fubarx

Years ago. Was visiting a client on-site. Meeting ran late and had to race home. Popped into a 'natural' food store to get something. Grabbed a package of pre-made 'fresh' shrimp spring rolls out of one of those open coolers. Ate in the car.

A 1.5 hour drive turned into a four hour nightmare with all the unplanned stops.

Never again.

Friend of mine used to volunteer for the local chapter of a well-known national non-profit. He tried to explain all the technical benefits of setting up a website, yada yada. The board didn't care and were bored.

He finally set up a small demo on his own. Just a few screens. Ran a small test. Presented static screenshots, along with charts and stats on viewership and engagements. Had mockups of donation pages, volunteer signup screens, newsletters, etc. That was when people saw the value and got interested.

Nobody cares about decentralized social networks, the technology, or how terrible the other outlets are. For a municipality, you may want to focus on maintaining multiple channels of communications and ways to reach and engage the most users. You could then fold the fediverse into it as one more channel. Something they should keep an eye on. They'll need a way to post the same content to all those channels with the least effort. Something easy that a trained intern or clerk can do.

Guarantee there will be questions of cost of setup, maintenance, and risks. May want to have some answers and slides ready.

Management would fold in 24 hours if they threatened to withhold Wordle.

Robert Caro's "The Power Broker."

There's also a 50-year anniversary, 12-part, 99% Invisible series diving into it. Looking forward to listening to those alongside each section.

Please stop by the office and pick up your combo Nobel Prize in Physics and Chemistry.

I agree with Cory that being reliant on a single organization puts us at risk. But disagree that Mastodon (as much as I like it) is the solution.

The thing with account portability is to understand Why someone moves from a server or service to another, and then How.

If you're initiating the move because of some philosophical difference with the server admins, or if it crashes often, or is gracefully shutting down, there's one path. But if you've been summarily blocked from access or there's malicious behavior (i.e. DDOS), there's another flow that needs to be addressed.

Even there, are you completely blocked or just from posting? , You could theoretically still access the APIs to move your stuff away vs. a hard block.

There's also the matter of forwarding addresses. Again, depends on the Why and How.

But the most important issue is that when you move, you want to lose as little as possible. That means your posts, comments/replies, likes/unlikes, who you follow, and those who follow you, as well as any media being hosted on that site.

Ideally, you pack up everything, go somewhere else, unpack, and everything works as before. But in reality, you're lucky just to get any of your posts out. There's a fairly high cost to a move, which will create friction (if you initiated the move) or total loss (if initiated by mods or malicious actors).

Neither Bluesky, Mastodon, Lemmy, or any other Federated or centralized solution out there lets you handle all the above permutations and scenarios. You're still screwed if you get banned. You still will lose a lot, have to recreate a lot to get close to being where you were.

And there's a reason for that. Nobody likes to spend valuable tech cycles working on features that get people OUT of their service. They'll do something as an abstract idea, but they've only got so many cycles and, unless required by legislation, they would rather spend them on fixing bugs and adding features over something that leads to fewer users.

So until someone comes up with a workable, perfect solution to COMPLETE portability, which is what Cory really wants, you might as well enjoy the features and communities on whatever service you're on.

So Rwanda's "very lovely gap years" are back on the menu.

In the words of the late Molly Ivins, one of the best political columnists in the U.S.: "The first rule of holes. When you're in one, stop digging."

Microsoft Growth Mindset = Amazon Day One

Agile in schools.

Because light-blue weighs less than blue.

Depends on the color of the feather and the ball.

There's a simple explanation.

"Congratulations everyone! We've proved without a doubt that the earth is flat. What should we do next?"