I started using Mastodon a few days ago, and it has been great so far! I’d like to take a few minutes to talk about what makes Mastodon special, and to provide some counter-arguements to the FUD that I’m seeing about Mastodon all over my feed on birdsite.

In my last newsletter, I talked about Journalism as a weapon against corruption and lies. Of course, in that instance I was talking about Police Brutality and the lies our president tells us. I was not talking about new school officials with fake degrees, but some students in Pittsburg just proved that the truth is equally effective there.

Mastodon is a free, open-source social network. A decentralized alternative to commercial platforms, it avoids the risks of a single company monopolizing your communication. Pick a server that you trust — whichever you choose, you can interact with everyone else. Anyone can run their own Mastodon instance and participate in the social network seamlessly.

I’ve just stumbled across this particularly excellent Handheld Raspberry Pi project from Node. It is built around the Raspberry Pi 0 W, with built in Wifi and Bluetooth, and it looks like a perfect weekend project, and exactly the kind of thing I wished I had when I was 15.

A few days ago, over on Boingboing, Rob Beschizza shared his new writing setup. A planck keyboard, an old iMac, and some beautiful vintage speakers, tucked away in a corner of his abode.