Kevin Marks @KevinMarks@xoxo.zone

Sunset hill walk

“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you’re dead.”

“Words don’t deserve that kind of malarkey. They’re innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they’re no good any more, and Brodie knocks corners off without knowing he’s doing it. So everything he writes is jerry-built. It’s rubbish. An intelligent child could push it over.…

Stoppard on GPT3 et al:
“He’s a lout with language. I can’t help somebody who thinks, or thinks he thinks, that editing a newspaper is censorship, or that throwing bricks is a demonstration while building tower blocks is social violence, or that unpalatable statement is provocation while disrupting the speaker is the exercise of free speech…

I'm on a Bluesky panel about interoperability tonight, though it's on twitter spaces, which only seems to work on my phone
https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1vAxRkVrMPzKl

Spring lambs, springing

In a classic silo, who you share a server shard with is an implementation detail, but choosing an instance does define a neighbourhood for you. Choosing to join witches.town or awoo.space or botsin.space will give you a different experience from mastodon.social

These make the substructure manifest. Local is everyone else posting on your instance. The people who share a server with you are now a default peer group. The Federated public is even more confusing to those with a silo viewpoint. It shows all the posts that this instance has seen - GnuSocial calls it “the whole known network” - all those followed by you and others on your instance. This is not the whole fediverse, it’s still a window on part of it.

Maybe time to repost http://www.kevinmarks.com/mastodontheory.html for those showing up from twitter
The structure of Mastodon and GnuSocial instances provides multiple visible publics by default, and Mastodon's columnar layout (on wider screens) emphasises this. You have your own public of those you follow, and the notifications sent back in response, as with Twitter. But you also have two more timeline choices - the Local and the Federated.

@cstross the choice of instance is about both sysadmin policy and who shows up in the local tab (same instance) and world tab (everyone that people on your instance follow).
There are a lot of SFF people on wandering.shop for example.