mastodon 4.7.3Ontario Research Chair of Digital Governance for Social Justice, York University.
My latest book, "Move Slowly and Build Bridges: Mastodon, the Fediverse, and the Struggle for Democratic Social Media" was published by Oxford University Press late 2025.
Been on the fediverse since 2017. I'm now helping run AoIR.social
he/him
Trans rights are human rights. I boost #BlackMastodon and #MutualAid posts. I also call for alt text for accessibility.
here's to hoping today is TACO Tuesday.
Surely this means they're revoke the FIFA Peace Prize, right?
An odd bit of language I've seen over the past few years:
My _______
Where the blank is something owned by big tech. Years ago, it was "My Facebook," which no doubt was short for "my Facebook account."
Later it was "my algorithm."
Now it's "my chatbot."
NONE OF THESE ARE YOURS, PEOPLE
Ask Fedi: I want to move web hosting and basic email away from my current host, which is now a MegaCorp with AI-based customer service and an increasingly useless admin interface. It's also based in the USA.
Can anyone recommend a company for basic webhosting and email -- particularly if it's located in Canada?
Please do not recommend self-hosting -- I do that a-plenty and I want to have someone handle some of my email.
I don't speak French, but I do speak "local, autonomous media that is not dominated by US big tech"
OStatus was based on an idea of sociality that was about public self-expression, which represented a lot of the Web 2.0/blogosphere idea of: this is how the Internet works, everyone can have a voice, and everyone can be their true self in public, and that’s the world we want to build....
Where is my mind?
When people face an uncertain future, they often long for the past. In the case of social media, there is nostalgia for a time when influential people were on Twitter, and when Twitter was fun. Some of the people who have embraced Meta’s Twitter-like service Threads have noted it feels like the Twitter of old....
Hey Linux server admin type folks: do you recommend using Cockpit to monitor servers and do admin work?
It's getting to the point where I have quite a few small servers scattered about the Internet. I tend to go through them all once a month to update them and check on them. I think I need to get a bit more active in watching them, though. Would Cockpit be a good choice?
I’ve been researching and writing about alternative social media since I was a PhD student in the late 2000s. As I’ve defined it in my research, alternative social media is not controlled by corporations, but by ordinary people....
Quirk and Gruber are emphasizing that ActivityPub, the protocol that enables the fediverse to work, is an open social media protocol. For Meta to adopt it is an endorsement of such opennness – something Meta is not known for. Meta is known for its “walled gardens” – centralized, closed systems that can’t interoperate....
Whether or not someone likes this approach often depends on the vision. Rochko’s vision has indeed attracted many people. One of them was Ro, a Black software developer (and major figure in the chapters to come)....
None of this is happening, however, because Mastodon’s API – its specific version of a client-to-server protocol – is dominant. While Mastodon’s size and influence was beneficial to ActivityPub in 2017, saving it from being an afterthought when the SocialWG ended its process, it also has warped the fediverse....
The more he learned, however, the more he realized what Awoo.space’s members were doing....
And yet, early on, Mastodon started experiencing bursts of growth – in early 2017, a few months after its launch, it grew by 73%, up to over 40,000 accounts, spread across about a dozen instances. Looking back, Rochko notes this was a sign of what was to come. Mastodon “started gaining traction,” Rochko told me in our interview....
The more he learned, however, the more he realized what Awoo.space’s members were doing....
Latest FOSS Academic post is -- you guessed it -- a 2025 year in review post. Thrill to the fact that I'm using much of the same FOSS to do my work as I always have! Feel the chills as I talk about #generativeAI and how terrible it is! Above all, join me in living the FOSS Academic Lifestyle Dream!
https://fossacademic.tech/2025/12/21/year-in-review.html
Replies to this post will appear as comments on the blog thanks to the magic of #ActivityPub!
The first post of 2026 on the Alternative Social Media Researchers Blog is live! It's by @jjsylvia@mastodon.social and it presents a syllabus of a course in social media ethics. The course uses a classroom instance of Mastodon to work through ethical issues in digital media.
https://www.socialmediaalternatives.org/2026/01/12/teaching-mastodon.html
Are you also teaching using Mastodon or other alternative social media? Reach out to us!
Taken together, fediblock and the Bad Space reveal the politics of defederating on the fediverse....
The path wasn’t clear, however. Infighting in the SocialWG rears up again as people advocate for and against ActivityPub and the federation protocol....
Since tech reporters were largely unfamiliar with GNU social, but were definitely familiar with Twitter, they also started calling Mastodon a Twitter alternative. This happened in a spate of articles that appeared in April, 2017....
Day Two of Future Networks (future-networks.ca) commences! On tap today, panels about the ecological impacts of media and alternative social media. Plus a keynote from @couldrynick@indieweb.social!
okay, this just made me laugh out loud
the other option is to scream
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/12/us/politics/trump-russia-oil-sanctions.html
