I keep telling myself I should stop thinking about social media so much, especially in the "current moment", but it keeps happening. This post started as a bunch of posts on Mastodon until I stopped myself and decided to Blog About It instead.

Mastodon is fine

Eugen being the BDFL of Mastodon (the project) might have been beneficial in the early days, but it feels more and more like a liability at this point.
If Mastodon is to survive for another 8 years, it cannot be run as a pet project anymore. And it also should not be run as "just" a Twitter-like anymore because Bluesky is effectively winning that battle with more resources than the Mastodon project could ever get.

A lot of the good ideas for the Fediverse aren't coming from Eugen or Mastodon at this point, and they rarely involve just "being another Twitter". Which leads me to my next point.

"Who is the new Twitter?" is a boring question

I really do not like this question.^[1] This isn't me being salty about Bluesky "winning", by the way. I would be bothered the same if Mastodon was being declared a "winner" because:

Why should we have only one website, exactly?

Why is this all we care about? Why is this the focus? Why do we obsess over who has the most (active) users?

Are we constantly arguing about decentralization, who does it and who doesn't, and complaining about monopolies only to want (effectively) a monopoly for our online spaces? Really?

Sure, it's more annoying, but I think it's healthier to have different spaces for different people.
I've been on Twitter since 2009, Mastodon since 2017, and Bluesky since early 2023 and at this point, I can say that all of these are true:

• I know people…Read more

Programming note: remember link roundups? Well, I'm deciding to call them by a different name now. Why? So I can make a silly pun. I wanted to go with "Cool Stuff Sunday" at first, but I'm not fooling myself in thinking I'll stick to posting these on Sundays.

Let's get to it, there's a lot of stuff to talk about.

Social Media meta

For better or worse, I still think probably far too much about social media, so I can't help but be into articles about it.

Tom (Date 'em Ups): I want you to dream

You can have dreams, Cohost. And when you're finally done making one come true, you can go on and have more. Dreams are why I'm here, why I've survived, and I want you, all of you to have them, too, more than anything else. Wherever the winds take us all after this, I hope you hold onto those dreams. Don't let go of them for anything. Anything. No matter how crushing the world gets, no matter how tall the barriers to entry are, nothing whatsoever. I had to hold onto mine tightly for over two whole decades, but damn it, I willed it into reality and I'm going to keep doing the exact same thing with what's in my sights now or die trying.

Another cohost-related post, it will happen again, I'm not sorry.

Luna: Online following and Starter Packs

I want people to follow me naturally because they enjoy my posts in particular, I don’t want a tech/demoscene/gamedev/etc audience showing up in bulk just because someone else decided to put me on a list without my prior consent.

It is not a secret that I am not exactly fond of Bluesky. I use it, but I tolerate it. Bluesky's "starter packs", much like Twitter's "Follow all"^[1] feature, are... misguided? I see where they're coming from, it's hard to "build a feed" when you start on a Twitter-like website but, like Luna here, I can't help but feel this will produce Some Weird Results.

I think following a starter pack is doing yourself a disservice because you're just injecting people into your feed without getting a feel of what their posts are like, and people who are added to them have little way of doing much about it. You can "just block the creator of a pack" but this isn't a great solution. Some people might prefer to never be put in the spotlight at all, sometime it might be awkward for people to block a starter pack's creator. The fact there isn't an "opt me out" button is bonkers to me, but ultimately doesn't surprise me coming from Bluesky. But I'm just a hater, so what do I know.

Build your feed slowly but…Read more

This post is mirrored on cohost as well and was written with it in mind. But also not? It's fine, don't worry about it.

Like many people in my age group, I think it's fair to say that I grew up online.

the pre-social media years

My "life online" really started in the mid-2000s when I joined the forums of Crystal XP. This name probably won't mean anything to you, but if you used Windows XP at the time, you might have seen their "BricoPacks". These were 1-click installers that reskinned your entire Windows installation. Their most successful one was the Vista Inspirat one. Pretty wild stuff. Oh, and also CrystalXP was "responsible" for that one Tux and its myriad of variations you might see on every other Linux fanboy's profile.

But like I said, they had forums. I joined those forums after reading CrystalXP's Photoshop tutorials and wanting to share my progress and get advice. I met a bunch of people, some of whom I am still friends with to this day, learned a ton about graphic and UI design.

I drew icons, wallpapers, all of varying quality that I would post to my DeviantArt profile.
I went hard into the Windows customization bit. At first, it was simple stuff, but around 2006-2007, I got enamored by Mac OS X's UI from watching a friend's Mac screenshots.
From this point on, my goal was to make Windows XP look like Mac OS X (Tiger and then Leopard). I wish I still had those "desks" screenshots because man, I was good at that shit. I made skins for iTunes, a skin for ObjectBar that mimicked the Leopard menubar, skins for Miranda IM that copied Adium skins.

A year later, I would get my first Mac. A…Read more