Eight years ago Lance Ulanoff had a problem. William
Shatner could not find him on Mastodon.
His distress is understandable, relatable even. Who wouldn’t want to
be found by Captain Kirk himself! The
Again, as I wrote in my blogpost, one of the problems was that Ulanoff conflated fedi and Mastodon. You are not writing this on Mastodon, but you are writing this on fedi. This is something that Ulanoff missed completely.
Anyway, as I said, you are welcome to interpret stuff anyway you like. To me, his piece was just hilariously lazy, conventional to an almost self-parody level “tech journalism”, and that’s what I call him out on in my blogpost.
I am not saying Mastodon-the-software-project has no issues, I am not saying fedi has no issues – I talk about those issues in other places at length. But “Shatner could not find me and ‘toot’ sounds silly therefore this network will not survive” is a take that needs to be pointed at and laughed at when it comes from someone so high up on the tech journalism ladder.
I guess I read it as a general indictment on Masto doomsayers because… well, the take may deserve a response, but singling it out almost a decade after the fact seems weirdly specific. Notably, he was himself responding to a piece in the same medium titled “Bye, Twitter. All the cool kids are migrating to Mastodon (And the big-name brands are following closely behind)”, which proved to be just as incorrect.
That’s a long time and a narrow view to hold a gotcha on some random tech journalist. Lots of hot takes to get mad about in that space, particularly in the late 2010s. I mean, this piece came out when the conversation around this wasn’t even about people fleeing the increasingly decomposing post-Musk corpse of Twitter. The version of Masto he was writing about and its interoperability wasn’t even that obvious. You made me look it up. Masto wasn’t even using ActivityPub at the time, apparently. There were hotter takes much later, and it seems reasonable to interpret you going over an early one as a proxy of the whole debate.
Again, as I wrote in my blogpost, one of the problems was that Ulanoff conflated fedi and Mastodon. You are not writing this on Mastodon, but you are writing this on fedi. This is something that Ulanoff missed completely.
Anyway, as I said, you are welcome to interpret stuff anyway you like. To me, his piece was just hilariously lazy, conventional to an almost self-parody level “tech journalism”, and that’s what I call him out on in my blogpost.
I am not saying Mastodon-the-software-project has no issues, I am not saying fedi has no issues – I talk about those issues in other places at length. But “Shatner could not find me and ‘toot’ sounds silly therefore this network will not survive” is a take that needs to be pointed at and laughed at when it comes from someone so high up on the tech journalism ladder.
I guess I read it as a general indictment on Masto doomsayers because… well, the take may deserve a response, but singling it out almost a decade after the fact seems weirdly specific. Notably, he was himself responding to a piece in the same medium titled “Bye, Twitter. All the cool kids are migrating to Mastodon (And the big-name brands are following closely behind)”, which proved to be just as incorrect.
That’s a long time and a narrow view to hold a gotcha on some random tech journalist. Lots of hot takes to get mad about in that space, particularly in the late 2010s. I mean, this piece came out when the conversation around this wasn’t even about people fleeing the increasingly decomposing post-Musk corpse of Twitter. The version of Masto he was writing about and its interoperability wasn’t even that obvious. You made me look it up. Masto wasn’t even using ActivityPub at the time, apparently. There were hotter takes much later, and it seems reasonable to interpret you going over an early one as a proxy of the whole debate.