the washington post has an article up today about the work immigrant groups, newsrooms, and meedan (where I work) have been doing to curb misinformation in non-english language speaking communities for the US midterms, and how gargantuan of a task it is particularly when large centralized platforms continue to be rife with misinformation and moderate non-english content poorly.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/07/whatsapp-wechat-election-lies/

#twittermigration #meta

ok I have seen a lot of people posting introductions to mastodon and how-tos and #feditips, and they've all probably explained it better than I could

but a thing I have not really seen said directly is just that... this isn't twitter, not only in terms of social stuff and general vibe, but in terms of the software and how it works and what the experience of using it will be like, and *that's okay*.

Like. I am Internet Old so I have been through a bunch of social media migrations and sites closing down. adjusting to the new place can be weird and kind of suck sometimes. way back in the day I hung out on message boards most of the time, and when people started to migrate over to using sites like Livejournal, I hated the idea - how could you have proper conversations with people on a *blog*? It would never work, fandom and discussion could never thrive there, right? But as it turned out, even though it was a different experience, it thrived pretty well because people used the threaded comments to hold conversations, and it was actually kind of nice having a space where you could curate your own experience a bit more, and I got used to it.

Also, on livejournal you used to have a choice of 6 (or like 20, if you paid for them) different avatars, and you could choose which one to use for each individual post or comment, and I loved that. So did basically everyone else. Making cool LJ icons was a THING. And when Livejournal decided to jump the shark and I moved over to a new service, I was like what the *fuck*, you just get one icon for everything forever? I hate this and it will never catch on and it's broken and it sucks.

But actually I did get used to it (I mean, ngl, I still think it was an awesome feature and I'd love if it made a comeback somehow, but I did) and it turned out that despite not having multiple icon choices, the new place had a bunch of good stuff about it that Livejournal hadn't had. And then I got used to Tumblr and various similar blogging sites, and even though I missed icons and threaded comments, I loved how easy it suddenly was to find cool art and photography and fandom stuff and other people who liked the things I liked.

And then tumblr jumped the shark and I came over here and I was like, huh this is confusingly different to tumblr and I can't write longform stuff because it's a microblogging platform and cws work differently to readmores and I can't quote-respond to people and that's weird. And, again, turned out that even though the fediverse lacks some stuff I liked, it has its own stuff that makes it awesome.

There is definitely kind of a learning curve to using fedi, but there is when you're getting used to any new site. And I absolutely get that people are missing specific things that they liked on twitter. But I think that maybe sometimes it is helpful to look at it as "Mastodon does stuff differently to Twitter", instead of "Mastodon is FAILING as a Twitter replacement".

Just hit "publish" on a #PairProgramming video course on Gumroad that I made with my former coworker Andrew Edstrom.

It's a bit silly, but it's all the stuff I wish someone had told me when I started #pairing. Self-care, pair care, what a "good" day looks like, common failure modes and how to avoid them.

You can buy it on Gumroad now.

https://simplermachines.gumroad.com/l/zdjtq