When I was a kid I had a penpal in Scotland. It was kind of interesting but after a while it became tiresome. One time I got a letter from my penpal with the usual stuff, school, sports, the Beatle…

When “together” is your message, we’re on the same team.

BTW, Twitter started in July 2006. I was an early user, and a fan.

Each podcast shownotes page now has a link, at the bottom, to the home page of the shownotes site, which has a list of all podcasts in the series. There's a lot of good stuff in the previous e…

This year, the Mastodon team returned to FOSDEM for the third time. FOSDEM is an annual gathering of open source developers, held in Brussels. We’re excited to report that the Fediverse is feeling vibrant! FOSDEM has become a central element of EU Open Source Week - a series of events, meetups and workshops that have formed around the conference itself. The range of events makes this trip to Brussels valuable for our team, with opportunities to meet other projects, non-profit organisations, open source foundations, and policymakers. On Friday evening before FOSDEM, a group of around forty Fediverse supporters, builders and enthusiasts got together for a social meetup. This was the first time that several prominent developers across the ActivityPub ecosystem had met in person, and there was an immediate sense of excitement and anticipation! We enjoyed the chance to meet up with both community members, and also developers working on other ActivityPub-related projects. FOSDEM itself runs across Saturday and Sunday. The team had a table with handouts that explained the project; a slideshow covering improvements since last year’s event as well as our roadmap; and some pins and stickers for sale. A few lucky visitors were able to pick up a special _limited-edition_ sticker featuring a “My friends are not for sale” tagline. The Plushtodons also made an appearance, for photo opportunities - unfortunately we were not able to transport any for sale, but folks were able to order new friends directly from the online store. My friends are not for sale stickers - only available at FOSDEM (so far) Reflecting on our third trip to FOSDEM, we’ve been thinking a lot about how things have developed in only three years: * in 2024, Mastodon was the first (and so far, remains the only) Fediverse project to get a stand at the event… and there was no specific conference track for Social Web discussions; * last year, the Social Web track - partly created from the popular demand seen the previous year - was a (packed) half-day affair, with spill over birds of a feather and after hours events; * this year, the track ran throughout the day on Saturday, with _29 speakers_ from countries worldwide, covering both technical and non-technical topics - _and_ there were additional meetups and sessions outside of that! Hannah (Community Director) and Andy (Head of Communications) co-presented a session on Mastodon’s mission, governance and community, and they also announced a forthcoming experiment to extend default server recommendations. > Post by @[email protected] > > View on Mastodon Overall, this year’s Social Web track highlighted the diversity of projects and discussions in the Fediverse ecosystem. It was also a hub of conversation around the need for greater autonomy in technology choices in Europe. It was a very exciting day. Some speakers at the end of the Social Web track (thank you to @Sturmsucht for being with us throughout the day and for sharing the photo!) On Sunday, our Executive Director Felix was part of a discussion about the Fediverse and the EU’s Digital Services Act. Conversations like these provide opportunities to share our mission, and they help to educate policymakers on the values of the Fediverse. Members of the team also took part in other sessions related to the Fediverse; and the others were kept busy with conversations at our table - although, by Sunday, we’d run out of most of the merchandise items we’d taken along… > Post by @[email protected] > > View on Mastodon At Mastodon, we value everyone across the community - our fellow developers, people who run Fediverse servers, and the people who use Mastodon and other connected applications every day. We were happy to be back in Brussels for FOSDEM, and we hope to return to continue the important conversations that happen there. Thank you to everyone who visited our table, for their interest and kind words about the project. We’re building a better social web for everyone, and we were happy to see you there! If you’re curious about what you missed, have a look at the recordings from the Social Web track. ### Thank you for supporting Mastodon We develop and maintain the free and open source software that powers the social web. There is no capital behind this — we rely entirely on your support. Donate to the project View our sponsors

Today's song: Eyes of the World.

Problem in Drummer blogs. oldschool.scripting.com is now served on https and the code in the template doesn't take that into account. For example, if you try to load the home page of my blog, …

Passing on good vibes on the internet

Heard an interview with Kamala Harris. She said they had 109 days to tell them who she is. Right there she highlighted the huge mistake the Dems make and continue to make. Ever since the advent of …

Highly recommend the HBO two-part interview with and profile of Mel Brooks who was 99 years old when the interviews were done. Includes quotes from lots of famous comedians. And the philosophy of c…

My favorite recent snarky slogan. "Just because you're offended doesn't mean you're right." I know so many people who should take that to heart. Acting on being offended is…

Doc has a idea how to stop teams from tanking. Get rid of the lottery. He's right of course. Think of the futility of tanking in the NBA when last year the #1 pick went to the Dallas Mavericks…

An increasingly high percentage of the videos on FB are fake. Some are entertaining, some are boobs (an amazing number) and some are pretty freaking dangerous, to the extent people believe they…

Observed programming behavior. After getting something complicated working, you figure it's all downhill from there, only to realize there's another big hill you have to climb — you…

Another example of ChatGPT utility. Asked this question: "I have a function named viewFeedItem. Inside it has an icon that when you click it, it calls viewFeedItem to view the parent of the it…

Jatan Mehta on exploring where to host his fediverse presence, from Mastodon to Ghost to Micro.blog. Whenever I read something like this, it reaffirms our decision to take a quieter approach to the social web. Less counting, less noise.

I still love my Keurig coffee maker. The coffee is delicious and hot and it's truly a technology marvel. So simple and easy to learn.