I think most people have that good ol’ love-hate relationship. I love a lot of the communication aspects, I hate the ads, spam, invasiveness, and in some cases the user experience. Then there are the studies of mental and emotion issues that can arise from overuse.
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Tik TikTok I am the Kitchen Clock
Boy I hope enough of you get the reference, but for those that don’t, it’s the refrain from Rubber Glove Seduction by PTP, a club song from the late 80s. It’s probably not for listening with your first cup of coffee. Back to today’s TikTok and a Reuters piece, TikTok a potential target in upcoming US bill to ban some foreign tech: “The bill comes at a time when TikTok is under intensifying pressure over concerns that data about U.S. users could end up in the hands of the Chinese government.”
You know what would stop all the political sturm und drang over TikTok, and well all social media? How about a SMDP Act? The Social Media Data Protection Act. It would be a US version of GDPR, with not only all of the protections of GDPR, but also HIPAA protections! Your data would be going nowhere you didn’t want it to go.
Mastodon
All of this brings me to the post about WordPress and Mastodon, WP Tavern’s Sarah Gooding, WordPress Community on Mastodon Launches “Toot the Word” Survey: “A fledgling community of WordPress users on Mastodon has made the network home and are reporting more quality interactions than they experience on other platforms.” While I don’t doubt the quality, I can’t view it. Why?
Sign in with your wptoots.social* credentials. If your account is hosted on a different server, you will not be able to log in here.
* Applies to all of the instances mentioned in the article
This is a big problem. Do we really need to have a million different accounts? How is it that my account at fosstodon.org, a community of like-minded people who enjoy Free & Open Source Software, is invalid? Is the “silo-fication” of social media a net positive? We already have Facebook groups, Post Status Slack, Make.WordPress. Are we as a community limiting contribution and creating barriers to entry for new contributors?