⁂ L. Rhodes

Tinkerer. Fix your hearts or die.

pronouns: he/him/they
location: Atlanta
site: https://lrhodes.net
blog: https://destructured.net

Last Notes

2025-09-19 21:31:37 UTC

- reply

The first thing we can do is distinguish between constructive and other kinds of political discourse. I'm not saying that all political discourse MUST be constructive — venting may not be particularly constructive, but it CAN be cathartic, and blowing off steam is sometimes healthy and necessary. One way to draw that distinction is by using Mastodon's visibility controls. Setting constructive posts to public gives people the most flexibility for finding and filtering them. Limiting the visibility of non-constructive political posts to quiet or followers-only tamps down their viral potential, undercutting the conditions that facilitate doomscrolling.

2025-02-06 20:50:10 UTC

- reply

You can do that with most books on the Kobo store using the "Save preview" link. If you're browsing from the Kobo OS, it's in the ⋯ menu.

2025-01-31 21:08:05 UTC

Being terrified is incapacitating, so maybe stop telling people they should be terrified.

2025-01-24 21:33:15 UTC

- reply

We can debate which is better for political posts, CWs or hashtags, but you should definitely be using at least one of them when you post about politics. If you can't choose between them, using both is fine. But filling people's timelines with unfilterable political discourse quickly turns into a mental health issue. This is one way that we look out for one another and reaffirm one another's agency.
Apply the same standard to political posts you're thinking of boosting.

2025-01-21 15:52:40 UTC

- reply

"Critics of zuckermuskian media claim those services are so terrible because they're for-profit entities, capitalist enterprises hitched to the logic of extraction and profit above all else. The problem with this claim is that it doesn't explain the changes to these services." A big part of the explanation is VC capital, which lets startups work on building scale first, but inevitably requires a shift toward maximally extractive behaviors. I talk about that a bit here: https://destructured.net/bluesky-enshittification

2025-01-21 15:49:22 UTC

- reply

I don't think it's helpful boiling the choice to stay on a toxic platform down to one cause. Some people are there because they can't build the same support networks elsewhere, and some people are there just because they enjoy the daily dopamine hit of seeing what the brands will do next. If we try to argue that it's one or the other exclusively, then we'll miss opportunities to help people shift to networks that are better for them.

2025-01-21 15:44:18 UTC

I have a few quibbles with this: https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/20/capitalist-unrealism/ One being that I think most everyone who has been here for a decent amount of time has had the experience of trying out Mastodon and realizing just how bad their relationship to some other social media platform had gotten.
Yes, there are absolutely people who are locked into other platforms by real, material things, but platform stickiness is a real thing, and it's really, really hard to acurately assess from the inside.

2025-01-20 23:57:52 UTC

MacGyver dinners are dinners you throw together on the spur of the moment using only stuff already in your kitchen, and the better it turns out, the more MacGyver it is.

2025-01-19 02:28:38 UTC

- reply

That's why I always find it a touch ironic when people express anti-billionaire sentiment on Bluesky. The network is built around the assumption that someone will be accumulating wealth from its operation.

2025-01-19 02:09:46 UTC

The ATproto Relay is a machine for converting data into wealth. That's its principle function in the network, and the reason it's located at the center of all interactions.

2024-12-17 21:29:20 UTC

- reply

Are you self-hosted? You could use a log-file analyzer. That's the smallest, least intrusive option. I use GoAccess on my sites, and it's pretty good.

2024-12-03 21:11:33 UTC

Per @npub1l2k…6m2l https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-95/ Nederlandse Publieke Omroep is sunsetting their Mastodon for lack of engagement. That's likely the fate of most broadcasters on the network, so long as engagement is the metric for success. The fediverse just isn't going to compete on engagement because corporate social media is designed to accelerate engagement—part of its sales pitch is delivering measurable eyeballs to media orgs and advertisers. Much of what's best about this network is the result of not functioning that way.

2024-11-22 23:48:10 UTC

- reply

People who have met her say Jay Graber is thoughtful and well-intentioned. Okay, but what happens when she leaves the company? Who will be the next person in charge of the server that contains terabytes of permanent records of every interaction between tens of millions of people? If it took less than two years to convert Twitter into a petty hate machine, maybe that's because its structure already lent itself to that use. If we want a replacement that resists that end, it's necessary to build resistance into the fabric of the thing.

2024-11-22 23:36:54 UTC

- reply

The Bluesky team is earnest and well-meaning, I'm told by people in a much better position to know. They haven't built this huge network around a central indexing machine for nefarious reasons. But that is what they've built: a network anchored to a data collection machine so big and costly that (according to their own white paper) the only entities likely to have the resources to run one are governments and corporations. It ought to be clear by now how that COULD be used for nefarious purposes.

2024-11-22 23:20:25 UTC

- reply

"The assumption that 'Twitter but decentralized' or 'Facebook but open-source and federated' will necessarily be good—rather than differently bad—is a weak one." https://www.wrecka.ge/against-the-dark-forest/

2024-11-22 23:14:14 UTC

- reply

All of this dovetails nicely with @npub1sac…kcpe's "against the dark forest," which has also been making the rounds today. In the dark forest metaphor, a trio of qualities shape our sense of safety online: indexed, optimized, gamified. Bluesky's insistence on anchoring the network to Relays is about ensuring that interactions on the network are all indexed. And because it stores those interaction in Merkle trees, they're indexed permanently.

2024-11-17 13:34:54 UTC

People keep reacting to Blueksky VC news with variations on "now they're going to enshittify," but no. Not yet. VC funding is runway. It's time they can devote to user-friendly features that boost growth. For years to come, Bluesky will look and feel increasingly great. The bits they build in service to their investors will largely be invisible, or presented as optional—data harvesting and brokerage, engagement juicing, blockchain functionality, etc. Enshittification comes later, when the VCs try to wring a little extra juice from an investment that has peaked. It's the coming growth period, when everything seems awesome, that sets us up for that fall.