I'm on Mastodon

Hello everyone,

I hope you're all well.

I'm on Mastodon now.

You can find me here at Veganism Social.

If you have Mastodon, you should definitely follow me!

I quit Twitter and deleted my account shortly after Elon Musk acquired it. I don't approve of anything he's done for it, and I don't want to support him by writing my thoughts on the platform and giving people another reason to visit it (leading people to click ads and fund Twitter). It is indeed my hope that the whole platform falls.

Social media serves as a public square where people can meet others, voice their ideas and think out loud in a public space. These are remarkably valuable and should not be privately owned and controlled.

Mastodon is part of the Fediverse. No one organisation controls all of it. Anyone can host their own Mastodon server, where people can make accounts and posts, much like Twitter. These Mastodon servers, in turn, can communicate with each other; hence, it is a federation. Power is distributed across many nodes of control, and it is straightforward to move from one instance to another and keep your following.

There are no algorithms dictating what content is served; there is no need to subtly influence what people see and click to manipulate their behaviour so that they are more likely to spend more time on the platform or click on ads.

Mastodon definitely feels different to Twitter. I don't feel as strong a desire to check my posts and replies. It is not designed to push and pull my attention in this way and that.

About Veganism Social, it is the specific instance of Mastodon I am on.

A federation is when different states unify. Australia is an example; we used to be altogether different nations before the states unified in a federation.

Federation in Mastodon is the same. From veganism.social, I'm able to interact with other servers. The sum total of these servers is referred to as the Fediverse.

The purpose of this design is to protect social media from:

  1. Centralised Control
  2. Corporate interests

I have been posting here for a few months now and have over two hundred followers. You can see my posts here.

If you want to set up a Mastodon account, I highly recommend joining one of the servers in this list.

As it is a federation, they all talk to each other, and you can connect with me no matter which one you choose.

Other Things

I started a part-time job this year as a Web Developer. I'm making enough money to live comfortably enough, and I have no intention of ever transitioning to full-time. I've been using this time to read a lot, and I want to eventually return to writing regularly.

I've recently read a book called The Dawn of Everything, which I've really enjoyed. It argues that the conventional narrative of history is all wrong and that there is no deep reason why human societies require hierarchy to function when they reach a certain scale. Neither farming nor cities require hierarchies or governments. Cities, in fact, predate monarchies by a few thousand years, and monarchies originated in smaller villages. We have found ancient cities with no evidence of wealth inequality. When the archeologists first started digging, they believed they had found a palace before realising that everyone in the city lived the same way.

You should definitely watch this TED Talk by David Wengrow, one of the two authors of the book.

I want to learn more about history, economics, politics, and how the world works in general. My reading list at the moment is as follows:

  • Archaeology: A Very Short Introduction by Paul Bahn
  • History: A Very Short Introduction by John H.Arnold
  • A Marxist History of the World by Neil Falkner
  • How the World Works: The Story of Human Labour from Prehistory to Modern Day
  • Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti
  • How Infrastructure Works by Deb Chachra
  • Das Kapital by Karl Marx

I don't expect to finish reading through all of these this year.

I'm still learning Japanese. It's been about three years now. I now have a streak on jpdb of over five hundred days; apparently, I know over six thousand words. My language learning strategy involves using digital flashcards on that website to learn ten new words daily and spend a lot of time listening to and watching content in Japanese. I hope to become fluent one day, but that day will not be any time soon.

I've also been playing through the Life is Strange series of games in Japanese, which has been fun.

I'm also remaking my website; I want to stop using Ghost CMS and switch to something much lower-tech. I'm writing a Rust library that generates XHTML documents (like HTML but stricter). I'm going to want my whole website to basically be text files. I'll also start sending these emails as plain text files.

And that's everything from me for today,

Take care everyone,

Sashin