A Fun Day on the Internet
Like a lot of people who enjoy blogging and tech, my social media drug of choice is Mastodon. For those who don't know, Mastodon is a platform where you can have (in my case) micro-blog posts of 500 words or less, as well as share photos. People can comment on what you wrote or repost it. They can also give you a little dopamine boost by clicking a star to indicate they liked what you posted. In that way, it is structured similarly to Twitter (X), Threads, and BlueSky.
Where Twitter and Threads are corporate-owned and centralized, Mastodon is just a platform, and anyone can get the software and set up their own server if they are tech-savvy. It can be confusing for newcomers to decide which server they want to join, but the good news is that you can join more than one, and you can also move your account. I have three Mastodon accounts: one is designed for travel photos, one is an experiment where members pay a couple of dollars a month to participate, and the size will be capped at no more than 500 people. My primary account is run by OMG.LOL, which is a service that provides a grab bag of tools for bloggers and IndyWeb types. You get a "link in bio" page, a /now page, a status log, email forwarding from a .lol address, and a bunch of other Internet-related stuff. It's $20 a year, but if you're broke, someone will usually hook you up with a membership.
The OMG.LOL community is definitely left of center. It's a place where POC, the LGBT community, and neurodivergent folks can feel as safe as possible in this cruel world. It's an international community operating 24 hours a day. They even accommodate white-haired grandads from the South like me. Lots of people who participate are in the tech field. I just lucked into finding it, and I'm so glad I did.
Today, Adam, the guy who runs OMG.LOL, updated the software that runs the Mastodon instance we belong to. One of the new features is an author card, which is just a fancy way of linking back to your Mastodon profile when you post something you've written on your blog. I first saw it when one of the resident geniuses of the community, Robb Knight, posted a card with a blog post he'd written, referencing a couple of other folks. Before too long, there was a thread going under Robb's original post as people wanted to know how they could get some of that good Internet magic for themselves. You could see that folks were excited. I know I was.
I had to mess with it for a while and do some background setup on my blogs before I got it to work. Robb wrote a nice set of instructions for everyone, and one by one, I started seeing people I know get the kinks worked out. One of the blogging platforms I use doesn't currently support everything that's needed, but I wrote to the developer, and lo and behold, he said he'd get it working tomorrow. I promise you, you would never get that kind of response from Meta or X.
Along with the new author card feature, the update to the Mastodon software also made a few cosmetic changes to the way the web interface looks. People were generally enthusiastic about that too. All in all, it was just a fun day to be part of a community, enjoying something new and learning something new at the same time as others spread all over the place.
The next time there's a burst of Internet toxicity, I'm going to come back and re-read this post and think about what today felt like.
Enjoyed it? Please upvote 👇