The legend of John Pixelfed is becoming reality #pixelfed
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of speaking to a seminar run by @npub1tl9s...0j90 about the fediverse. It was titled, "The Fediverse: What it is, why I study it, and why you should, too." My slides for the presentation are here: https://robertwgehl.org/presentations/Muenster.html You can see the talk text if you select presentation view. Or, just go to this link for the text: https://robertwgehl.org/presentations/MuensterText.html #fediverse #academics #research
Over on Bluesky, @pixelfed is trending because Meta is actively blocking links to Pixelfed servers. When will any of these tech CEOs learn?
One of the things I've come to enjoy on the fediverse is that most admins and moderators are pretty easily reachable, so if people want to know why they made whatever decision they made, the conversation usually can happen. Can it get acrimonious? Sure. But you cannot do this with corporate social media. When they make questionable decisions, you can't contact them. You can post to your public timeline and *maybe* some PR flack states "we'll look into it," but all the decisions remain opaque.
I just gave a presentation at the Institute for Technoscience and Society at York University, titled "Seeking Just Governance in Community-Run Social Media." Now, thanks to Marp and a bit of BeautifulSoup, I can share the presentation and notes easily: https://robertwgehl.org/presentations/ITS_presentation.html Here's the text: https://robertwgehl.org/presentations/ITS_presentationText.html The presentation includes alt text on images.
Latest FOSS Academic: Marp!
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As avid readers of my blog know, I am livin
 In which I discuss a Markdown-based way to make slide shows. Thanks to @npub12qh7...k48x for alerting me to the awesomeness that is Marp. [Replies to this post will appear as comments on my blog] #FOSSAcademic #FALD #marp
Latest FOSS Academic post: libraries! Libraries everywhere!
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 In which I share links to two alternative social media/fediverse libraries. More scholarship! Bring it to me! [Replies to this post will appear as comments on my blog unless privacy is set to followers-only or DM. CWs will work, as will deletions] #FOSSAcademic #alternativeSocialMedia
I'm purposely going to follow more non-Mastodon/micro-blog accounts to expand my view of the network. Anything out there you would recommend? I've been poking through #Pixelfed accounts, but surely there is more cool stuff out there!
Just got done listening to @npub1j6xz...re8c give a book talk about The Digital Closet. It's a deep critique of the underlying technologies of content moderation used by #Google and #Meta. Such important work! the book is free to read, too!
MIT Press
The Digital Closet
In The Digital Closet, Alexander Monea argues provocatively that the internet became straight by suppressing everything that is not, forcing LGBTQI...
Hey, folks from what was once called Twitter! My fedi tip is: follow hashtags. You can search for hashtags of interest and then follow them just like you can follow any account. Your timeline will fill up quickly if you do that, and then you can start to follow interesting people in the timeline. For example, some of the hashtags I follow include #blackmastodon, #mutualaid, and #canpoli, among others. I've found that I can get news just as fast here as folks on #X. #fediTips