rysiek

In May 2001, when the 54th and final volume of the Animorphs series was published, many of its millions of readers felt short-changed by its bleak ending and took to the internet to vent their frustration. Created by American author Katherine Applegate and her husband Michael Grant, Animorphs was a popular science fiction saga for young adults in which a parasitic army of slug-like aliens, called Yeerks, wanted nothing more than to invade Earth but were constantly thwarted by a group of teenagers who possessed the ability to morph into animals. A tale as old as time. To be completely honest, I have never read Animorphs, nor have I watched the TV adaptation, but that did not stop me from enjoying and admiring this refreshingly honest letter, written by Applegate for the attention of the saga's disappointed fans.

The letter ends with the below paragraph, but it is well worth a read in full.

So, you don’t like the way our little fictional war came out? You don’t like Rachel dead and Tobias shattered and Jake guilt-ridden? You don’t like that one war simply led to another? Fine. Pretty soon you’ll all be of voting age, and of draft age. So when someone proposes a war, remember that even the most necessary wars, even the rare wars where the lines of good and evil are clear and clean, end with a lot of people dead, a lot of people crippled, and a lot of orphans, widows and grieving parents.

Recent moves by Eugen Rochko (known as Gargron on fedi), the CEO of Mastodon-the-non-profit and lead developer of Mastodon-the-software, got some people worried about the outsized influence Mastodon (the software project and the non-profit) has on the rest of the Fediverse.

Good. We should be worried.

Mastodon-the-software is used by far by the most people on fedi. The biggest instance, mastodon.social, is home to over 200.000 active accounts as of this writing. This is roughly 1/10th of the whole Fediverse, on a single instance. Worse, Mastodon-the-software is often identified as the whole social network, obscuring the fact that Fediverse is a much broader system comprised of a much more diverse software.

This has poor consequences now, and it might have worse consequences later. What also really bothers me is that I have seen some of this before.

I go on to dive a bit into the history of StatusNet (the software), OStatus (the protocol), and identi.ca (the biggest instance) on a decentralized social network "grandparent" of the Fediverse.

And draw an analogy to show why mastodon.social's size, and Mastodon-the-software-project's influence on broader fedi is a serious risk we need to do something about.

Non-paywalled link here.

To be fair there's quite some needless USAian exceptionalism in there. Still worth the read though.

Almost exactly six months after Twitter got taken over by a petulant edge lord, people seem to be done with grieving the communities this disrupted and connections they lost, and are ready, eager even, to jump head-first into another toxic relationship. This time with BlueSky.

Great, step by step explanation of load balancing, with animated examples. Pretty damn neat!

Polish military is apparently deploying an internally built encrypted communicator based on Matrix.

(PL link but auto-translation should do fine with it)