December 18, 2022

A blog devoted to finding a Fediverse server to join Mastodon

This has been a blog page devoted to finding a Fediverse server to join Mastodon
put together by Hal Brown

I'm not going to keep updating this blog because I discovered that there was a more comprehensive list which people can use to decide which Fediverse  Mastodon server they want to use to read and toot on. Click below:



This is my blog about Mastodon from Dec. 16


Below: Just a few servers on Mastodon

Click above to enlarge image

Those who want to view or join Mastodon can do so at lots of web addresses for Mastodon servers which are decentralized. They are all on a Fediverse. 

The fediverse (a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe") is an ensemble of federated (i.e. interconnected) servers that are used for web publishing (i.e. social networking, microblogging, blogging, or websites) and file hosting, but which, while independently hosted, can communicate with each other. On different servers (technically instances), users can create so-called identities. These identities are able to communicate over the boundaries of the instances because the software running on the servers supports one or more communication protocols that follow an open standard.[1] As an identity on the fediverse, users are able to post text and other media, or to follow posts by other identities.[2] In some cases, users can show or share data (video, audio, text, and other files) publicly or to a selected group of identities, and allow other identities to edit other users' data (such as a calendar or an address book). Wikipedia

You can read more about Mastodon here:

The images below are about 42 of the links which you can use to view or join Mastodon. Click to join. There are over 160 as of Dec. 20 and more are added just about every day. 

These two appear to have the most members:
Mastodon Social

This is where I toot. I can't find a logo for it so I'll use my version until I find an official one.
 

These are other popular ones:




This one is called Pachyderm

The servers above appear to have the most members.

Others have fewer, even some less than 200.



All the images below are links.  The newest links are on the bottom of the list.






.














This one is in German

















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Seeing how GOP is about to drive off a cliff reminds me of a favorite Charles Addams cartoon

Seeing how GOP is about to drive off a cliff reminds me of a favorite Charles Addams cartoon
By Hal Brown

Click to enlarge
My Version
CLICK ABOVE TO ENLARGE

When I was too young to appreciate the writing in The New Yorker, which my parents subscribed to, I looked forward to each issue for the cartoons. My favorite cartoonist was Charles Addams which no doubt showed something about my personality. In fact, that when I read McCarthy's Race For Speaker Risks Upending House On Day One in HUFFPOST this morning the above cartoon came to mind.

It was one of the two Addams cartoons which I liked the best. This is the other one:


I suppose this says something about my developing personality and my somewhat morbid sense of humor. I also like the cartoons in The Hanging Book:

Click above to enlarge - I misplaced or loaned out my copy of this book and writing this story prompted my to order the last used copy they had on Amazon.


If you stumbled on this blog because you're a Charles Addams fan and haven't already watched the streaming Netflix show Wednesday I highly recommend it. It has two Golden Globe nominations and features the Christina Ricci  in a supporting role. She played the original Wednesday in the original Addams Family TV show.

But I digress...

Back to what I think the cartoon represents. The car which is about to careen off the cliff is occupied by all Republicans but you have to wonder who is driving it. I'd have to choose between Marjorie Taylor Greene and Donald Trump depending on whether we are thinking only about Congress or the GOP as a party.

Who then is this driver?


He sees the approaching semi and is aware that the Republicans who are chasing and about to overtake him, and is smart enough to take advantage of the opportunity that fate afforded him.

The Democrat's leader, President Biden, lacks the ruthlessness gene and is not a malignant narcissist, anything but, so he wouldn't even dream of sticking his arm out the window and making the universal "it's safe to pass me" gesture which he knows would result in real life in the kind of movie scene where a car speeds off a cliff and bursts into flames.


The other way to interpret the cartoon is to say the man waving driver of the car to pass and die engulfed in flames is Donald Trump and he's being chased by any and all Republicans that don't bow down to him.



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December 17, 2022

Pictures that say 1000 words

Pictures That Say 1000 Words

By Hal Brown

Archives on Right >


Background from InPixio, Hal Brown

Updated Dec. 19: 

As Elon Musk and Donald Trump compete for headlines with their self-defeating bizarre behavior I watch how editors decide to illustrate their stories. Today I found a opening page story for  Elon Musk Posts Twitter Poll Asking If He Should Step Down As CEO on HUFFPOST. It is no longer the top of the page story so you can't the it online the way I did.

It fits right in with the theme of the following story. Of all the photos of Musk they could have used they found one where his gaze was directed upward as if he was looking at the headline. For posterity, here it is:

Click above to enlarge

The symbolism of this above photo was lost when the story moved down the page because while his gave was up the title was under the much smaller photo. It happens to be to the left of another Musk article which happens to be about Mastodon which is the platform I now am active on.



Below is my original blog story:

This was the top story on the HUFFPOST website this morning linking to this article:


I don't know whether it was an actual photograph of was photoshopped and made into a dark silhouette. 

I did a Google Image search and found the photo was used several times before:

Click above to enlarge

It is credited to Justin Sullivan of Getty Images. It was used in this article among others:

Whether it was photoshopped or not I think the black background was added because most people who are photographed have a background behind them.

As I write this the top of the site article on HUFFPOST is about Trump's malevolent doppelgänger Elon Musk for this article. It isn't nearly as dramatic as the Trump illustration:

I would guess that the black background  was also added to replace whatever was in the background of the photograph to make it more dramatic but I can't prove it.

I would characterize the photo of Musk as not particularly flattering but not appearing as obnoxious as he does in some of the photos published of him.

When the Musk article was no longer the lead story and moved down the page this is the Photoshopped image HUFFPOST used which shows him as looking ominous:


A Google Image search shows the first photo being credited to Jim Watson of Getty Images. It has been used frequently:

For example, it was used to illustrate a New York Times June 9, 2022 article.
There are so many photos of Trump and Musk showing such a range of emotions for editors to choose from to illustrate articles. Editors do not decide which to use by accident. 

Generally the photos we see of people in the public eye come with some kind of copyright protection and there is a legal gray area about how they can be republished. On this blog I often use the amazing Photoshop manipulated images made by DonkeyHotey since they are free to use as long as you give him his well deserved credit.

I used two of them in this blog story:


I took the photo HUFFPOST used and with BeFunky made it look like this:

With InPixo I made this with Jan van Eyck's Crucifixion and Last Judgement diptych from Wikipedia as a background.





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December 16, 2022

My Muskbashing morning Mastodon migration missives

My Muskbashing morning Mastodon migration missives
By Hal Brown


 

About this ongoing blog: Those who follow my stories know I have a thing for alliterations so the title saying these will me morning missives was just an excuse to use the word "morning" and doesn't mean I will update this just in the morning. I hope to keep the general theme going until Twitter suffers the same fate of the Edsel.

I originally posted links to Mastodon addresses in the Fediverse (interconnected websites) where people could view or join. There were so many that I decided to put them on a separate blog (here) which I hope to keep updating as I find new ones.

Dec. 18 Updates:

Taylor Lorenz is an American journalist for The Washington Post. She was previously a technology reporter for The New York Times, The Daily Beast, and Business Insider, and social media editor for the Daily Mail. She is particularly known for covering Internet culture. (Wikipedia)

From MSNBC: Taylor Lorenz on being suspended from Twitter.



This is what Musk is posting. Talk about self defeating, he is actually giving publicity to alternative platforms she people may not know about.

I assume his algorithm searches text only and at least not yet doesn't follow links or what is in a tweeted image. At least he hasn't caught me. Here's my latest tweet:



Previous posts in this series:

Musk's going back and forth with his suspending and un-suspending journalists led me to make this illustration:


He's demonstrating that he's rubber room ready. Sorry Elon, for your own protection there's no WiFi in the padded cells.... 

There's another alternative to Twitter which was just mentioned on the Ali Velshi show. It is called Post. 


Here's an article about Post:

You have to get on the waiting list to join. If you click below you can help me move higher up the waiting list:



UPDATED DEC 16 10:30 Pacific time

Click to enlarge, does not link to Twitter

I am hoping I get banned from Twitter for writing this with a link to the blog:
 When I made FOIA request to the FBI to see if I had a file because of my college anti-Vietnam war activity I was disappointed when I didn't. I was too small time I guess. I am but a minnow in the online ocean. Getting recognized here would be a good story .
 


I will post the most recent additions to this blog on the top of the page.

Here's a toot I just put on Mastodon

I wanted to see what was listed as trending on Twitter to add hashtags to my link to my Mastodon blog story which doesn't mention it and saw #ThursdayNightMassacre and found out that we have a new member @joyannreid who tweets are still there (see screen grab of her tweet) so a BIG welcome to her. Hard to track all the journalists moving here. Welcome to @pkrugman@mastod JenRubin@masto.ai and Rachel Maddow -  maddow@beta.mstdn.cf




Twitter suspended the accounts of more than half a dozen journalists from CNN, the New York Times, The Washington Post and other outlets Thursday evening, as company owner Elon Musk accused the reporters of posting “basically assassination coordinates” for him and his family.

The Post has seen no evidence that any of the reporters did so.

The suspensions came without warning or initial explanation from Twitter. They took place a day after Twitter changed its policy on sharing “live location information” and suspended an account, @ElonJet, that had been using public flight data to share the location of Musk’s private plane.

Many of the journalists suspended Thursday, including Washington Post technology reporter Drew Harwell, had been covering that rule change, as well as Musk’s claims that he and his family had been endangered by location sharing.

Twitter did not directly respond to questions about the suspensions. But Musk suggested on Twitter, without evidence, that the journalists had revealed private information about his family, known as doxing. “Criticizing me all day long is totally fine, but doxxing my real-time location and endangering my family is not,” he tweeted late Thursday.







I originally posted this on Twitter like this:
Now my new tweet looks like this:

I was hoping some of my followers would click the first tweet but hardly anyone even looked at it.

Changed the tweet to see if I can lure more people to click on the link without getting kicked off Twitter.

This blog, despite the title, really has to do with the alternative to Twitter named after a prehistoric beast. It is growing in popularity.
The Twitter bird evolved for a few years (read about it here) but until Elon Musk bought it the bird, with notable exceptions, like most birds mostly tweeted. Now with Musk, it is screeching. 

We don't know what a mastodon sounded like but presumably it was something like an elephant. You can listen to elephant sounds here. Mostly they trumpet and this is how they are depicted in most movies. They rumble when communicating with each other, they also roar, bark, snort, and grunt. Tooting isn't on the list, but why quibble. I think the term "toot" conveys that Mastodon wants to be a civil and respectful town square.

Not tooting yet. Click above to create an account.
Not ready. Learn more about it here.
Excerpt:

Mastodon is an innovative open-source and self-hostable microblogging platform similar to Twitter or Tumblr. Its development was started in 2016 by Eugen Rochko and since then Mastodon constantly attracted new users and communities looking for a social environment independent from big company logics and censorship.

Mastodon is not a Twitter clone: by concept, structure and functionalities it is something completely different and much more interesting!

This page is an introduction to Mastodon’s basic concepts and features which you should know to fully understand how Mastodon works. It is structured in independent sections which you can jump to from the Index (see the link in the upper-left side), but it can also be read as a single text.

The site also hosts an Instances search engine that you can use to find the Mastodon instance that best fits your needs.


I've posted the link to this blog on Mastodon and have been working to add as many links to Mastodon servers as I can find for those who want to get a feel for what it is like, and hopefully if they like it they will join. Scroll down to see the links.

This is what Twitter is doing to those who tweet a link to Mastodon 

This is what someone tooted (the same as a Twitter tweet) on Mastodon:

If you’re wondering about Mastodon’s impact, Twitter is now automatically marking links to mastodon as “sensitive” (aka dangerous) and forcing users who get them to “appeal” the claim. In case Elon didn’t seem desperate enough for you already…

Below is a screen grab of what they tooted with their identity blocked out by me because there's no established convention or policy there about sharing the identity of someone who posts there.


If you have followers on Twitter (I have 154) who you want to be able to know you are leaving there and moving to Mastodon you may be able tweet without running afoul of Elon's attempt to keep anyone from finding you. Just figure out a way to persuade your followers to click my link without alerting the evil genius.

If you want to promote Mastodon on Twitter you may be able to avoid their algorithm tagging their tweet by 1) not using the word Mastodon and 2) trying to outfox them by tweeting something innocuous which will also clue in your followers that you are doing something that you want them to know about.

I recommend you that if you have things to share that don't fit into the word limit for a toot that you try out a free website builder.  I  have used Google Blogger since 2012. It costs extra to have dedicated web address. I chose a dot org after my name because dot com was taken. I am an organization of one. If you have a website you can write anything at any length, include pictures if you like, and put a link to your page in a toot.

Most popular web building platforms have a free version and some you have to pay for extra features. Popular platforms are Wordpress, Weebly, Wix, and GoDaddy. Musk said he was open to buying another website platform, Substack, another popular platform. They weren't interested

 I can only see how many people looked at the tweet (impressions), 17 so far, but without paying I can't see how many people click the link (engagements). Before Musk took over a tweeter could see both for free.

This is what I tooted on Mastodon:

Click above to enlarge.




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You've read my opinions but unless you've talked to me you've never them in heard my voice. Now, thanks to Salon's Chauncey Dega you can in his podcast. By Hal M. Brown,

  Chauncey DeVega  is a senior politics writer for Salon. ( You can read about Salon on Wikipedia .) His essays can also be found at  Chaunc...