Since Meta (the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) launched Threads as a rival to X/Twitter, there has been a healthy dose of scepticism from the fediverse community about Meta’s intentions, the company’s values and whether Threads joining the fediverse is a good thing or bad thing.
oslo.town is based on Mastodon, so it’s part of the fediverse and our position on Threads thus far was to remain open. On launch, Threads had not joined the fediverse and their implementation of this has been relatively slow. This means there was very little impact on oslo.town.
This week we used the Announcements feature on Mastodon to ask users of oslo.town if they wanted threads.net to be blocked or kept: of those who voted 92% voted to block threads.net, while 8% voted to keep the connection.
The results of the poll were very clear, so steps have been taken to block threads.net on oslo.town.
As the current admin of oslo.town, I agree with the majority poll result. Blocking Threads is best for us right now, and it matches the ideas behind the fediverse and Mastodon software.
As we find ourselves in the midst of November, it’s a poignant reminder that it’s been 5 years since I had the privilege of creating oslo.town – a Mastodon server for the people of Oslo’s capital and the first Norwegian-based Mastodon server to exist.
Mastodon is a social network that can be compared to Twitter, but with a lot better ethics around how it works. Instead of being one big network owned by one monopolistic company, it’s made up of many smaller sites that talk to each other to create one big network. And oslo.town is one of those sites!
The community is alive and well thanks to its amazing members! While some people come and go, we have around 240 dedicated oslo.town folk who keep coming back month after month.
I’m really lucky that some of our members are so generous and help to keep oslo.town running. They donate their own money through Patreon, Ko-Fi, PayPal or Vipps so that I don’t have to pay for everything myself. Thanks to them, we can keep the site running with minimal costs.
Tusen-tusen-tusen takk! Thank you!
That thanks should be extended to @hugo@masto.pt at masto.host who set us up with the server and has been doing a fine job of maintaining that ever since, ensuring we are always running the latest version of Mastodon.
And a shout out to @angristan@mstdn.io who hosted the first ever Mastodon server that I joined back in 2017 and inspired me to start my own, and to @Gargron@mastodon.social for, you know, creating Mastodon.
Five years has flown by! Let’s check back in for our ten-year anniversary.
More than a week has gone since my previous Links of the Week post, but whateverrrrr. I’ve been busy just trying to live life with a 2 year old kid who is always feeling a bit ill, the drama of some local kids trying to kick our windows in every night, trying to fix everything that keeps breaking in the apartment, keeping up with all the chores or just trying to catch a break.
Anyway, here’s some stuff what I did see with my eyes since the last time I posted. Most of it is on the internet:
From a purely commercial point-of-view, I get it. There are a lot of apps using the API that don’t serve up any of the ads or tracking that Twitter uses to make money. But these third-party apps were what once made Twitter’s community spirit great – and apps like Twitterific have a great part to play in the history and making of Twitter.
Related: If you live in Oslo, check out my Mastodon instance oslo.town and if you don’t live in Oslo but want to give Mastodon a try, check out this list of Mastodon servers.
Design Conferences List 2023
Whether you do UX, UI, Product Design, Design Research, Interaction Design, or another form of digital design you can attribute to this field, then you might want to check out this big ol’ list of design conferences.
Every year, WhatsApp Product Designer and Twitter user @nunosans collects together all the design conferences that are happening around the world and dumps them in one collaborative spreadsheet, together with dates, links to the official websites, and pricing details.
It’s very useful if you are either looking to go to a conference, looking to speak at a conference, or even just looking to see the recordings of talks they make available live or after-the-event.
The tabs at the bottom of the spreadsheet hop between previous years.
The website of address of Neal Agarwal is appropriate; neal.fun. It has lots of fun little playthings that Neal has coded together. One of the newest additions to the page is a Google Maps mashup.
Launching the site will throw you to random interesting Street View location somewhere around the world. Take a look, drink it up, and then hit the Random button to be whizzed off to the next location.
There’s a lot to look at and I’m sure the more curious-minded amongst us could spend hours clicking away on the site.
Anyway, some genius has made ChatGPT even better by ditching the robots and replacing them with cats. Now here’s some tech that I can fully get behind.
For years and years and years I’ve used the bookmarking service Diigo to save any web links I find interesting. It’s been reliable and consistent, but the developers have been awol for some time.
I’m trying out Mozilla Pocket. If you want to follow me there, you can follow the user @shit-hot to see any bookmarks that I share publicly.
If you know of Yandex, you’re probably Russian or very much into technology. They run a lot of different products and services; web search, email, maps, a web browser, alternative DNS, a taxi service, yada-yada-yada. The simplest way to describe Yandex is Google, but for Russia.
Recently a big chunk of their code was leaked and it gives a really good insight into how a modern search engine is run. For most people, going through this would be very boring, tedious, and uninteresting.
For me, it’s a bit interesting. My time in work is spend designing Microsoft 365 search experiences – so it’s right up my street. The breakdown does get a bit technical, but I’m glad someone at Search Engine Land took the time to do this write-up.
The title says a lot. The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, bought the social networking website Twitter at the end of October 2022(BBC News). As a result of that purchase, a lot of users were unhappy and fled.
The alternative? Mastodon. It’s not run by one single user, but anyone can install the software on their own server. Or, if you’re not that technical, you can just join one of the many servers that already exist.
Because there are many servers, this means the Mastodon network can’t ever be bought up by one individual. This also makes it really tough to tell exactly how many people have given up Twitter for Mastodon – but the answer is seemingly a lot as some of the larger Mastodon sites struggled with the new influx of users, and others reporting massive percentage increases(The Guardian).
The logo for the Mastodon instance oslo.town
If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you will know that I run a version of Mastodon called oslo.town. During October, the site added 100 new people. During the first five days of November, the site grew by an additional 170 people, bringing the total number of people to 680.
A journalist, writing for the Norwegian technology website kode24.no reached out and asked some questions about the growth in traffic and subsequently featured me in an article on their website(This article is in Norwegian).
If you live in the Greater Oslo area, or are interested in Oslo for another reason, feel free to sign up to oslo.town and create your first Mastodon account! If you already have a Mastodon account, you can follow me: @matt@oslo.town
And that’s pretty much the update for this blog post. However, people have a lot of questions about Mastodon, so I’m going to continue below with a Frequently Asked Questions. If you are interested, keep reading…
Frequently Asked Questions (about Mastodon)
If you wish to share this article, but to jump directly to this section, please use the following link: https://coxy.co/3750/#faq
Is Mastodon the same as Twitter?
Mastodon is similar to Twitter, but they are not quite the same. Many of the basic features are the same; you have a Home timeline which shows posts from people you follow, you can follow people and they can follow you back, you can write new posts and share others’ posts to your followers, you can create polls, etc.
However, Mastodon and Twitter work slightly differently and so it can be confusing to new people who sign up to Mastodon.
Where should I sign up for a Mastodon account?
If you are unsure of where you should first sign up for your Mastodon account, you can go to this big list of Mastodon sites and choose a website that you think sounds funny, or similar to your interests.
This works similar to email. If you sign up on Outlook, your email address is probably username@outlook.com but if you signed up at Yahoo! it would be username@yahoo.com.
Do I need to sign up to other servers to read messages on them?
No. You only need one account on one server. From there, you can follow anyone you want – regardless of which server they use – if you know their username.
Simply type their username into the search box on your Mastodon app or website and they should show up. OR, you could visit their page and hit the big ‘Follow’ button and follow the instructions.
How do I find people to follow on Mastodon?
You can find people to follow on Mastodon in a few different ways.
Using and searching for #hashtags. This will allow you to see posts around particular topics or live events. As a starting point, you can try searching for #introduction and will see posts by new people to Mastodon introducing themselves.
Do you know their username? If you know a person’s username, you can put it into the search box and it will show up. If the Mastodon server you use has never ‘met’ this person before, it could take a few seconds before they show up.
‘Explore’ special interest Mastodon servers. Every one of the many Mastodon servers has an Explore page. This is usually at server.name/explore. For example, visiting oslo.town/explore will show you people on oslo.town and each profile will have a ‘Follow’ button.
Thank you for reading this far. If you made it here and still don’t have a Mastodon account, you probably should just sign up now as you clearly like to waste time on the internet.
A few weeks back I ordered some oslo.town stickers from moo.com and as soon as they came, started applying those tacky little dots to various parts of Oslo.
It didn’t take long before all 200 were stuck up and my pockets were empty.
Hopefully, come the new year, I’ll order a lot more and continue to subtly advertise my little social network for Oslo.
The site has very few daily active users, but that’s fine by me. Especially since the site is connected to the fediverse, which already contains millions of users.
