Today was the first day of a three-day off period I took from work as a late birthday … thing, for myself. But, the first thing I did when I woke up, was I jumped onto my PC and started writing a guide to ActivityPub. Why did I do this? Well …
There are a lot of misconceptions about AP, and Mastodon in-general. I see people saying things like, “It’s too hard,” or, “I don’t want one account for everything!” The latter is a misunderstanding, and the former is only a matter of having the information you need right in front of you.
ActivityPub software, be it Mastodon, Peertube, Pixelfed–they all have “join” pages, but there isn’t much in the way of connecting them all together onto one page, so someone can find them all and look at them, and read them, and maybe even learn a few things about AP and all the software that revolves around it.
So, I solved that problem … a little bit, today. And I hope it helps someone relieve their fear about jumping in, and getting at least somewhat away from the corporate slog of having ads constantly shoved in their faces while everything they write and create is scraped for soulless bots.
On the topic of ActivityPub, though, I received the unfortunate news that the Peertube instance I’ve been using for a few years are voluntarily winding down their instance due to, and in their own words, “capitalism and climate change.” I’m not entirely sure what they mean by that, but fair game.
In an attempt to keep my presence and my hundred-some videos on the Peertube network, I copied everything to infosec.exchange, and you can follow that account there! (If you want to.)
And, finally, the reason I decided to write that whole guide in order to help people get away from corpo-social-media, is because Meta is in testing on Instagram with unskippable ads. Not specifically on Reels, but just … on the timeline. While you’re scrolling. Like some cheap smartphone app trying to make revenue for its sole developer.
You can read more about all of that here.
But what this is, is just another display of complete lack of care for the users who populate a piece of software in favor of the already fat wallets of investors, and advertisers. After a long six months of hearing and reading that generative AI is all about investors, I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m sick and tired of whoever these investors and advertisers are, thinking they can just destroy all of the internet as we know it … for a couple bucks.
And that’s why it’s time to leave that behind. Maybe not all at once. Maybe in baby steps. But, the most important first step, is to try.
Try to take back some of your identity, and ownership of your own data. If you can’t vote with your wallet, vote with your presence, and leave these apps, and developers, to destroy their software in peace. Since most of these corporations seem hell-bent on burning down the internet … for no reason.
No reason at all.
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