

But private groups - on any platform - don't fit my woolly definition of what I think "media" is.

Twitter is social media. Twitter Direct messages are not.

Telegram chats are not social media. Telegram groups are.

Public Slack channels are social media. Private work groups are not.

Wikipedia is not social media. The discussion pages are.

Does that make sense?

As I said at the start - this is a trivial discussion. I don't say this to cast aspersions on the ongoing investigations. I'm just curious as to what systems - or facets of systems - feel like social media.

The alleged behaviour of these officers is wrong. It would be wrong if it were via email, Facebook Messenger, or in-person locker-room chat. But, what intrigues me is how we instinctively categorise things - and the consequences that has on our discourse. Would your first reaction to the above article have been different if the headline had said "an investigation into private messages"?

The language we use shapes the opinions of those around us. I think it is helpful to be as precise as possible when discussing contentious issues.

The follow-but-mute antipattern

@edent — Wed, 02 Jun 2021 11:20:46 +0000

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 years ago. In a fit of mutual back-slapping, we'd followed each other on Twitter. It quickly became apparent that he only ever tweeted about his beloved football team. I felt a bit rude unfollowing him so quickly, so I muted him. I do this occasionally - it is polite to follow some people, but that doesn't mean I have to read whatever nonsense they say.

Follow-But-Mute.

Once I realised what had happened, I quickly blocked the prick. But it got me thinking about some of my own behaviour on social media.

There are signals we send just by virtue of existing in public. I hit like on my friends' videos - but I don't always watch them to the end. A mate releases a podcast, so they get retweeted even if I don't actually listen to them. I follow people out of politeness and immediately mute them. If I see someone I find distasteful has followed me, I kick them. A swift block-and-unblock means they stop following me, but don't get notified.

But now I'm wondering if this is all a bit of an antipattern. Do I really need to signal to the world who I follow and who follows me? Would social media be calmer if people weren't chasing for interaction numbers?

Or am I being paranoid? Are people really scouring the history of my favourites to use against me?

This is the peril of the panopticon.

How do I know you?

@edent — Mon, 22 Feb 2021 12:10:02 +0000

I don't have a great memory. I often meet people who remember me, but I don't remember them. I've had whole conversations with people who clearly know me, but on whom I've drawn a blank.

My phone's address book has a "notes" field, and mine is peppered with little aide memoirs about the people I've met. Things like this:

And, I guess we've all got a contact like this, right?

(Sorry, Geoff!)

But there's no way to do that on Twitter or LinkedIn or any other social network I'm aware of.

Wouldn't that be useful? How many times have you stared at a digital acquaintance and wondered "how do I know you? Why do I follow you? Who the hell are you??!"

What I want is a private note field on your social network so I can say "Worked with them on Project X" or "Met at Dave's party. Married to Jon(?)". I'd also like to know why I muted or blocked someone - "Only talks about football" or "Holds the wrong opinion about NeoGeo games."

I wonder if there's a GDPR issue that stops services offering this. I asked on Twitter:

And got an array of contradictory replies!

Is this something you'd find useful? If so, what's stopping companies from offering it?

Should Twitter tell you if you've been following a fake account?

@edent — Wed, 23 Sep 2020 11:03:22 +0000

I get a lot of random Twitter DMs from attractive women who are desperate to make friends with me. I usually report the obvious spammers. But a few weeks ago, one nearly slipped through the net.

The woman was wearing a military uniform - a proper one, not a sexy Hallowe'en costume - and was asking a fairly sensible question of me. But something didn't sit right.

Usually, these accounts have stolen photos and random names. But the name of the account matched the name on the uniform! A bit more digging showed there was a Verified account for the real user - so I reported the fake account for impersonation.

A few months later(!), and Twitter told me they'd removed the fraudulent account.

This got me thinking. How many fake accounts do I follow? How many have been retweeted into my timeline? How many have I interacted with? Surely, by the law of averages, I must have been fooled at least once. Right?

What if Twitter (and Facebook, and MySpace, and TikTok, and Club Penguin) told users that an account they were following has been removed?

Would you like to know that the "celebrity" you were following was actually an unauthorised fan account? How about that the insightful political analyst was really a paid-for propaganda bot?

The idea has some downsides.

There will be False Positives. An entirely innocent account which is removed despite doing nothing wrong. What are the libel laws if Twitter tells you @RealPoliticalAlanayst was deleted for being a bot - when they're not?

Does it diminish your faith in the platform if, once per week, you find out that accounts like @SuperKittensAway were paid to retweet Anti-Vax nonsense into your timeline?

You normally don't notice that you're no longer following a specific account. Does it have a chilling effect on you if people you thought you trusted are suddenly removed?

Is it overwhelming if you regularly get a notification which says "You recently liked a Tweet from @IdrisElbaIsSoFit - we have determined that account was paid for by the People's Front of Judea to promote anti-Roman sentiment"?

What if a user just deletes their account of their own free will. Should you be told?

There are tools which will monitor who you follow - so you can see if a user has been removed. But not the reason why.

With all that said, I think it would be useful if social media told you if accounts you interact with are removed. Whether it is for racism, trolling, propaganda, or malicious intent. Yes, it may reduce your willingness to engage with similar accounts - but that's probably a good thing.

Think I'm wrong? There's a comment box just down there where you can vent your ire.

Book Review - Teaching Medicine and Medical Ethics Using Popular Culture ★★★★★

@edent — Tue, 19 May 2020 06:31:30 +0000

This book demonstrates how popular culture can be successfully incorporated into medical and health science curriculums, capitalising on the opportunity fictional media presents to humanise case studies. Studies show that the vast majority of medical and nursing students watch popular medical television dramas and comedies such as Grey’s Anatomy, ER, House M.D. and Scrubs.

This book is currently free on the Springer website - and it's a brilliant read.

I thought this was going to be an "Everything I know about X, I learned from watching Y" type book. You know, Philosphy/Buffy, Physics/Doctor Who, Law/The Bill. But it isn't!

It's a thorough look at whether people learn about medicine via popular media (they do!). It also covers what they learn and how it can be misleading. There's a great discussion about the medical ethics shown on TV and how that influences clinicians to behave.

I found it fascinating just how deep our prejudices go - even when discussing fictional characters.

There were also eight mentions that a character was overly emotional, annoying or ‘whiny,’ but these criticisms were exclusively directed at female characters.

And, while we're living in the age of pandemic, there's a nice little look to the future:

When looking at release dates we realised there was a possible link between ‘zombification’ cause and global health events.
To test our hypothesis, we mapped the year of release of pathogenic zombie films against the World Health Organization’s list of infectious disease outbreaks. This demonstrated a correlation between the two, with an increase in the release of infectious biohorror films in the years following outbreaks such as SARS and pandemic influenza . So it appeared that global health threats have an impact on pop-culture media. This is also reported in the literature, where horror films are identified as a barometer of society’s fears, anxieties and cultural consciousness.

An excellent and timely collection of essays.

How I'd redesign Twitter (and why it won't work)

@edent — Thu, 02 Apr 2020 11:24:11 +0000

Way back when Blackberry was the smartphone, my team at Vodafone obsessed over the idea of the "Unified Inbox".

"What if," the marketing chaps said, "you could see all your notifications in one place!"

Imagine a single inbox where your MySpace friend requests mingled with your Email. And your Facebook and Google Buzz notifications were in the same list.

It was a lovely idea. And users all proclaimed that was what they wanted. But users lie. And good ideas fail when they come into contact with reality.

People like silos. And they are fine with rapid context switching. And, it turns out, they're happy to learn how to use a dozen different apps.

So we now have Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Pokemon, Untappd etc all living in their own little silos. Occasionally cross-~~contaminating~~ pollinating.

In light of Twitter's talk about turning itself into a protocol rather than an app, I thought I'd take a stab at how I would redesign Twitter. This is based only on my user needs. It is insular and not collaborative.

Here is a three-stage way I'd improve Twitter - and any social network. Then I'll discuss why it won't work.

1. Will the Real Slim Shady Please Stand Up?

Imagine you want to follow Clark Kent - ace reporter at The Daily Planet newspaper. On Twitter you have to work out if he's @CK1234 or @ClarkKent_1 or @UpUpAndAway. Does he have a verified tick? Is that a parody account? Is that Clark from Kent, England?

How about if The Daily Planet ran its own federated Twitter server? You just need to follow @Clark@DailyPlanet.info

His content gets syndicated into your feed - so you're not checking yet-another-network - and you're assured you're following a legitimate account.

Similarly @CustomerHelp@hsbc.uk is more likely to be the real customer service provided by your bank.

As an individual, you might choose to run your own Twitter server - just like you run your own blog. Or you might save yourself some hassle and join a communal server - just like you use WordPress.com

2. Channels

I love Clark Kent's off-beat look at the down-town arts scene - but I hate his biased reporting on Superman. Suppose Clark publishes multiple channels - Superman, Arts, Sport, Personal, Keto, etc.

He posts his dieting tips on #Keto (how does he keep in shape?) and his personal rants about the lack of phone-booths on #Personal.

I could choose to follow his "all" channel, or mute his #Superman channel, or only follow his #Arts channel.

He is in control of what he publishes, and I am in control of what I choose to see.

Google+

This is what G+ nearly got right. It let you put people in "Circles" and then choose what to show them. As I said at the time, this is backwards. Clark doesn't know what you're interested in.

Private Channels

Perhaps Clark wants to create some private channels. He has one called #JusticeLeague (WTF?) but he only lets certain people follow it.

This is similar to how I use Facebook. I only have close friends and family on there, and don't post publicly. Yes, I'm aware anyone them could leak my pics to the press, but that's no different to any form of communication. This is light-touch privacy.

3. A Local Twitter For Local People

Channels aren't the only solution to this though.

Local Twitter servers are free to set their own policies. Consider Untappd - a beer-based social network. I can post all my beer-realated musings on there. If you don't care about that, don't syndicate that facet of my personality.

Syndication and Federation are two-way streets. Clark Kent wants to interact on a local Twitter server specific to Metropolis. He also wants to be on a Photos-of-Krypton server.

Clark could choose to have two separate accounts. One where he discusses police brutality in the city, another completely unconnected one for photos of a distant planet. Or, does he want one primary account?

As a strict teetotaler, Clark blacklists all posts from Untappd and other alcohol-based networks.

Why this is doomed to failure.

Laziness. Humans are intrinsically lazy. That's why we invent so many labour-saving devices. Our laziness will capsize this effort in several important ways.

Organisations don't want to run a social network. Would The Daily Planet really set up a Twitter server for its reporters? Maybe - but they'd probably outsource it to a big central provider in the same way they've outsourced their blog to WordPress.

Individuals aren't going to bother doing this - other than a few strange nerds like you and me. So they'll all gravitate to a few big providers.

Those large providers would coalesce and we'd end up with one big social network again.

Humans are too lazy to verify things. Is that Tweet about broccoli causing cancer from a reporter at DailyPlanet.info or DaiIyPlanett.biz? Will users be able to identify trustworthy content any better?

Most people are too lazy to curate their feeds. I have a friend who tweets about the local Cricket Team. I couldn't give a shit about cricket, and wish I could filter out that part of her personality. If she only thought of me and my selfish needs when Tweeting, she'd have the grace to tag every post with #Cricket - then I could mute.

What happens when Clark leaves the Daily Planet to write for LexCorp's blog? Does he lose all his followers? With this proposal, a social network becomes more like email. Would their need to be a mechanism for forwarding follow requests?

Cross-Posting from multiple accounts gets confusing. I automatically syndicate my blog, beer, Instagram, and FourSquare through to Twitter. Should I do it the other way round? Where do people follow me? What's a hub? Where am I?

Even while writing this proposal, I got confused between channels and servers and communities and interactions. Will people bother to learn a new way of socialising? Or will everything just be dumped on the main feed without any curation?

Your Thoughts?

Ignore the technical aspects - for now - I'd like to know whether you think this is the sort of social-media future you'd like to participate in?

Abstinence isn't safe - why quitting social media isn't the solution

@edent — Wed, 26 Feb 2020 12:33:53 +0000

(Another in a long list of posts which will turn out to be touchingly naïve!)

When teaching people about safe sex, one topic bitterly divides people - whether abstinence is a suitable method. Simply refusing to engage in sexual activity will protect you from pregnancy, disease, and trauma. Abstinence is particularly promoted by religious zealots.

Similarly, whenever social media is discussed, privacy zealots proclaim that the only safe option is to jUSt dELeTE FaCEBooK!

The problem with teaching abstinence is that it is unrealistic and leaves people unprepared.

Thousands of years of evolution produce a strong sexual drive in humans. It is literally impossible to prevent hormone sozzled teens from engaging in genetically programmed activity. Refusing to teach about safe sex leads to an increase in pregnancy and sexually-transmitted infections.

Similarly, humans are hardwired to be social. We like talking to our friends, seeing their photos, and playing games with them. Asking people to become social pariahs is not healthy.

As The Age of Surveillance Capitalism points out - social networks need to be regulated. We need to punish their bad behaviour just as we punish sexual abuse. But banning bad behaviour, sadly, isn't enough. We also have to take responsible steps to protect ourselves.

How to practise safe-Facebook

This is what I do in order to protect myself when I engage in risky social activity - like visiting Facebook.

Use Firefox - I use FF as my main web browser. It has built in tracking protection for Facebook and other sites. To me, using Firefox is the equivalent of wearing an condom. A sensible precaution to prevent unfortunate accidents.

On my Android phone, I don't use the Facebook app. Instead, I use Face Slim. It's a stand-alone web browser with its own icon. It keeps your phone protected.

That's the technology - the equivalent of contraception. But in the UK, we don't just teach Sex Ed - we have Sex and Relationship Education. There's no point in addressing the mechanics of sex without also addressing the emotional risks and rewards.

Don't hang out with idiots and dangerous people. I prune my FB friends list. If you're constantly sharing stuff which angers me, or makes me upset, I'll unfollow you. Because you don't have a right to make be feel bad. If your sexual partner does stuff that makes you uncomfortable - and won't change - then you should leave them.

If you're generally nice, but are always sharing inflammatory articles from a specific newspaper, I'll block that site or app. Removing yourself from a dangerous situation is sensible.

I don't use Facebook to sign in to any other apps or websites. I don't want my partners to kiss-and-tell.

Different social networks give me different things. I'm not "going steady" with Facebook - I'm also in a relationship with Twitter, LinkedIn, and some cool new social network which goes to a different school, you haven't heard of them.

Most importantly, I educate myself and my friends. I encourage you to go forth and ~~multiply~~ do the same.

Right, I think I've exhausted this metaphor.