I actually enjoy Mastodon because the “followers” you get or the ones you follow are few and it’s all manageable. I don’t understand the appeal of following so many that you can’t possibly keep up with what they write about or who they are.

Definitely. Most of the time communities are friendly and supportive - but I’ve noticed too that there are users who seem deliberately scratchy and saying things that are looking to provoke and who become fizzy if they’re challenged in any way about something they’ve said. I wondered if it’s much younger users who are coming from other places having picked up the “fight me” attititude there.

That’s probably the best way of dealing with it.

That’s one of the issues, isn’t it? I recently found someone who only responded to comments about Margaret Thatcher, challenging negative comments about her. This person’s history went back years and ALL of the comments (thousands!) only challenged negative ones about her. It could have been a bot, of course, but if real, it was a pretty weird way of engaging online. That goes beyond contrarianism, it’s some sort of “distributed sealioning” maybe?

It’s a hard one, though. I’ve found myself challenging someone who then avoids answering and making other similarly unsupported points… eventually you learn that it’s a waste of time. Equally, you don’t want to leave their comments out there unchallenged.

How can you tell good faith from bad faith?

For instance, can you tell if this question is asked in good faith or not? These things seem very hard know.

Seems to me that’s the point of it: to stop people asking questions in good faith and then persisting on challenging lies and disinformation.

If you haven’t read it, Emily St John Mandel’s last novel, Sea of Tranquility, is excellent and tackles some of the themes if Station Eleven. It’s a time-travelling SF novel mixed with autofiction and ties in with some of her earlier writing. Super-recommended.

The downside is that I’ve virtually stopped writing blog posts and rely on the “microposts”. Not sure if that’s why I started a blog.

I’ve tried all sorts of things and have settled on using Wordpress with a rss widget which publishes my rss feed from Mastodon (it picks up certain hashtags to avoid publishing everything - eg. #blog). It publishes pics and everything. It also works with Pixelfed (maybe not Bsky). There’s probably more elegant ways to do this - and ones involving activitypub - but this one works without much effort setting up.

Could you set up a Cloudflare tunnel and make sure the security rules are tight enough to keep others out?

Have you been listening to and analysing the lyrics of mid-1970s Pink Floyd? If not then that could be your next move.

Yes. I have a 4gb Pi 4 and self-host a Wordpress website, Bookstack, Trilium, Syncthing server and a server to serve images and a couple of other apps which are all internet available through a Cloudflare tunnel. Far from struggling (though admittedly nothing is processor intensive).

I joined as soon as it was open. Very quickly it was full of junk TiKtok videos (many with the Tiktok logo). As others have said you have to keep scrolling through the same videos in the same order to see anything new.

The feature that’s missing is some sort of “filter creator” that would enable users to build their own algos.

(To be fair, I can’t see why Tiktok works as an app other than as some global-scale brainwashing tool.)

I don’t think that Note Station has been updated (other than maybe security patches) for years. I tried it when I was looking for an Evernote replacement and was shocked how basic it is.

Sure I’m not going to be the first one to ask you this but have you tried Obsidian?

I’m fairly noob-ish but have run Tailscale like this for about a year:

Tailscale on your NAS runs as the host and when you open the Tailscale app on your phone you copy the IP it gives you and use that (plus the port that your services like Bitwarden, Calibre etc each use). Eg.

100.121.9.23:8081

THAT’s the sort of IP you the add to the Bitwarden app or type into your web browser.

I’m pretty amateur with tech but found Tailscale pretty easy to set up and run.