Redes sociais

The one change that worked: I banned myself from social media — and my children have never been happier 
theguardian.com

Reading yet another one of the countless articles and opinion pieces from people discovering that it’s good not to spend the whole day glued to their phone, I picked up an ~interesting technique. When Anna Mathur is with her kids and needs to do something on her phone, she “announces” the action:

One habit that helped was narrating my phone use out loud. When I pick it up in front of the kids, I say: “I’m just adding bananas to the shopping.” It keeps me accountable, because once I’ve said it, I do that one thing and put it down. And it tells my children that I’m not disappearing, as I used to.

I think it applies to adult-only situations too.

Elon Musk’s lawyers sent a cease-and-desist letter to Nitter’s maintainer, a legitimate service that displays X posts through a different interface. The person, who goes by zedeus, complied with the threat, took down their own Nitter instance, and stopped development.

These guys don’t even bother hiding the hypocrisy anymore. They scrape the entire internet to feed their AI parrots, but turn around and use financial muscle and legal harassment to go after individuals doing the same thing — for more honest reasons and on a garage-shop scale.

XCancel, the popular Nitter instance I’ve been using for several months now, is still up.

Update (19h33): XCancel is down, too.

The scrolly chair 
newcartographies.com

I’ll say it right up front: I’ve written my share of pieces on this topic, which doesn’t invalidate the observation Nicholas Carr made in his newsletter:

I hate to be a cynic, but I’m guessing the main reason for the proliferation of these sorts of articles [about using your phone less] is that they’re algorithmic catnip. They’re symptoms of the illness they seek to cure. We’re addicted to reading about our addiction to phones. If the pieces have a therapeutic value, it probably lies less in helping people gain control over media than in renewing a reassuring fantasy of such control.

Which leads to funny situations, like two chronic phone addicts giving tips on how to use your phone less (podcast).

I get the feeling that content created as an offering to the algorithm god shows up around any popular topic, even niche ones. It hooks people who are idly browsing the internet, across their multiple algorithmically curated feeds that amplify the slightest flicker of interest in a given subject to the extreme.

Another topic, an underlying one, is “PKMs” — personal knowledge management — with their needlessly complex organizational methods and that cool connection graph generated by Obsidian. The promise is that by organizing your ideas in text and linking them all together, you’ll gain the superpower of never forgetting anything.

The outcome for those who manage to break out of these endless content cycles is the same: what was all that for, anyway?

Indigo unifies Bluesky and Mastodon in one app

App

Indigo app icon: purple, with a white circle in the middle and the top of the letter “i” cut out within the circle.I had the opportunity to test Indigo before its launch — on the 12th — a social media app that unifies the timelines of Bluesky and Mastodon.

The duo of developers, Aaron Vegh and Ben McCarthy, have experience in the field. They’re also behind Croissant, an older app that lets you post simultaneously to Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads. Seen together, it’s as if Indigo were an evolution of Croissant — you can also post to Bluesky and Mastodon at the same time from Indigo.

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What is Mastodon for? 
connectedplaces.online

The Fediverse, particularly Mastodon, still suffers from the reputation of being “complicated.” Its key distinguishing feature — federated instances — is also its Achilles’ heel.

A few years ago, I started recommending [pt_BR] joining the Fediverse/Mastodon via the developers’ instance, mastodon.social, and focusing on the personal timeline. It’s simpler to explain and — I hope — to understand, but something gets lost along this easier path.

I hadn’t realized this until I read this post by Laurens Hof on the Connected Places blog. He makes a very astute distinction regarding the Fediverse experience, between the instance layer and the federation layer, and argues that most people live in the federation layer (timeline):

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