Last year, we had the “buy Twitter” campaign. Now, the arrival of Mastodon, the last “Twitter replacement”, has caused a lot of renewed talks about what we’d need to replace this or that digital platform. I argue that many of these proposals, wishes and plans may be misplaced, or looking in the wrong directions.
Two good examples of what I mean are in this post about Mastodon, and in this thread on mastodon.
Mastodon is the latest “Twitter replacement”. Yesterday I said on Twitter that something described as its “bigger flaw” seems no big deal to me. Here I explain why.
I had never heard of Mastodon until 2 days ago, when I wrote that yes, even Nazis can use it. Yesterday I found this comment on BoingBoing to a more complete article by Sean Bonner. The Boingboing comment ends with this quote:
Short answer: yes, they can. Regardless of what some websites are saying.
Mastodon is “an alternative to Twitter”. Mashable just wrote that:
“Mastodon.. in many ways it’s like Twitter, but it is also so not like Twitter… What makes it stand out? It has better privacy controls than Twitter. Also, neo-Nazis are explicitly banned.” and then, 2 lines below: “Mastodon is a type of free and open source software (FOSS) known as “GNU social.
Today’s copyright law is ridiculous and offensive, to say the least, and this week it’s Mr Roger’s Neighborhood" turn to prove it.
Andrea James writes on Boing Boing that
"Over the weekend, two episodes of Mister Roger's Neighborhood "Conflict" series unexpectedly appeared on YouTube after being unavailable for three decades. YouTube quickly removed them, but to many, the timing felt related to Trump's plans to defund PBS." The full story is here, but I’m not mentioning it it because it may “be a message to Trump”.
On February 28th, 2017, a “cockup at Amazon facility in Virginia, US” caused its S3 cloud storage to fail.
This fault led to “major websites and services - including Imgur, Medium, Trello, Yahoo webmail, the Docker Registry Hub.. falling offline, losing images, or left running like treacle. Basically, that outage “knackered half the internet, it seems, because it all relies on S3 to store data online”.
Just to stress: this is one S3 region that has become inaccessible, yet web apps are tripping up and vanishing as their backend evaporates away.
Former CIA director Michael Hayden recently said that millennials may leak secrets because they are “culturally different”. OK but.. please let me point out some of the culprits for such a difference, and the fact that those same culprits had been clearly named and described more than three years ago.
Mr. Hayden said that millennials have different instincts than the people who hired them and this cultural difference may be the reason why “millennials leak secrets”:
