Wash it down.
Oh, Okay.
Hello, everyone. This is, Wednesday June the 12, th 2024 is the monthly meeting of the St.
Louis Unix users group. This is the book end slug is the nickname of the group And as usual, we do a Oreo cookie style meeting.
The announcements, the introductions are in the middle of the meeting at We Center of the Cookie.
And on the front end, we have a. An introduction of basic oriented session. Tonight it's going to be about an introduction to sniffing, like wire shark and TCP dump.
That'll be Grant and Lee. And then at the end of the meeting, the second part of the meeting will be, main presentation by Scott Graneman on social media for nerds, Okay.
And so that'll be coming up after the announcements in intros, Q&A in the middle of the.
So with that, I'm gonna turn it over to, Lee and Grant and we're gonna learn all about more sniffing.
It's part one last month.
Alright. Let's get started here. I'm going to share my desktop. And show some.
Introductory points for people to think about. Sure, the idea here is I'm sitting in my workstation here in the shop.
And this is the one I use. All of the time. And I want to be able to sniff traffic on a machine somewhere else in the world.
Okay. We have a machine out in the rack here called Bach 2. Which is the clone of the original Bach.
So what I did.
I have a log in to Bach. 2 right here. And it's called, you know, it is.
Everybody knows what the SSH config is, I hope. But I also are basically copied that config.
And added my key. To the root user on box 2. Such that.
Now here I'm on.
If I go to b 2 r. No, I'm logged in as root.
And if I look at the keys on clock 2. There's 3 of them there. The top 2 are.
For pulling backups. This is the key from our backup server, which is core.
Does anybody see the screen? I'm not seeing. I just see a black screen.
You're saying it?
I'm seeing it. Yes.
Yeah.
Alright, let me try reconnecting I guess.
Oh, hold on, you see in the black screen, are you seeing? You see the black stream with the chart on it?
Are you seeing a black screen with the lines of information from the
I'm looking at a terminal emulator. Showing the SSH authorized key file in VI.
Yeah, I don't see any text. I see a large screen.
Just connect and reconnect.
You got a problem. Yeah, go ahead. Okay.
Alright.
Go on, and we can dilly dally for a moment to let him drop and come back.
Sure. Yeah, this is, you know, the, my main workstation is Storm. This is the public key from my storm system.
And I dropped it in the authorized keys file on box 2. I will point out up here at the top.
There is a line that's been commented out because it broke at some point. I never bothered to fix it.
If you're doing this in a production environment, Grant and I were talking about this before. This is a very Simple way, in fact, if I, if I'm thinking correctly, Grant.
Correct. Yes, you can.
We can use the from. Without the command part, right? Okay, so technically I could put a from down here in front of my key.
Yep.
And make sure that this key was only used if it was coming from my workstation basically. Which would be a level of security above and beyond.
Yep.
Just having a key pair that could be accessed with that private key from anywhere in the world. That makes it.
Would that be require an IP number or because that ending stuff? That's symbol is your host name.
Yeah.
Right, it's the part that he has highlighted and that will be the remote IP address that the SSH Damon sees the client coming from.
Thank you.
3
Okay, it's gonna see IP address is not gonna see. A host name. Cause there's no DNS involved here.
So you have to use the IP address.
I think you can get it to use DNS, but it's better to use IP.
Okay. Yeah.
Cool, Tony can see us. We can move forward.
Alright. There the next step. In that security. Is to add a command requirement.
When we back up machines, we have to have root access. Typically, we would restrict that root access to keys.
While you're typing, I want to interject. You're describing best practices for security.
That is not an actual requirement for the remote sniffing that we're doing this evening. It makes things easier.
To just allow the connection.
Yeah. And. So, so tonight we are talking about the simplest way to do it. Next month we will add some.
More complex options to the process. But for the basic. Route key. You change your SSHD config.
To prohibit password, which allows keys by default, which is the opposite.
And this is how you.
Enable root login from outside over SSH.
If you were doing the force commands only.
You would turn on that option here in the SSHD. And then you would be. Restricted to
Command. In this case, they are single.
This is Stan. I don't quite understand that. We restricted to commands.
Okay.
SSA has.
For commands only. I mean, I remember reading the man page, but I didn't understand it.
SSH has an option where you can say people can authenticate using this key. But no matter what they gave remote plans or trying to get a shell.
The server is saying nope. I am treating it as if you are running this command. I am forcing this command on you.
So it's good for things like backups. In case God forbid the key pair on the backup server become compromised if somebody else gets a hold of it.
And they try to connect to this. Server machine that Lee is on right now, that key pair could only be used.
Thank you, I understand that. All right.
For our sync with the parameters specified there. So it's. Yeah.
Okay.
Okay, so that's how the SSH works. That's how I can as my user.
And, LVL. When I SSH to b 2 r.
I end up with root because my public key. Is in the authorized key file for. The root users are on back too.
That makes sense everybody.
Okay.
Right. The way I use it, normally I don't allow root. I have it go in as my user ID and you're front-ending it in his LVL, your user ID.
Stan, you're talking about what is best practices. We have kind of sidestepped those right now.
Oh.
To make this demonstration easier. We're trying to introduce a little bit of complexity each time.
Okay, thank you. Understood.
Yeah. Yeah.
Trying to make it, I can understand it.
Yeah, this is step 2. And, you know, we'll get to the point that we could actually capture traffic here and then we will.
Next month, talk about how more details about how we filter that traffic and other options for authentication.
Take the and not port 2 2 0 6 off. From the toe stubborn.
Thank you.
Okay, so. Basically, I want to SSH. To b 2 r, which is B 2 root.
And I have a command here. I'm gonna do a TCP dump. In fact, Grant, why don't you go over some of these?
I'm not I'm not too conversant with some of the options.
Momentarily a real quick aside Stan since you were just asking. The what's inside the double quotes is the remote command that Lee is passing to Bach to route.
And that's where the force commands can say, I don't care what command you give me, I'm saying no.
I'm gonna run what's in the authorized keys file.
So full path to TP dump. I sorry the dash you escapes me at the moment we'll have to check the man page.
The dash s specifies the snap length, how much of a packet to capture and 0 means capture everything.
Dash w means we want to write the capture out to a file. And the single dash is a long time Unix Linux.
Standard nomenclature for standard out. And then not port 53. Is a filter to give TSP dump to say I want any traffic that is not port 53.
Okay.
Nice. You originally intended. To have port 53. Since some of the genesis of this talks about DNS testing.
On Bach months ago on mailing list.
So what we're doing is we're SSH in from Lee's workstation, his preferred place, his got his favorite mouse and keyboard and theme and everything.
Let's turn the way he likes it. To log in to Bach 2 as the root user.
To start a traffic dump. And send that traffic dump. Back to his workstation. Through SSH.
Then we're gonna take that traffic dump. And feed it into Wireshark. Using the pipe operator there.
And telling Wireshark. I don't recall the K. We need to look that up. I'm sorry.
And the dash I is where to read. The capture from and again you see the single dash. As standard in.
Maybe check man page for TCP dump real quick.
Talk amongst yourself for a moment. The dash you on TP Dump turns off buffering.
Okay, what else did we have?
Dash K on wire shark. I don't know. I have to get to a system that has wire shark on it.
Or yeah, if you would please.
Don't have, oh, sorry, wrong.
Wireshark is not on B 2.
Yeah.
That's part of the purpose of this.
And let's see, we're looking for
Correct.
Go to the next one.
Start the capture session immediately.
Gotcha.
Here's the minus I was specify the capture uses the specified interface otherwise wired shark searches a list of interfaces Choosing the 1st non loop back if there any non like yadda yadda
So we're. Remotely running TSP. Taking that output and bringing it back. To Lee's workstation and running Wireshark on the workstation and Wireshark will analyze that and provide a whole bunch more creature features.
That CLI based TSP dump does not provide.
Hit the
Did it open on another window?
Good question. Oh, no, it don't depend on this window. It was under.
Yeah.
Okay. Yep. Now we see Wireshark looking at traffic. Going to But he's looking at it on his local workstation.
And there's a whole bunch of traffic. If you go back to the other window and hit Control C to stop it.
But leave wire shark open or did it close?
Yeah, I know I quit.
Okay. Okay. Hit the up arrow, start again and then. Once we start.
Shop.
Seeing some things, try the. I'm waiting. In a moment, I was hoping to see some TCP dump.
But yeah, let's try the stop there.
Okay, so yeah, click on some of that TCP traffic. And then, yeah. Sure.
Okay, if you notice down below we're seeing source port 2 2 0 6. Which that happens to be.
The port that Lee is running SSA Tong on that system. So this is a classic toe stubborn.
With remote packet filter. Sniffing. You end up the traffic. That you captured.
To come back to you, you're recapturing the traffic coming to you. So.
I'm not familiar with the term toast of her.
Something you stub your toe on a bounce up and down on your other foot for a few minutes using some selective 4 letter words while your toe is throbbing.
It's kind of like, smashing your thumb with a hammer.
Make sense?
Yep.
Or drop in a brick on your toe. I think maybe. If you finish explaining why this is a awkward thing maybe that all oh
Fair enough. So. The packet capture. Is in some ways it's in a feedback loop.
He's listening on the Ethernet interface that the traffic coming back to him. Is going over.
So what you want to do, Lee, if you'll go back to your terminal window.
And you can quit without saving and will restart.
Yeah, all right here.
Okay.
Yep. Add the and not port. Yep. So now we're telling TP Dump, do the filter.
But don't capture port 2 2 0 6, which is where SSH is running on this server.
So go ahead and start that.
Okay.
I'm, I'm stopping my toe on camera here. Hmm. Okay, now that we've got that properly, I can stop doing that.
Yeah.
Okay. Let's actually stop and let's add and not. To it.
Think that's the proper syntax.
Right now.
Yep.
Yeah.
Hey, that looks a whole lot quieter. Would somebody else is so you're filtering DNS.
SSH and ARP. Okay, ICMP. That's a great one. So you're sniffing.
Remotely and displaying locally.
So where it says apply display filter. Below the stop fin restart fin settings. Down the apply display filter.
Yeah.
Pipe ICMP and hit Enter.
And that filters the received packets and only displays ICMP. And Wireshark, you can see a whole bunch.
More features. Like it's decoding the ICMP destination unreachable. It decodes.
Echo request, pings and replies. You can see the binary output. You can save it to local files.
So you have the full feature. Of Wire Shark. On data coming from a remote system. Where you don't want the security.
Of wire shark. Let me read the question that was just posted.
So can I please explain? How these 2 systems are set up, I think is what you're asking.
Okay, so Lee has a system somewhere across the internet. Called Bach 2. We kind of have an idea where it is in St.
Louis, but whatever. And he also has his work station that's sitting in front of him and his comfortable chair with food and a drink beside him.
I' it on Mars if you want to capture traffic. And have that captured traffic come back across.
The internet routed network through SSH. And display in Wireshark on Lee's workstation.
Wherever he wants. My use case for this was back when I was consulting. I had Wireshark with a whole bunch of different tweaks.
Setting hostnames, protocols. Filters, all the things I would use routinely on my workstation in my office.
And I had a whole bunch of clients. That had small Linux boxes acting as routers. So with this, I could say somebody was having a problem talking to a printer in their office.
And or something else. Whatever. I could SSH. To their router.
And run a network sniffer. Listening to their office land. And have it display on the workstation in my office and figure things out.
And then 1520 min later after after I figured out what it was, some an email explaining I could disconnect, then I could turn and I could do the same method.
To my production web server that was located at Kolo downtown to troubleshoot. Encryption TLS issue, forthcoming demo.
This is.
Or an SMTP issue or what have you. And. They're from a security mindset.
The more things. That you dissect and analyze. The process of dissection. Can be a potential security issue.
So there's a lot of people that will tell you you do not want to run Wireshark with all of its capability.
On security sensitive systems because What if somebody pops Wireshark? If you're running that on a sensitive system, they've just popped that system.
Well, with running Wireshark on my workstation, which I have a good backup of.
And it's not the remote security sensitive system. I can use just the smallest amount I need to capture via TCP dump.
I can send that back across the network. And if something is gonna pop, Wireshark, it's on my workstation, not the security sensitive system.
I can blow it away. I have a good backup. I can restore it. So I'm separating where I'm sniffing with TsP Dump.
Server somewhere else. Versus where I'm analyzing it on my workstation where it's comfortable for me and I have all my favorite fonts and color settings, what have you.
Does that make more sense?
That's really an interesting concept that You're distinguishing between these security concern and the need to fix something.
Yes.
They're very important. You can obviously see both of them in a real world situation.
Yep.
I don't know. I assume that B 2 is a virtual machine. But I will also say I don't think it matters because this same methodology applies equally as well to a virtual machine, a physical machine.
A change route jail, a local zone on Sluris box. It's, I'm just doing something to get the network sniffing.
The bare minimum thing required to capture the packets. Send the packets back to me. And then I have the full analyzing on.
Wireshark. Let's sneak peek something else. Hit the stop button, please, Lee.
And then go to, I think it's the statistics menu.
In points.
So here is a very fast report that Wireshark can give me that I would have to scrape.
Output from TSP Dump. And post process and do a whole bunch of things. I can see there's 3 Ethernet MAC addresses involved in communications.
If you click the IPv floor tab, We can see. Yeah, there's 97 different IP addresses that have been captured.
No IPv 6, Lee, do you not have IPv 6? Okay. And TSP.
DOt for a TCP tab, you can see some things specific about TCP.
And UDP as well. I could also. Okay, go ahead and close that tab.
Where it says ICMP. In the display filter box, change that to be TCP, please.
Right click on one of them, an actual TSP packet.
Well, that is okay. Here's TCP, okay.
Right click. Believe it is, where is it? Follow.
Further down there you go So we got 2 windows, the one that's in the foreground is the actual data content.
There isn't any. But this demonstrates I can very easily inside Wireshark. Pick a packet and say, I want to follow this entire stream.
This is tremendously helpful if you're trying to trace an email issue or something or web issue, what have you.
Where there's hundreds of packets flowing per second. And I care about 30 of them. If I get a capture.
The typical idea when doing a capture is get a whole bunch of data. Just capture as much as you can hold.
And then you filter that down to what you need. Maybe what's related to what you need. And you can pick.
Just an entire thing. Like, ically somebody is having problems. Configuring their latest mobile phone to log in to.
Email server. And they don't know what settings need to be put in place. Back before encryption was a common thing.
You could very easily identify, hey, What either what is your globally routed IP? Or try 3 or 5 times in a row.
Yes, it's going to fail, but I am going to use those 3 or 5 failures as a marker.
I can then identify in logs. Which you are. And then I can take the IP from logs and I can look at that traffic and I can go, oh.
You've typed something. Or a recent case. 4 day job is. Printing was not working and come to find out the system was not even trying to communicate with the printer.
Despite everything saying it should be. Well, come to find out, dig a little deeper, a script that is part of the interface.
To send stuff to the printer was messed up. So the script was failing right away and it was never shipping anything to the printer.
Debugging that with out network sniffing. Would have taken days longer, whereas it was, it took me about 45 min using an upward sniffer.
And with Wireshark, I can see a whole bunch of things with a whole bunch of tools.
At my disposal in a non-sensitive security context. While I still get data. From a remote, sensitive security context.
I'll quit monologging while I drink and let me talk for a few.
Oh, I'll do suggest is let's go back.
And kill this and if I'm not blowing smoke
This should give us only Yeah, DNS traffic, right?
Yes, caveat. It doesn't do DNS over HTTPS or DNS over TLS, but it will get traditional DNS.
Right, okay. Yeah, it's, the non secure version.
Yeah.
So if I'm going in here, I'm capturing. And if I jump out on and do a host.
Google.com. I can see. That DNS handshake that I just initiated on.
Huh. And the Not the actual bites towards the bottom, but the collapse sections. If you'll slide that up.
And then click the little twisty next to DNS.
Domain name system left hand side.
Oh, up here?
Here.
Nope, the middle section. Down. Click on a packet again.
Oh, yeah, yeah, and it's okay.
Okay. Down 3. Yeah, there you go. And drag your window up a little bit.
Click the Twysty Next to Queries.
So here you can see. More details Wireshark is actually exploding things out and I don't have to know what different hex values mean in DNS.
I don't have to know what something means in TLS. I don't have to know something HTTP.
Wiresharks display. Sstem will interpret that and I go, oh. 20619725121 one which we can make it give a hostname sent a DNS query to dot 2 50 which we can make a Gibb hosting and was asking for google.
Dot com So Wireshark. Will display. Things and make it a whole lot easier. And you got multiple queries.
If you right click on one. You should be able to, I think, follow it and it will see you can see the query and the reply.
UDP strength. So there's the actual binary. Displayed as it is.
But we can see above the 2 packets. That made up that DNS query.
So a lot of times when I do follow a screen, I don't even wanna see the raw bytes.
I just wanted to do the filter of, okay, here's the few packets that have to do with.
The specific thing I was looking at and I wanna see. The analyzers that are in the background window.
So.
No, have we blown everybody everybody away or?
We had a question for SSH. I get to port 22. One of the 1st things I started doing 30 years ago is security by obscurity.
So I moved our standard SSH port to 22 0 6. In fact, that is because it was.
Port 22 in 2,006
That's when we started doing it. More recently, I've started using 6 5 0 2 2.
When I'm looking to be, you know, if I, if I'm exposing a port to the public internet.
Yup. And. I used a high port 1 8 9 7 6 for a long time. For the same reason.
I started getting people knocking on it. I have now put it behind. Port knocking. That's another question discussion for another time.
Or new people that have joined us. This session is recorded. It will be on our presentation archives.
And also this is Part 2, last month we had part one.
And next month we'll probably have part 3.
I think we were going, we had talked about doing an intermission. Where we spent a little bit of time.
Showing how to get keys set up and authenticating to pseudo using keys. And then the following month, we were going to use that.
To do it the more secure method.
Or
I liked it.
That I like. Good idea.
Okay, Lee, if you will the where it says UDP stream equals 2 in the query bar right below the buttons.
Take that out or you could hit the X on the right hand side of that.
So there. If you were paying attention to mailing lists within the last couple of months, we were talking about how long.
DNS queries were taking. So I think if you go to the view menu. Lee?
Hang on. Time there should be one that's a delta between packets. Second since previous captured packet or second since previous displayed packet please Up, up.
Oh, okay.
Hmm.
Yep. Click that. So there, Wireshark. Click on packet number one, please.
And if you notice the little 2 arrows on the right. Are showing that those are related. The time from packet number one going out and packet number 2 coming in.
0 point 0 3 1 and change seconds. So another feature of Wireshark. I don't have to do time math.
It can tell me how long between packets. If you click on packet 3. It's actually the time since the previous one, but that's an outgoing query.
The incoming response was 0 point 3 1 seconds.
And then if you see on packet 7. That was a later something else on the system. You just happened to capture it.
Was Clam AV doing a query. To check the current version of the KLAM database.
And I bet if you click on the reply, packet 8, we'll see something interesting. Transaction ID, okay, query, expand answers, please.
Below queries. 2 thirds the way down.
Sorry, I missed it. Where
Keep going.
Further, further down, further down, right there.
There you go, answers.
Oh, Andrew, okay.
Nope. Yes, sir. Okay, so we have a text record came back in response and have the value.
So if anybody is curious at the time of this recording. The current Clam AV database version is 0 point 1 3.1 1.
And change in details I don't know about. But this is an example of how. Fresh clam service.
Running on a system periodically checks to see if there is a new version of Clam AV database.
To know if it needs to download or not.
So, very fortuitous capture, Lee.
I'm sorry.
Would you say, Grant?
Very fortuitous capture on getting the Klm AB test.
Oh, yeah, really.
I'm just trying to figure out why it ended up here.
Because we did a DNS. Traffic and that test is done. As a DNS query.
Oh, never mind. You know, I've got, maybe running on number of machines. I wasn't thinking that it was running on Bach too, but it is.
So there probably is. There is a clam maybe service running on B 2 so that service was doing the query.
Just see a fresh clamp needed an update.
Yep. And you just stumbled into another thing that is very common with sniffing traffic. Anytime I come to a new system and somebody's like, I've inherited this, I don't know what's running on it.
One of the best ways in my opinion. Is to watch the traffic in and out of it.
Okay.
And also, it also helps identify things that you may not. May not be officially on that machine.
Correct.
Alright.
Okay.
Sam had a follow up question asking if port 2 2 0 6 is more secure than port 22. Only in that it is the not default, which is where most things.
Try to pick on it. It's kind of like the old adage. If you're, or don't drive a red sports car.
Drive a different colored sports car. The idea is police see the red and sports cargo. Aha, your speeder.
It's just trying to be the not most common thing.
Sam, you've been asking good questions. I don't know if you have a microphone. Do you have anything else?
And text works just as well.
And, I'll also throw out there and I'll pull Lee under the bus with me.
That if anybody has any questions, wants to know more details. Ask on the discuss mailing list or I have my real address visible.
Feel free to send me an email. I will do my best to help answer. I believe in teaching people to fish.
So, Lee, you get to help teach people the fish too.
No problem at all. I've been doing it for 30 years.
Cool, glad to have you, Sam. I'm glad you're teaching people the fish.
That's why something smells fishy in here. Alright. Any other questions or should we jump into the GUI middle of the Oreo?
Okay. Sounds like we're going for the gooey middle.
Right. I guess Stan, if you could put up the. Middle part slides You appreciate it.
It just mentioned earlier, our monthly general meeting here, this is the slew group.
And St. Louis Linux Unix users group. And any of you who show up for 2 of our meetings of any of the for 5 monthly meetings we do a month.
If you show up for any 2 of them during the calendar year, you're a voting member.
So, there are no dues. The general meeting, which is the one you're at right now.
We refer to it as our Oriole cookie style meeting. We have a tutorial, a basic, presentation.
On the front. That was what Grant Lee just did and then, we have this, the middle of the meeting, the GUI Center where we do announcements, introductions, those kind of things.
And also we have a kind of a general Q&A here in the middle although they'll also be time for questions at the end of the night.
And, And then after this, we'll have our main presentation. So. Announcements 8 days from now next week on Thursday is the St.
Louis Linux users group. And that's another presentation. Orient meeting, there will be a speaker.
It will be a specific topic. And it's a secret so far actually the thing is we've had some changes and so we're realigning and so If anyone has something that you like to talk about by all means, best to me during the meeting or call me or send me an email.
Otherwise, we'll be working on finding another speaker for next week. So, Next point, 5 days after that meeting, the 4th Tuesday is the new Linux users group, the new Linux users group.
It does not have a presenter. It does not have one speaker with a particular topic for the, we do the new Linux user is.
Whoever considers themselves the most novice. User, gets to ask the 1st question. And everybody else in the room puts in their 2 cents their best answer and tries to come up with a good way of explaining whatever the issue is.
Then, that gets satisfied. Whoever the next motion office person is gets to ask their question.
And so it's a good way for a new new, new person in the field of Linux to learn, get some answers.
And, for those of you who are more experienced, You really enjoy coming to the meeting too because boy sometimes there's some really interesting discussions of how to best do something that seems like a simple budget first.st
And, so please the more experienced people come to that meeting too. You'll enjoy it.
Coming up, Debian 10 long term support version, it ends on the sport part ends on June the 30th That's important Jewish because Bach, our machine that we use for our website bail server all those kind of things is running W.
10 and so we have a little project going right now to upgrade that machine and get it on something which will be supported past the end of the month.
And, of course to do the upgrade, it'd be nice to have some volunteers.
So anybody who wants to participate, participate, excuse me. Please talk to contact Lee here or Well, S.
The it's not gonna be a terrible thing to be a volunteer. There's 2 good reasons to be a volunteer.
One is if you're working in a corporate environment, so give you good experience for that. If you're a home user and I always do my upgrades not a big problem There's a little bit of a difference here because, with this machine.
It's a multi-user system. We get a number of people logging into a number of people depending on it for their email.
Websites, they're hosted on it. So it's not quite like just having that home user system where oh this didn't work okay it's gonna be another few days before I get it fixed.
So this gives you a little bit of the. The feel of what a corporate or business type environment, you know, might be like to actually schedule how to do an update.
So, this gives you a non, There's no boss to this, so it's not like you're getting yelled at at work.
Okay, holiday July the 4th is this coming Thursday. So our next Slack meeting, St.
Louis area computer club is on Friday July the 5th The Slack is more of a hardware on. We'll even talk about how you can put a new bird in the Microsoft Windows on a box or any other kind of software.
So, we'll talk about how different hardware works. Again, there's no presentation.
It's all just. Whoever asked questions generates the answer. So. Let's see. Other announcements?
1st off, let me just run through. There's a number of odds and ends on the calendar.
On the 1st of this month it was the 40th anniversary of all tricks which was the deck version of Unix.
On the second this month, it's the 10th anniversary of the Swift programming language. Swift is very popular with the Apple community.
Very popular with the BSD Unix users. That's kind of their version of rust for us being kind of the popular language in the Linux community right now.
And now let's see on the 4th of this month. 45th anniversary of this account first, st spreadsheet.
6th of this month was the 85th anniversary of McDonald aircraft. Important because at one time they were really a big name in the area of computing.
And local St. Louis company. Those of you who are here in town. let's see, 15th of the month.
No, I'm sorry. Today, is the 15th anniversary of, the United States shifting the TVs.
Over to the ATFC. Wanted to call high death TV. So we've actually been doing it now for 15 years, hard to believe.
Tomorrow. The 11th anniversary, a number of us went up to the airport to see from the Unix group to see the solar impulse land.
That was it all solar powered airplane that landed up at Lambbert traveled. Was it one coast or the other way?
No. And lastly, on the 16th of this month, it's the 75th anniversary of univac That was the, you know, back one.
So that was kind of the. Big 1st popular American computer that was available for public divide by the public.
I mean large companies because it's extremely expensive but so it's really a change and how the world dealt with computers and So big anniversary.
There's a spy office downtown just on the edge of not like, landing. And they use a lot of user group meetings down there if anybody knows anybody down at this very office.
Love to find out what they intend to do. It's sitting next month. It's big anniversary.
I haven't heard anything from that yet. Okay, that's all the dates I have unless somebody else needs to point out it.
Something on the calendar. We'll jump back to the. Slide to what's going on here in the middle.
We're going to click back. It takes a second to get back to where we think we are.
Alright, oh, introductions, okay. Is that where we're at? Sand the introductions, presentation archive.
Presentation art. Oops, hold on. 1st Asian archives, okay, we record, as many of our talks as we can.
People allow us to, we put them in the archive. If you go to the URL, you see there at the bottom page, sloop home page.
Under resources, presentations, you can find a whole bunch of recorded, talks over the years and,
We we also have the presentation archives on each of the web pages. Down the lower bottom right corner.
On.
Alright. Lower right corner, yeah.
And stay on doesn't enormous amount of work. Cleaning them up, editing and getting them, available on the system.
So thanks a lot to Stan, few other volunteers for. We're following a few
We have other politicians?
Yeah, it'd be nice if we had a few more other volunteers. A lot of fingers and toes make make the work easier.
So if any of you would just like to contribute a little bit of time. We can certainly use the help.
And I'm not talking about my psychologist. So. So anyway, all these sponsored meetings.
I already mentioned the, St. Louis log, St. Louis, and the other 2.
Calendar always went through that i think oh okay When you go to our calendar. The ones in red are the ones that are actually run by our organization.
The other things on the calendar. Or things that we've always found people in St. Louis or techies who are interested in open source software type stuff.
Might be interested in so some of the stuff of St. Louis base, some of the stuff is worldwide based, but it kind of falls into the open standards, open source type of information.
So we put it out there. If anybody has anything you think we should put out there, please send us a note and editor at sloop.
Org and we'll try and include it. Mailing list, we run. Mailing was called announce.
That's very limited traffic usually comes out once every week, sometimes every 2 weeks. And it basically just usually mentions what our meeting is or some other very important outstanding thing for the week.
To discuss is kind of an open discussion. Anybody can post a question, anybody can post answers.
And we'll hear a little bit Scott's talk here the main talk it's always fun to get other people's response to questions.
Steering committee for those who like to see sausage being made, we try not to talk about how we plan things, how we do things.
Their general meeting, but a steering committee is where we try and actually do the planning and stuff. So anybody's welcome to come.
It's not. Not a big elected position, it's just people who are interested. Hoping out, helping organized.
We like additional ideas.
Yes. Even if You don't have to be volunteering to speak on a topic, but if you just have an idea of what you think might be a good topic for a meeting.
We like to know you know what the idea is and we'll try and find somebody to speak to it.
Also, if you happen to be somebody who wants to speak, we have ideas. Offer you some ideas on what you could speak of.
Call for help. They said they'll be another call, general call for help at the end.
But for those of you who can't wait around for the end of the night. What do you break?
What might you need help on? What are you been doing this week? This month.
Anybody have anything we want to quickly ask about?
Yeah, you're in equipment.
Okay, if you don't have it at your fingertips right now, our discussed mailing list, as I mentioned before, is where where you could descend an email and hopefully somebody come up with an answer or a response.
Our main topic. That's the big talk that we do at this point and the presenters are always people who are very nice they provide notes and clues, slide decks.
And usually they let us record them and one of the ones who've been very good for a long time, our former vice president of this group, Scott Granman, who is going to be our speaker here tonight.
There's Scott waving at us. And let's see, Scott, I think you prefer if questions are held to the end.
Is that correct?
That would be great.
In comments.
Okay. And, Add comments, okay? And so we'll, we'll try and hold the questions and comments.
Until Scott calls for them.
I mean, if somebody doesn't understand what I'm saying or, you know. Whatever, like of course ask about that, but if it's just a general question or comment, if you could hold it, I'd appreciate it.
Okay.
Like video you're talking about not showing.
That would be very helpful if I'm not sharing my screen and I'm 45 min in.
Yes, please let me know.
Hmm.
Okay, when Scott is not dealing with this unruly crowd, he usually he's a principal at Web sanity where they try and make companies websites better, they try and make companies websites better, not more productive.
And when he's not doing that he's an adjunct professor at Webster University.
Webster and St. Charles Community College.
And also St. Charles. And as I said, he frequently is speaker for us, really appreciated and he's here again tonight to talk about social media for nerds.
Yep. So, before I start. I was gonna I planned at the start of the day to have my whole data.
Oh.
Work on my slides and do a lot more and my sewer backed up And, I had the plumbers come and as you guys, any of you guys know and you have plumbers come to your house.
What starts out costing this much becomes that much. And I got interrupted constantly all day and so what started out as 400 is now 3,000 So I'll be taking a collection up when we're done.
From anybody wants to donate. So it's been a very stressful day. So I'm actually looking forward to talking about.
Pardon my language. I'm looking forward to talking about this shit instead of the other shit I've been dealing with all day.
So this is good. So let me share my screen.
Yeah.
Can you guys see my, social media for techies?
Yes.
Yeah, sure.
Yes we do.
Okay. Awesome. Alright, so I did give the talk like this a year ago. I think Gary and I both forgot.
And so this is an update. There's some repetition, but I have updated stuff. There's a lot of new content in here.
Some of the stuff I didn't really get a chance to go and do it as much as I wanted last time.
So this time I'm getting a chance to do that a little bit to retread because either things haven't changed.
Or I don't think I got it across as well as I could have last time or I didn't emphasize it as much as I wanted to last time.
But a lot of this is completely different. So hopefully that's a relief. For everybody. So I wanted to start out with this, you know, Gary said a lot of the guys in the group our dinosaurs, that's Gary's language, not mine.
And I think if you guys at least as early mammals. Not dinosaurs.
And he said, you know, a lot of guys hear about this stuff, but they don't know what it is.
They don't know how to use it. They don't know if they should be using it.
And I totally get that. You know, social media has been around since the late nineties at this point on the internet.
It's, you know, gotten more and more big. It's 1 of the primary uses people have.
With the internet, certainly with their mobile devices. I can't tell you how many times, you know, I've been in the doctor's office or in line at the store or in a restaurant.
And I'm looking around and everybody's on their phone and I know that many if not most of those people are on social media.
Either look it up stuff or maybe contributing, reading, whatever, but that is something that a lot of people do.
Whether we like it or not. Now, I'm old enough to remember back in the nineties when social media started and certainly even through the 2 thousands as Twitter started to get more popular that the stereotype was always I don't want to hear what people had for breakfast.
And I don't hear that much anymore. Social media is certainly gone way past that of people taking photographs of their lunch and whatever and posting that to the world.
There's a lot more going on. It's a lot more complex. There's niches for every possible interest in group and activity.
That you would want to do. So I don't think we have to worry about those attitudes anymore.
And by the way, I'm not going into this talk saying all of you should be on social media.
I've got Lots of complicated feelings about social media. I'm not always convinced it's a good thing.
I think some are good. I think many are bad. I think overall for society, I'm not sure where I fall in terms of the social media and net positive or a net negative for society.
Depending on the day. I'm often on the net negative. I think it does a lot of bad things.
I think it enables people that were better off in their little hometowns being their own little weirdo.
With their own little weird ideas, all of a sudden being able to connect people all over the rest of the world.
And kind of, Get each other riled up. I sometimes think that's a that's not been a good thing for society at all.
So I am not coming into this as a cure leader for social media saying everybody needs to be on and everybody needs to be using it constantly.
I am very skeptical about it. I am actually very limited in my social media platforms that I decide to use.
I'll be very honest with you guys about my feelings about what I think about the various ones and you know what I could be wrong.
I could have my own biases about some of these social media platforms and when we get to the comments and questions, please, if you have different opinions about it or want to push back on something I said that'll be the time to do it let me know but I do have strong opinions about some I've got opinions about many of them.
I've got opinions about many of them. So I just wanted you guys understand where I'm coming from.
So this is not a This is not a let's all hold hands and jump into the world of social media together.
I'm I'm not that person. That said, I wanted to start out with some numbers and some figures and this, this one, you know, we've got 7 billion people give or take.
On the planet and in 2,020 about over half of them were using social media of some kind and 2 years later.
We are. And almost 4 sevenths. Of the global population is on social media. Now again, that's a very broad umbrella to put things under.
You know, one person social media is going to be very different than another. You know, we know Facebook is the biggest as you're about to see.
But for instance, I don't use Facebook. I have an account there from years ago.
I haven't logged in and I don't remember the last time I logged in. So am I considered a Facebook account?
Yes. Have I used it in years and years? No. Not at all.
So you know the numbers here these aren't necessarily monthly active users, but it's people that.
Have it, have accounts, and so on. So what do people do on social media? Well, these are some of the niches or activities people do on social media along with a few examples.
So blogs have been around since the late ninetys, everybody listening to this has read a blog. Some of you may have blogged over the years.
I've done both. I still use blogs heavily. I think they're fantastic. The underlying technology behind blogs, RSS.
Which allows people to subscribe to blogs and have the content pulled to them in their RSS reader of choice is everywhere.
It's still being widely used. Podcasts for instance. Are all based on RSS, which is the underlying file format for blogs.
So People like to say, oh, blogs are dead. RSS is dead. That's ridiculous because it's widely used to this day.
It's just not always told to people as RSS. There are lots of people out there of every age of every technical skill level that listen to podcast.
I listen to podcasts every day and have been for over 20 years. Most of those people I would wager have no idea and I'm talking a vanishingly small number of people would have an idea.
That they're listening to something that is using RSS that has its roots back in blogging in the ninetys.
But yet millions and millions and millions of people listen to podcasts every single day. So and read blogs blogs are still widely used out there.
Business networks like LinkedIn are very important. Now personally. I'm not a big fan of LinkedIn.
I feel like it's more a necessary evil than something people get excited about using. I have a LinkedIn account.
I will occasionally every few months log in and approve. You know, request from people asking me to connect with them and so on.
That said, people that I respect and trust that are very successful tell me that LinkedIn is extremely important in terms of getting jobs, networking with people, getting employment, things like that.
So Well, I'm not turned on by LinkedIn. I know a lot of people consider it very, very important in terms of business.
Activities. So that's something to keep in mind if you're looking for a job trying to network things like that, LinkedIn is the primary resource for that.
Microsoft bought it a few years ago, so it's owned by Microsoft. That said, I think they've been pretty hands off on it.
Collaborative projects, of course, GitHub. GitHub is the widest social network for programmers and developers in the world.
Ever. It's going to be one of those resources I predict, you know, 1020, 50, a hundred years from now people are going to be looking at to understand our moment in time, 50, a hundred years from now people are going to be looking at to understand our moment in time, 5,000 years from now people are going to be looking at to understand our moment in time.
Certainly when it comes to computation and history and things like that. A bug using GitHub and so on.
So we all, most of us know that it's a fabulous resource. I love it. I use it all the time.
Enterprise social networks like Slack. Which is a chat app. Widely used. Thank God I don't have to use that.
Forums like Reddit is probably the most widely known. I'm going to talk about that today.
Know most of the people on here have probably gone to Reddit. I'm gonna show it to you later for those of you that haven't used Reddit.
I have complicated feelings about that. I think it can be a tremendously useful resource. I think the people running the company are mostly scumbags.
And that's true for a lot of these companies. In actuality. So while I may find the content useful, some of it, I find that people running the company to be greedy dirt bags who really don't care about the users and only want to lock people in or sell off.
The user generated content and make money from that and so on and red it's a great example. There is fabulous content on ready you will not find anywhere else.
But the people running the company are in my opinion are not good people. Micro blogs. Well, Twitter now known as X, which I will talk about a very little at the beginning because that really kind of made that idea popular where you know the the problem with blogging was always you got a nice big white box that you need to type into and micro blogging said you know what instead of a big large white box
let's give you a little tiny box originally it was only a hundred 40 characters because originally it was meant to be used with flip phones where you then that was the size of an SMS message.
So Twitter started with SMS messages that you would send and then got posted, which was a hundred 40 character limit.
Later it was raised to 280 now. It's bigger than that. Tumblr, mastodon, which I'm going to spend quite a bit of time on, that is the social network I use probably the most.
And I'm gonna definitely, I am gonna try to get you guys in that because I think it's the social network for nerds and techies.
And other people, I think it would fit in with a lot of the people listening to this. Photo sharing.
Flickr's been around a long, long time. Instagram, of course, is widely known photo sharing.
Social bookmarking, delicious kind of started this. It's pretty much gone. Now, there are other services out there for this.
I don't think this is nearly as popular as it used to be, but there are still services out there.
There's 1 called PIN board that I have very mixed feelings about. I think as a service it was fine.
The problem is the guy that runs it is pretty much it's a subscription. And he's pretty much stopped improving it for the last.
5 years. So he's taking people's money. And inertia plays a big part in all this.
I'm still on there because I haven't taken the time and energy to move everything off of there.
And so I keep paying him the little amount. 15 bucks, whatever it is, but the guy hasn't improved it in years.
People complain about that. He doesn't do anything. So that can be problematic. Social gaming.
Fortnight world of war craft not my kind of games i don't like interacting with people that i don't know i'd certainly don't like interacting with games like fortnight where you start out with a hundred random people and you end up on a battlefield and you get down to just one is left.
Because you end up playing against a lot of people that are like my son and his buddies that are in their teens and are super fast and super good and if you have cat enabled, will let you know their opinions about your sexuality and where you can put various parts.
Of your body into other parts of your body. So not being interested in that sort of dialogue, I tend to avoid those.
Sorts of gaming services. That said the games I like are co-OP games where you play with friends and others that you know.
And I enjoy that a lot. That to me is tremendously fun to do socially to play video games with my brother and some of our really good friends and trash talk either each other and have fun kill zombies kill aliens soldiers whatever that's social gaming is just not with everybody in the world.
Social networking, of course, Facebook. K. Is the Russian equivalent of Facebook.
Video sharing of course everybody on here's used YouTube a lot. It's the second largest social networking social media service in the world for good reason.
Again, I have very Mixed feelings about YouTube. You can find anything on YouTube if you need help repairing something you will find a lot of videos on YouTube with people repairing very obscure things and explaining to you how they did it and it's fabulous.
If you are looking for a commercial you remember seeing when you were a kid you will probably find it on YouTube.
Unfortunately, you will also find tremendous amounts of misinformation, garbage science, people trying to tell you lies to get you to vote certain ways, believe certain things.
Scam you and there is just a tremendous amount of that garbage on YouTube and unfortunately the algorithm on YouTube it has been shown again and again.
Pushes that stuff to people. So you will start out looking at something very innocent and then the recommended videos and you follow that then you follow that and and very very soon you're looking at utter complete garbage and this ends up causing a lot of people to go down the YouTube rabbit hole and leads to Q and on theories and kids getting the wrong idea about various, you know, activities they can do that end up harming some of
them and so on. So, again, I have mixed feelings about this stuff and finally virtual worlds like Second Life and others.
So here are the. I just looked this up today. These are the top 10 social networking services in the world with the most users.
And again, you can see Facebook 3 billion easily bigger than all the others has been for quite a while.
Again, I am. I don't like Facebook. I think Facebook has.
Done a lot of bad for the world. I think the company has been more interested in growth. Than it has been in being good stewards.
I think they have led to that that software has led to genocide in various areas around the country.
For excuse me, around the world, I think it is led to political misinformation and problems that way.
I think, yes, it is allowed grandmothers to keep track of their little grand babies and so on.
But I still think in a large part Facebook has been a net negative for society. I think it's been very bad.
I personally stopped using it. After the Michael Brown verdict came down, I grew up in a small town in Mid Missouri, a town of 30,000 people and I live in St.
Louis and have been here since 1,985 and when the Michael Brown verdict came down people that I had grown up with that I considered friends.
That I was connected to on Facebook were many of them, not all of them, certainly, but many of them were saying some of the most ignorant, vile, racist garbage and I realized it was making me hate them.
And it was making me angry and I also realized that the whole purpose of Facebook's algorithm is engagement, which is to get people to feel the emotions that get them to share and like and reply and say things that will get other people riled up and I decided to get out of it.
And so probably 10 years now, I guess, since I really last used Facebook haven't missed it.
At all. But a lot of people still use it. Youtube, as I said, that's the second largest with 2.5 billion users.
WhatsApp, I'm gonna talk about that in just a minute and give you my very brief impressions, 2 billion users.
Instagram I'm gonna give my very brief impressions of that in a second. TikTok 1.5 billion that's obviously been in the news a lot lately as our government is attempting to pass what I think will prove to be unconstitutional bans.
On excuse me unconstitutional regulations on TikTok because of its content. We chat. Which I'll mention Facebook Messenger.
I'll mention as well. Telegram. I'll mention that. Snapchat and finally X, formerly Twitter, which I'm going to talk about.
So I'm going to give you some very brief impressions of some of these. I'm not going to go much more in depth on several of these because they're so widely used you can easily find information about them.
Many of you have have used on used various ones of these or touched on them in various ways. But I did want to give my very quick impressions about some of them for those you may not be as familiar with them as others.
One thing to keep in mind, book of Meta also owns WhatsApp and Instagram and Facebook Messenger.
So 4 of the top 10 in terms of most users in the world are owned by the same company. Which I also think is problematic.
I think that's deeply problematic and certainly from an anti trust. Point of view, I think that they should be forced to divest themselves of some of these different platforms.
I don't think Facebook should own. Instagram at all or WhatsApp. I think those should be split aside.
I don't think they should have been allowed to purchase Instagram in the 1st place. Or WhatsApp.
But be it as it may, they currently own those. So you should be aware of that, which is, by the way, because Meta owns them, I don't use WhatsApp or Instagram or Facebook Messenger because I don't want to feed that beast.
I don't want to help that company out. So I do know about them. I'm familiar with some aspects of them, but I'm not certainly going to be talking as a user that can give you a lot of information.
About them because I have chosen purposely to divest myself of those services and not use them. So WhatsApp, it's interesting.
Not many people in the US know about WhatsApp or use it, but if we were in Europe or Asia or pretty much anywhere else in the world, that would be what we what we used to send messages to each other.
So in the States, Apple Messages is about half. Half the people exchanging messages in the US are using Apple messages.
Well, in Europe, hardly anybody uses it. Everybody uses WhatsApp there and I've read conversations over and over I've read the numbers so I know I know I'm correct and when I speak in America, we also, as you know, if an Android users ever tried to chat with an iPhone user, you know, about the green bubble, blue bubble thing.
Well, that's because if you're chatting, if I'm on my iPhone or Apple device and I'm chatting with another Apple owner, it's blue because that's letting me know we're using the messages protocol, which is end to end encrypted.
So the blue bubbles mean you are chatting with somebody and it's end to end encrypted, not even Apple can see what the messages are.
You know, the government can't see it. No one can see it. The reason it goes to green bubbles is not too shame Android users.
It's because they're not using messages. Apple doesn't allow that. So it's defaulting to SMS.
Which is the our MMS, which is the same texting protocol we were using in the nineties with flip phones.
Well, that's not encrypted in any way. So the green bubbles are not to be, oh look, that's a green bubble person, the green bubbles are there to let you know, this chat is not encrypted, it's in the open.
Anybody can see it. The government can see it. Whomever. And so that's what's going on.
Now, some of you might have heard that Google, the carriers got together, you know, AT and T mobile and so on.
They got together a couple of years ago and said, let's make a new and better MMS.
New better texting and they came up with something called RCS. Right? And Google jumped right on that bad leg.
And they've been pushing RCS heavily. Trying to get Apple to embrace it as well.
And the problem is, and again, you should know the facts on this. The problem is, and this is the frickin carriers, the carriers said, okay, great, it's going to replace MMS.
There's no built in end to end encryption. Our CS has no built in and encryption in in the.
In the protocol at all. The carriers did not do that. We makes it junk.
It's just as bad as MMS. I mean, yeah, you can have better quality videos and better quality images and stuff like that.
But it's not end end encrypted. Well, Google came along and added its own proprietary an algorithm on top of it.
And the keys are at Google. So Google has been pushing Apple to adopt RCS messaging into Apple Messages instead of MMS.
Well, Google, Apple finally agreed last year. I think partly and this is a good thing, partly because the European Union was getting on their tails.
And saying you need to open things up. So they said, fine, we will add our CS.
So later this year, this fall, when the new version of Mac OS and iOS and iPad OS come out, they will support our CS.
However, the thing you guys should know is It's still gonna be green bubbles because it's not end to end encrypted.
And number 2, the thing you should know is it's not using Google's proprietary encryption protocols.
Apple said we will do what the protocol says. The protocol does not have encryption built in. Therefore, we are not going to include encryption and we are not going to include Google's completely proprietary.
Google controlled encryption mechanism. So be on the lookout for that when it comes out, you're gonna have people complaining and screaming about it that Google isn't encrypting it.
It's not, sorry, Apple isn't encrypting it. That is not Apple's fault.
It goes back to the carriers and their desire not to have encryption. It goes back to Google, adding encryption, but keeping it proprietary.
And so be aware of that. Well, all that's a long way of saying that In the US, that stuff we have to worry about.
The rest of the world, they don't use messages and they don't use MMS.
They don't use texting. Texting was traditionally very expensive in other countries, especially in Europe.
Whereas in the US, very early on, we went with the, oh, you pay this much, you get as much texting as you want.
And so we kind of adopted texting more than people in other countries did. When WhatsApp came along originally was $1 per year.
And so that was it. And you got to use your data plan instead of having to pay for each message.
It was a, you know, a kilobyte or less each message. And so it was part of your data plan.
So it made perfect sense. Well, it's still the most widely used in the world. The thing is, and I will credit.
Meta, I hate saying that for to say Facebook. I will credit them with this. The same end to end encryption protocol that signal uses, which is one of the few end-to-end encrypted messaging apps I would trust.
They use the same protocol in WhatsApp or end end encryption. So WhatsApp does support end to end encryption.
And it's using the same protocol as signal which in my book is great. The only problem is since it's owned by Facebook, they know who you're chatting with.
They just can't see what you're chatting about. But they still know who you're chatting with and that's then used to create that social graph that helps them map who you interact with and understand those social relationships.
Instagram, you know, Instagram to me is a bunch of people staging photos to make it look like they're perfectly happy.
They have a great life. Everything's wonderful. Study after study has shown that Instagram can cause depression, especially among teenage girls because of unrealistic expectations about their bodies, their lifestyles, how they should look.
How they should act, what, you know, what their, what their, the things they should try to own and possess and do.
So, to me that's deeply problematic. And from everything I've read, the META has been shoving more and more and more ads into it.
It's also the place when whenever a new social media service comes out and they get worried about it like TikTok, they try to shove these new features into Instagram.
And so based on what I've read extensively from people, it seems like it's turned into a much more confusing model mess than it used to be 10 years ago when it was a service for sharing photos and commenting about them.
So again, I know billions of people use it. I know people love Instagram. To me, It's not the service for me at all.
I know a lot of people feel like they have to be on it. That the celebrities they follow or the influencers which is a vomitous word in my opinion are on there.
As for me, no, I can't imagine a lot of you guys would find you out of Instagram.
Maybe some of you do and I just, and not imagine it to know. Imagine it imaginative enough to think of the reason, but to me it's kind of one of those services like, I'm not really into the Kardashian, so you know, whatever.
Tiktok? TikTok's owned by a Chinese company. It is clearly linked back to the Chinese government.
There is no doubt. They've said that they're not and I keep reading article after article where people are going no actually the thing about it is it's famous for having an algorithm where it just starts when you open it the 1st time it starts showing you really short videos.
And you swipe. Until you get to a video you like and then you watch it then you swipe and very very very quickly it gets really really good at understanding the kind of videos you like and show you a lot more of those videos and it gets very addicting very quickly.
I cannot tell you how many college students have told me I'm trying to quit using TikTok.
I spend way too much time on TikTok. And they were kind of famous because of their algorithm, my God, what is the secret to the algorithm they've got that's making it so addictive and the Wall Street Journal and others did you know tried to figure this out and it turns out the major part of the algorithm they use to understand what you want to what you like is the amount of time you
spend looking at videos. So if they notice you spend a few more seconds looking at videos of funny things cats are doing, you're gonna get a lot more cat videos.
If instead you watch videos about teenagers showing new dance moves, you're gonna get more dance videos.
So the more time you spend looking at videos of a certain, genre, the more you're going to get served up of those hence the addicting nature of it.
Again, I don't use it. The amount of data that this company tries to extract from your mobile device is shocking.
It's like Facebook levels. How much they want to capture. And so I installed it, I played around with it, okay, and then I went and Apple has this really nice feature where they will show you the, it's kind of like a nutrition label, they will show you the privacy label for the software.
And when you look at what TikTok does, it's oh my god, it's amazing.
In fact, let me show you because, it's It's pretty amazing.
Here we go. Alright, here's TikTok. Now, Apple has this on the web and you can click to go to the app store.
So, hey, look at this, cool. Here we go. So. The following data may be used to track you across other apps and websites owned by other companies.
Contact in for identifiers. Now fortunately on an Apple device you can say don't track me.
However, the following data may be collected and linked to your identity. Purchases, your location, contacts, search history, identifiers.
Diagnostics, financial info, contact info. User content, browsing history, and usage data.
And so when I saw that and I also realized again TikTok isn't really for me if I was a lot younger and had a lot of different interest it might be.
Certainly there is technical stuff on there, but to be honest, what I do is I like other people surface the interesting TikTok videos that might be relevant to me.
In Mastodon and other places and then they post them and that's when I'll take a look.
Or something's like somebody's like, oh, I found this TikTok video. It's hilarious.
Well, they've kind of done the curation work for me, so I didn't have to sit there and scroll.
And get all this information. So somebody else wants to find a really funny video and then share it on the web, which you can access TikTok with.
Hey, man, I'm all for that, but I'm not going to install that app and I'm not going to use it because that's just too much for me and again it's not something I want to spend my time doing.
Now, one more thing I want to show you guys. So again, that's the kind of data that they're getting.
Well, let me show you what. Facebook does.
Here we go. There's Facebook. Okay, data used to track you. Contact info identifiers and other data.
Data linked to you. This data may be collected and linked to your identity. Health and fitness.
No thank you. Financial info, contact info, user content, browsing history, usage data, diagnostics purchases, location, context, search history, identifiers.
I love this. Sensitive info. And other data. So, no.
Now again, I know a lot of people, especially younger people, they're like, oh, they don't care about this.
They'll use it. I find when you point this stuff out, a lot of people you're right are gonna go, I don't care.
I don't have anything to hide, which is the dumbest thing to say in the world, but that's for other talks.
Me, I know I know a lot of you guys. Maybe the older ones of us? We're looking at that going, no.
Absolutely not, I'm, I'm not going to share that information with a company that's based around ads and marketing and tracking and all that stuff.
So that's something else to consider about a lot of these social media services, networks and apps is the tracking they're doing.
You know, at least if you're using it in a browser, you can use add and tracking blockers to kind of block a lot of that garbage.
But if you're on an app, yeah, you can use add and tracking blocker software, but apps give out a lot more information.
Then say websites do and so again that's why I'm much more careful about the apps I use than I am on the web, I'll be a little more open on the web because I can block more stuff.
Okay. So something else to think about with you guys. So me, TikTok, don't use it.
Again, unless somebody points one out to me that looks good. We chat is a Chinese app and it's if we were in China right now we would all have Wechat installed because you pretty much have to.
And we would all be using it for everything. In other words, it is far more. Then a social networking app.
You pay bills with Wechat. You call taxis with Weatat. Merchants now, you pay with Wechat.
The people don't use cash. Much in China at all. You use Wechat to pay for things.
So it is truly an everything app and by the way musk Elon Musk wants to turn X into this.
I don't think that's gonna work here. I don't think that's gonna fly in the US.
I also don't think a lot of people are stupid enough. To give Elon Musk their financial info and lots of other stuff as well.
So I'm hoping A, that it fails miserably and B, that you know nobody tries to do this sort of thing.
But again, Wechat. Most popular app in China used for everything. If you don't believe me, go to the Weekat page at Wikipedia and start reading and you'll be shocked.
How integrated that app is into everybody's lives. Facebook Messenger, that's built into Facebook.
You can use it as a separate app. It does do encrypted chats. But you know it's for people on Facebook well i don't use Facebook i'm not gonna use Facebook messenger so I'm not gonna use it.
It's pretty much a chat app and in my opinion if you want to do chat I've got Apple messages or I could use signal with other people.
If I had to, I could use WhatsApp, but I really haven't had to.
But Facebook Messenger to me, a lot of people use it, but as for my opinion, why?
Telegram. This is a chat app developed originally in Russia. I have talked about this with you guys before several years ago.
This, this app claims to be end and encrypted that is bullshit. The encryption algorithm has never been published it has never been open sourced Ask any any reputable cryptographer even the NSA and they will tell you that you have to publish the encryption algorithm so every other cryptographer in the world can look at it and validate
it. And in fact, this is called Kirchhoff's law. This goes back to the 18 hundreds.
Any encryption scheme should still be secure even if the algorithm is known as long as you have a secure private key.
Encryption key and these guys say well we have 5 math PhDs and we developed our own encryption algorithm and it's fantastic.
Trust us and nobody else can see it, but it's perfectly fine. And I've seen so much evidence that the Russian government has back doors into this.
Other governments have back doors into that thing. So there is no way I would ever trust this service whatsoever.
The fact that they're being so arrogant. About their so called end to end encryption means I would, I would not use this.
It is used by some bad actors around the world as is everything. I'm not saying that's a reason to not use something But be aware is used by some bad people to do stuff.
On the other hand, it's used by a lot of people to think it's safe.
When governments have the ability to get into it and look at it, that's been shown substantially again and again and again.
So. I wouldn't use Telegram at all. I wouldn't touch it.
Snapchat. Beloved by middle schoolers and high schoolers everywhere.
So snapchat, the, the claim to fame for Snapchat is that you send messages and photos to people and they disappear after a period of time.
And so that's the nice thing, you know, send a message this gone. Right. Now of course people can take screenshots.
Now you know that if I send you a message over Snapchat and you screenshot it, I will get notified that you screenshot it.
Now of course if I take on my iPad and I take a screen of picture of my iPhone screen.
You'll have no idea. So it's not like that's a foolproof thing.
At all. I find the UI of this thing completely impenetrable. That said, kids love it.
You know, partly because things disappear there to my mind kids don't mind sitting there with an app and figuring out what you know swiping in every direction and all that means.
When I've tried to figure it out again, I found it impenetrable and hard to remember.
It also again doesn't seem like an admin for me. So, but that's what it is.
So those are my quick takes. Let's come into X, formerly Twitter, which I still hate calling it.
I used to love Twitter. It was probably the most widely used social network I used. I followed people on there that taught me stuff that kept me informed.
That is some a little entertainment, certainly, but mostly it was people that taught me things about computing, technology, history, web development.
Technology in general, Apple, Unix stuff, authors. People like that and I thought it was fabulous.
I also used to protect support a lot with other companies. I found if you send them a tweet publicly that they would get right back to you and help deal with the problem.
So I thought Twitter was great and then Elon Musk bought it. And in October, 2022 and it immediately started going downhill and it still sucks.
In fact, it's worse now than it was. I quit using it soon after because for a decade, if not longer, Twitter was built around 3rd party apps.
In fact, a lot of the stuff we consider part of Twitter was not developed by Twitter. It was developed by 3rd party app developers who added these features and then Twitter a good idea we're gonna add that so retweeting That was built by users.
Lots of other things I can't think of at the moment but many many of the basic feed oh direct messages hashtags were developed by end users not by Twitter Twitter Twitter saw that they were doing it, not by Twitter, Twitter saw that they were doing it, adopted them.
So the problem is almost immediately one of the things Elon Musk did was ban 3rd party apps from being able to access Twitter.
Well, I've been using a third-party app for years that was fabulous called Tweetbot and one of the cool things it did was I didn't have to look at ads.
So I never saw ads on Twitter at all. In fact, I didn't know how people that use the default Twitter app dealt with it because it had so many ads, the website had ads.
And one of the 1st things Elon did was ban third-party apps and at that point I said bye.
I am not gonna, use this. When I can't use the tool I want to use and not to mention I knew what he was gonna do.
I saw immediately what he was doing to that service. I left. I'm glad I did. I have not missed it.
Lot of people that I followed on Twitter never moved over, but that's fine. I've my life's just fine and dandy without it.
In fact, this is a summary of some of the things that have happened. Races slurs have soared since Must bought the website.
He's repeatedly endorsed the racist great replacement theory despite telling Don Lemon he doesn't subscribe to it, posting a vial video warning about a flood of illegal immigrants ending America to replace white people.
Must retweets right wing pseudo science, anti-vaccination stuff, said that a post claiming that Jewish people push hatred against whites was, quote, the actual truth before apologizing and then telling advertisers to go fuck themselves.
That is a quote from him. And suggested the diversity equity inclusion would lead to plane crashes. His most recent post include reposing a cringe worthy right-wing comedian song about racism, an endorsement of a Joe Rogan segment alleging the squatters can steal people's houses, a complain about America's uncontrolled immigration and a post outrage to Democrats for voting against a bill that would allow state authorities
to enforce federal immigration law while defunding sanctuary cities that protect illegal immigrants. And there's much more.
I toyed originally with doing, you know, nothing but stupid things that he's done. And I said, I don't know time.
I don't wanna get my head into that. I don't wanna get your guys head into that.
This did a fine summary. So, You know, I think he's, he is.
Elon Musk is a guy to my mind that thinks he's the smartest guy about everything and he knows nothing about running a social network.
He's also somebody in my opinion that is a damaged psychological person and wants attention, attention wants validation.
I think in some ways he bought Twitter to be the complete center of attention on that service. Everything I've read about him validates that.
I think he's a horrible manager, a horrible boss. I think he's been lucky in a few areas.
I know for instance, I know everybody's like, oh, but Tesla, yeah, but he's run Tesla into the ground.
He's not helping that company at all. He's running too many things. I'm very critical of the guy.
And I like this a lot, January second of this year since Elon Musk bought Twitter, it's lost 72% of its value.
Because advertisers, of lead, neo-Nazis are back in force on the platform.
If you're an advertiser, you do not want an ad for your product appearing next to an anti-smitic.
Neo Nazi racist post, which has happened again and again and again and again. So I look at Twitter now with sadness and with that brings me to true social.
Look, that's the logo and I wanted to show that fading into smallness.
To kind of illustrate truth social. Yes.
Hey Scott. Yeah, I, this is all good stuff.
Thing that a number of our people kind of asking for though is So social media or techies are maybe I should have better stated as social media or technical topics.
Okay. Okay.
Well, I'm getting to that. I'm getting to that. I'll skip. I'll skip further then.
There we go.
That's fine. No problem. Remember, you can find social content on, excuse me, tech content on a lot of this stuff.
It's a lot of the places people might have heard of like, oh, Instagram photos, videos, but you're not gonna see a lot of technical stuff, but you should know that.
The Fed we need to talk about heavily. This is really, really, really important. The Fedaverse, which is a portmanteau word for federation in universe.
Is decentralized. The big problem with Twitter and this, this happened, Elon took it over and the problem is if you don't like the way Elon runs Twitter you don't have a choice it's either used Twitter or not If you don't like the ways Zuckerberg runs Facebook, then too bad.
You either use Facebook or you don't. It is completely centralized, LinkedIn, centralized.
Almost every social network service today is centralized. Well, the thing is The fed averse is the exact opposite of that.
The whole idea there is, you know what, it shouldn't be centralized. It should be decentralized.
Where if you don't like the way that a server that you're using is running things, you can move to another one.
The people that were following me, they'd have to see that they have to sign up for Mastodon.
They have to go join mastodon. So I lost. A lot of people. I can't follow people that I left behind on Twitter from Mastodon because Elon doesn't allow it.
Well, the Fedaverse is an attempt to solve those problems. So it is decentralized. There are and you're gonna see lots of different services all using the same protocol.
Okay, and we're to talk about that. It is a huge group of interconnected.
But independent servers called instances. So if you're somebody say what instance are you on? That means what server are you on that are used for social networking, file hosting, photo sharing, video sharing.
I mean, most blogging, micro blogging. Pretty much anything I was showing you earlier and saying you can do that with.
With a social media, you can do with the Federverse and new services are coming out every day.
So what you do is you join an instance and create an identity. On that. At that point. Using that identity you created on that instance.
You can follow any of these other. To with limits, which I'm gonna talk about in this sec, any of the other instances, services and so on all from the same one identity.
So in, if we were doing this in the non federverse world, imagine you going, you know what, I've got a LinkedIn identity.
I really like that I'm gonna follow Twitter people and Facebook people and Pinterest people and I'm gonna read it all in LinkedIn.
So I am now able when I log in to LinkedIn. To see Twitter posts I want to follow, tweets.
Facebook posts? Pinterest post All in one place and then if I go, you know what?
I don't like LinkedIn anymore. I want to move somewhere else. I could take that identity I had created at LinkedIn.
And I could move the identity to a different place and I would still be able to follow everything and everybody would still be able to follow me.
Sounds like utopia. Well, that's what that's the entire idea behind the feder. Okay, they're federated together and you can then use this identity to follow everything in one place.
Okay. Here are some of the services. Now here's the deal. Unless you, know some of these like Tumblr WordPress you're like oh I've heard of those well they're now integrating with this.
Okay, but the ones in the 1st 3 lines, those are actual Fed averse services. Now, I bet most of these except maybe mastodon, you guys probably are going, I've never heard of these and you know what?
They're small. They're not. They're nowhere near those top services I just showed you.
Okay, we're talking a few 1 million users, not a hundred 1 million, or a billion. And actually, that's been kind of a good thing.
You don't have, it's nice because one of the problems on Twitter and Facebook is you got a lot of trolls.
You got a lot of people there to stir the pot and cause problems and send out disinformation and garbage.
And and just, you know, ignorant people. And by and large, you do not see that on the fed averse.
The people there want to be there. They tend to be a little more technical. They tend to be a little more rational, a little more reasonable.
People aren't there to cause problems and troll and things like that and if they do they get booted and you're about to see some examples of that.
So it's been really nice. I like it. Most of the tech people that I followed on Twitter moved over to Mastodon.
So for me, I was like, oh, this is great. The people I really was getting the most utility out of are now unmasted on.
Not everybody. Not everybody, but again, it's enough. You don't need everything. So here's the thing, the World Wide Web.
Consortium is the standards body for the web. Okay, they were behind HTML until 2019 now a different organization doing that.
They're the organization that decides what is CSS. What is the WAF type format? What is XML?
What is the ping graphic format? What's the SVG graphic format? They're very important, very big.
Tim Berners, Lee runs the organization, the inventor of the web. Well, Back in 2014 they said they realized the problem was centralized social networking.
And so in 2,014 they launched the federated social web working group. To try to come up with a solution.
And in 2,018 they published the activity pub standard. That is the standard protocol that undergirds the Federverse.
So any service on the Federverse is able to interact with all the others. Because they're all talking activity That's what's going on.
So, and what's interesting about it is. From the get-go. Lead author Christine Lemmer Weber notes that the team predominantly identified as queer, which led to features that help users and administrators against undesired interaction.
You know, even I'm a straight guy. But I have gay friends, I have gay family members, I follow gay people online and they are certainly on Twitter and other places.
Got daily horrific. Over and over and face and Twitter often was very slow to fix the problem and help.
With the problem and it was it's really bad. It's still bad. In lots of places.
So. You know even for a straight guy like me I understand where they're coming from because they're like you know no one No one wants to use the social media service and have people dog pile dog piles when somebody decides they don't like you and they get all their followers to start harassing you all at once or try to dox you or just try to make your life miserable.
And that's happened over and over and over again. And so the fact that it happens to people, that identifies queer, well, they put stuff in place to try to minimize and mitigate that.
That benefits everybody. It's like I tell my students when it comes to accessibility. People tend to think, oh, accessibility only is for people that are blind.
Right? Everybody! Everybody is disabled. At some time or another, I always use the example my son was a baby and I had a baggage, a bag of groceries in one hand and a baby in the other and I'm trying to unlock the front door.
I'm temporarily disabled. Thank God only temporarily. Right? If you're driving and the sun's in your eyes, you are temporarily disabled.
Well, the protections that even if you're not LGBTQ. The protections that they realized that they needed to put in place ultimately benefit everybody.
And this is the thing I really like. The team authoring activity pub had no corporate participation. Advertising in the Feder is very frowned upon.
I don't think I've ever seen an Okay, that would be very bad if there is a brand on the Federverse, they better definitely Okay.
And post useful good stuff because if they start posting ads they will be slammed. So, it's great.
Yes.
Yeah. Really want to chime in and add that not only to the admins and the developers, but the community.
Yes.
It very strongly protects each other. If anything, it's a dog pile in reverse. To tell admins, block those servers and community pulls together.
Yup. Yup, absolutely. Yep, people are mastered on much more. A lot of these people, it's their space where they can be themselves and not have to worry.
And they are very protective of their spaces for very good reasons. You know, no matter what your group is, not just people identify as queer.
I mean, all sorts of different. Groups and organizations and identifications band together, because often this is one of the only places they can.
And so yeah, thank you for saying that. So Federverse is based on activity Pub. Everything in blue here is using activity.
Pub and you can see they're all connected. So I'm gonna talk about I use Mastodon heavily.
Well, Lemmy is kind of like Reddit. I could follow Lemmy. In Mastodon.
Peer tube is like YouTube. Well, I could follow peer tube accounts in Mastodon.
Or vice versa. That's the cool thing about this. And so if you have software that you really like for reading Mastodon like I do, I can then turn around and use that to follow Pixel Fed and see people's images like Instagram as they post them.
So that's the beauty of this stuff. It's really, really, really cool stuff. And here are some of the, I like this graphic.
This is showing you some of the different branches, you know, there's parts of the feta verse dedicated to book lovers.
Parts dedicated to music, parts about storing files, parts about networking, personal networking, events for writers and so on.
And it's all connected together. By the way, Gunn social was around way before that they do a different standard because they were way before that.
So decentralization, no one controls the fed averse. At all. Each instance is independent from all the others.
They're just all using the same protocol. Now, this is where it gets interesting. So I just said, hey, they're all connected to each other.
Well, not necessarily. Because One of the things that means is, yes, they can all federate with each other, but instances can defederate from others too and say no.
We don't want to be connected with you. We don't want to interact with you and we don't want you interacting with us.
Now let me let me explain. Gab, which is still around, used to be a website similar to Twitter and it's always been a problem.
Widely described as a haven for neo-Nazis, racist, white supremacist, white nationalists, anti-Semites, the all right, supporters Donald Trump, conservatives, right libertarians and believers in conspiracy theories such as Qanon.
GAB is attracted users and groups who have been banned from other social media platforms and users seeking alternatives to mainstream platforms.
Extreme. Antisemitic racist and homophobic content is rife on Gab.
With open praise of Nazism? Increment of violence against minorities and great replacement narrative saying that, white people are going to be replaced by non-white people.
Gap contains much of the same content as purpose built neo-Nazi sites such as Stormfront.
If you go on that site within Almost immediately you will start seeing this garbage. Okay, well. In May, 2,017, Gab publicly lost.
As an app. Okay, on October 27, th 2,018 Robert Bowers killed 11 people in the attack on the Pittsburgh synagogue.
He was a very heavy gab user, neo-Nazi references, neo-Nazi post.
In the following days PayPal, Go Daddy. Giant stripe back blaze all dropped gab as clients and the app stores kicked them out as well.
In July, 4, which is disgusting they picked that date on July 4, 2,019, they switched its infrastructure to a fork of mastodon.
It is using Activity Pub. It is a fork of mastodon. So it's no longer an app.
It's no longer an individual website. It's a website but undergirding it is Activity Pub, the same thing as all the others.
Well, here's the cool thing. Immediately when they did that. Almost every other mastodon instance defederated with GAB.
They cut them off. And so that means that I like this analogy that the Nazis, the racist, the losers on Gab can go pee in their own pool.
They can go play in their own pool and be foul it with their garbage however much they want but they can't connect with virtually anyone else on Mastodon and we can't connect with them.
Which is great. I don't see their garbage, they can't see us. And so this is an extreme thing that is not often invoked.
But what happens is there are discussions among the administrators of the various instances which has volunteer based. And they will often get together and discuss and agree as a group we are going to defederate with this instance because it's being used for dxing.
Because it's being used for spam because it's being used by people to harass. Are caused problems for other people and that gets that gets bad enough and bad they're defederated and cut off and it's a beautiful thing.
So that's 1 of the positives about this. So that brings me to talk to you guys about mastodon.
Mastodon is the flagship Vedaverse service. It was released in 2016 by a German guy named Eugene or Eugene or Eugene Rochco.
It is very similar to Twitter in immediate see how it looks. It's micro blogging. As of today, there are 15 million accounts.
However, there are less than a million monthly active users on proud to call myself one. And again, the people I follow use it.
There are in different, I see different numbers. But around 9,400 servers running that you could join.
Some of them have one person on them. You can set up your own individual mastodon instance that's only for you.
You could set one up for we could set one of we could set one up with a family.
And so on or you can join ones that have a hundred 500 a thousand 5,000 25,000 250,000 users on it it's purely up to you.
And so, again, it's only got a million active users per month. Well, you know what?
I really enjoy it. It's great. I think most of you guys would really enjoy it too because it's your kind of people.
Nerds. But not everybody on there's a nerd. I don't wanna get that across.
Like it's nothing but tech all the time. There's lots of different stuff. But it does tend to skew a little nerdy.
And you know, I know my audience, I know what I am. And so I think you guys would really enjoy it.
It's free and open source software uses Ruby on Rails and Nodejs. It's written in React and Redux on the front, uses Postgres for the database.
That's the homepage. Okay. And I wanna show you guys what it looks like. I'm gonna log in in a sec and the web and an app and show you guys but I mean it supports audio video and picture posts.
Accessibility is baked in. It's a big deal. In fact, You will get friendly but firm notices from people.
If you post images or videos and don't include a description. You will get people responding saying you really need to, you really need to include a description.
Sometimes people leave and do it for you and say, here, this is what you should have done. A lot of people refuse to repost images and videos that don't have descriptions included.
So if you fail to do that, you are limiting the reach of your post because a lot of people will not forward it along.
So that's, again, it's a cultural thing and it's baked into the culture there.
It supports polls. It supports polls. It supports content warnings, which hide the content until you click to say. It supports content warnings, which hide the content until you click to say, yes, I want to see it.
Now you can turn those off and say, never warnings go ahead and show me stuff. Content warnings, you might think, oh, that's for nudity.
Well, sure, there are people that post nudity and porn on the Federverse. Absolutely.
It's not a big thing, at least not where I hang out, but it is there. And certainly the norm is that if you are going to pose something that has nudity that has that could offend somebody, you should put it behind a content warning.
But people also do that for political content because they understand. Everybody wants to read political content. And so people will put, you know, content warning politics or content warning Trump or things like that so that people that don't want to see it or don't have to deal with it don't have to look at it.
And other people can click on it. Again, in my case, I just turn content warnings off.
They don't bother me. I don't mind, but I'm also careful about who I follow.
But that's what that means. And again, if you do not use it, you will get people politely or firmly telling you you should.
Animated avatars, custom emojis, and more. Okay. Now, here's a big difference with.
And this bothers some people. I don't think it'll bother my audience. When you sign up for Twitter, immediately Twitter recommends people to follow to you immediately.
Facebook encourages you to upload your contact list. I did that when I joined 15 whatever years ago like an idiot.
And they will immediately say, oh, did you know this person and this person and this person and this person are all on Facebook?
Go connect to them. They're your friends. Right? Same thing with LinkedIn.
When you go in LinkedIn, it really wants you to upload your contacts. So it can say, hey, here are people already on here.
You can follow up. So it immediately suggests people and wants you to upload your context to them.
Mastodon does not do that. Mastodon does not want your contacts. They don't even ask for them.
I don't even think there's a way to do it. Okay, you gotta find people to follow.
They do, they might recommend one or 2 topics. They do not push celebrities and garbage like that at all.
That's just not what it does. But there's another big difference. And that is. When you use Twitter.
When you use Facebook, when you use LinkedIn, You do not see the post every post of the people you follow.
In other words, if you follow 10 people on Facebook, And they all post stuff, you will not see everything they post.
Facebook quit doing that a long time ago. Instead of what they do, they like to go to the people that post say, oh, your post is only reaching this many of your followers, would you like to reach more people?
Pay us. And so if you pay Facebook They will then make your make sure your post goes out to more your followers not all but more and that to me is ridiculous.
So number one. You're not guaranteed that when you post something, everybody following you is gonna see it.
It's not even gonna show up. But number 2, in the case of all these other services, they use the mighty algorithm.
To surface interesting content. Okay. So what that means is you will see posts. Tweets, etc.
From people you did not follow. From people you've never expressed an interest in because the algorithm says oh lots of people are interacting with this we're gonna shove it in front of your face and hope that it gets you riled up or upset or you find it funny or you want to share it because that will get your interaction time up.
That's their goal to get more people in interacting with this stuff. And so. Mastodon doesn't do that.
It is strictly reverse chronological order. If you follow 5 people, your feed will show you everything they post with the newest at the top and the oldest at the bottom.
So, and that is how it works. There is no algorithm at all. There are no ads. The stuff you see is the stuff you decided to see.
And if you don't like it, you can unfollow those people. Mute them, whatever you want.
Always in chronic order. Now I love that. That's how I use Twitter. I did not ever want Twitter to show me post that they thought I might like.
I don't want to see that. Okay, for me, I wanted to see the people I thought I wanted to see every post from the people I followed in reverse.
Exactly what you get with mastered up.
Also, moderating is in the hands of the people that are running the servers. So if you're on an instance and they tell you right up the right out right out of the bat what the rules are So they will say no transphobia, no homophobia.
Know this, know that. Right? And if you violate the rules, you will be punished in some way usually blocked for a day or 2 or worse kicked off.
So you know the rules right off the bat. Well here's the deal. If you don't like the way the person's running the server.
You can move to a different server, but the moderation is up to each individual service. Each individual instance.
That's nice because you're not relying on what Elon Musk thinks is offensive or upsetting.
You're relying on what the server admin thinks. Is going to be moderated and if you don't like it you can move.
You can even start up your own and moderate the way you want to do it. So, for instance, here we go, Wikimedia decided to create their own instance@wikimedia.social and they're they're experimenting with Mastodon with their own post and their own stuff and they're thinking maybe one day will allow people other people to set up their own accounts under
Wikimedia. Social. Mozilla, the people behind Firefox, did the same thing with Mozilla Social.
They are experimenting with mastodon and the fedaverse by creating their own instance. Okay, now the web, you can use an app.
But the web interface is really, really, really good. And by the way, when I say the web interface, I mean on the desktop laptop, or you can use the web browser on your mobile device.
And it's perfectly fine. Now, apps get you additional features. They get you more integration with the operating system, but the web is perfectly usable on your mobile device or on your desktop.
And I actually wanted to show it to you. So, this is a screenshot.
I'm actually gonna log in here and show it to you right now. Let me get past this.
And I'll say this, and I'll show you that too. On my iPad and iPhone and I and Mac, I use an app called Mona, which is extremely powerful.
It's like the power you. App for mastodon it's got a million configuration options and you can do all sorts of stuff it's it's really great I'm going to show you guys that as well.
So, lots of lots of preferences. Okay, so let me let me go ahead and show what I'm talking about to you guys.
So. Here I am and I've logged into Mastodon. And this is the web interface.
Now I'm using Brave with the side tabs turned on, so I'm going to close the tabs.
So here you go. I'm logged in to mast it on my browser. Now this is called the advanced view with multiple columns.
You don't have to see that. You can also see. Something like this. This is the simplified view.
Where, you know, I don't get multiple columns at all. But I wanted to show you guys the more complex.
View. So right here, notice you got your multiple columns. This is me. This is where I could post.
So I'm going to go ahead and post something right now. I'm in the middle of showing mastodon off.
To the fine folks. At the whoops. St. Louis.
The Unix users.
And hit post. Now right here, that's what I would use to attach an image. That's what I would use to add a poll.
That's what I would use that a content warning. And that's what I would use to insert a mode, that's how many characters, different ones have different lengths.
So, mine here gives me, I guess, 5, 12500 different ones give you up to a thousand.
That's not gonna if somebody if somebody's on an instant that lets them post a thousand it shows up fine in mind it doesn't get cut off So I'm gonna go ahead and hit post.
And there it is. So I'm just now posted this. This is showing other people that I follow.
So these are people I follow or other, post that they've boosted a boost is like a retweet.
So that's when you find a post. I want to share that with my followers. You click this button right here and that would boost it, retweet it to your followers.
Let me see if I can. Find something good. Let's. Oh, there you go.
I like that. There you go. I just boosted that. It would if you're following me, you would now see that on there.
Of course, I can click it to UN boost it. I can favorite. Post, I can bookmark posts.
And then if I click this. I can expand the post, show me the entire thing, because by default it will show a limited number.
They can click to see the whole thing. I can open the original page. I can copy a link to a post to redo that.
I can embed it on a website. I can bookmark it. I can write a post and mention this user.
So if I click that, it would open up a new post where I'm mentioning that person, which means it'll show up in their timeline.
I could privately send them a message. This is not encrypted. Private messages are not encrypted.
So, you know, don't use them for that purpose. If I don't like this person or what they're posting, even if somebody else posted them.
So, you know, I might follow people and like what they post, but they share stuff from people.
I'm like, I don't wanna hear what that person says. Well, I can mute that person when you mute somebody that says, here's the explanation.
They don't know they've been muted. They can steeze to your stuff. But you won't see theirs.
You won't see post that mention them. They can mention follow you, but you won't see them.
And then if I click on the options, I can mute them basically forever. 24 h, 7 days, 30 days, the apps I use have different amounts.
And so on, I'm gonna hit cancel because I don't wanna mute this person. I can also block people.
If I block them, they know I've blocked them. That's Dear between muting and blocking.
Muting, they don't know I've muted them. They can post to me all they want.
I'll never see it. Blocking, they know I've blocked them. Okay, I can filter posts and say, you know what?
I don't wanna see post that mentioned activity calendar again. And I've got a bunch of filters where people, some people tend to talk about like podcasts I don't care about.
So I'll say, you know what, if they mentioned this podcast, don't show me that post.
I don't care. Okay, or a topic I don't care or a hashtag I don't care about Sir, I, I'm not really a sports guy.
Well, if people are talking about a sporting event, I don't care about we're all using the same hashtag.
The hashtag and filter it so I don't have to see it anymore. So it's really nice that way.
I can report them. To their instance owner if I have a problem with them and notice their instance is called mastodon world.
I can block the entire instance. So if I'm like, you know what, I don't just wanna block this guy.
People from Mastodon world have been jerks over and over again. I don't want I just don't want to see anything from them and I don't want them to be able to interact with me.
I can block the whole instance myself. And not rely on the instance I'm on to block them.
I'm in control of blocking the entire So that's the kind of powerful moderation tools.
That you've got in place. Now, if I click here, I can determine what I want to see.
I can see, you know what, don't show me post that other people have boosted or don't show me people's replies to stuff.
If I want notifications are every place. I have been mentioned. Or somebody is replying to something I've said.
Or If I repost something, if I boost something and then it's edited. I will get a notification about that.
So that solves the problem of, you know, Stan posts something about, you know, I love Linux.
And I'm like, yeah. And I boost Stan's post. And then it turns out Stan's a jerk and he goes back an hour later and changes it too.
I hate Linux Linux is for losers. Well, I will. Notifications that he edited the post so I can go back in and unboost it and then block him for being a jerk.
So don't do that again, Stan. So, that's what notifications are for.
And then over here, this is this is kind of cool. So. Yes.
Hey, Scott. You were talking about, you could block. All of Mastodon world.
What?
What are you on? You're blocking everything on masked not work.
I'm using mastodon. Dot social. That's my instance.
Okay.
Hey Lee, log in and you'll see that I tagged you and Scott. That's the center column top.
Yeah. Yeah.
Oh, right here. Cool man, thanks. Very cool. I'll follow you in a sec.
Yeah.
Now, notice, he's an old bites dot space. Okay, that is not my instance.
I'm on mastodon. Dot social. Now, I'm gonna show you a list of instances in just a minute.
Here's the deal. Mastodons on social is the biggest one. It's the one Eugene Rochco, the inventor of mastodon administers.
And last I looked, I think it had over 500,000 people on it. It's easily the biggest.
Here's the deal. When you join Mastodon, you have to pick an instance, but you can move.
And they do a nice job of saying, I'm gonna show you actually in just a minute. Here's all these different instances.
This one's focused on this and this one's focused on this when this one's for gay programmers and this one's for people that like to hike and so on.
Now of course. Just cause you're on the instance for gay programmers doesn't mean you can't interact with the hikers or the Linux people or the.
Whatever, it's no big deal. Okay, so.
I just forgot. Oh, so, forgotten what I was gonna say. I was gonna talk about.
Oh, so, the problem was that they realized that was really kind of scary for a lot of people to the very 1st thing go, okay, choose what server you want to be on.
Here's a list of 9,000. And so that was a little overwhelming for people. And so what they did, I think this was the right move to do, Eugene Rashco says, hey, join Mastodon Social if you want.
Here's a couple of others. If you want to see the whole list, here it is. But he wants to make it like more friendly for people and again remember you can leave and move to any other one.
So I don't have a problem with him pushing. Mastered on social upfront because it's not like you're locked into that forever The reason, one of the big reasons I chose mastered on social was because I thought, you know what, it will always be available.
Eugene Rochco is not gonna decide next week. You know, I don't wanna do this anymore, I'm out.
And close the instance down. So, and that has happened. I'm going to talk about that in just a little bit in a few cases.
So I feel very. Safe being on that instance, but again, I could always move someplace else and of course I could start another account somewhere else.
As well. So
There's a very key thing about moving. And that when you go to something else. You can update your source.
And your followers, by understanding as your followers end up. Updating and following you at the new source.
So you take your followers. With you.
Yup, that's right. Yep, that's absolutely right. And that's happened.
I follow people like, hey, I'm moving and then I didn't have to do anything.
I was now following them at the new location. So that's really cool. So the thing is this is one of the little confusing things about Mastodon because each instance is independent.
Right? I'm unmasted on social. He's on old bite stock space. Well, look, he just followed me.
I want to follow him. When I click follow. Oh, it just did it. Cause I'm logged in.
So in the past, I'm gonna unfollow you, sorry, I'll follow you in again.
If I went to his page. Oh, it's cause you're following me already. That's why.
So if I click follow back, it just doesn't. I don't have to do anything else.
I wanted to show you guys what happens. Let me go to Eugene Spaffords.
Page. So Eugene Spapper, the famous programmer and educator, right? I he is not following me Alas.
And so I decide I want to follow Sp. Well, Spath is@mstdn.social.
Okay, that's it. That's the, which is very popular. A lot of people are on it.
In fact, notice there's 1018,000 active users on that server. If I click follow, this pops up and it says, hey, you don't have an account.
With mastodon MSTDN dot social. So you're gonna have to put your instance in there.
And that way we can make it so you can follow it. So it's not as seamless.
So I now have to go, oh, I'm on mastodon dot social. And then click that and it says, oh, now I can follow him because look what it did.
Look at the URL. The URL. Is now mastodon dot social slash.
At Spaff, his handle@msdn.social. So I'm gonna follow.
And now it's done. So notice if I go to me, it's mastodon.
Dot social at Right? So if you follow somebody on a different instance. That are that is not following you.
You have to go through that extra step. Which is nerdy. It's a little friction.
The reason I didn't have to do that. Over here was because he was already following me so what already knew about the connection between the 2 servers.
Okay, so I just wanted to make that aware to you guys to be aware that there if you follow somebody on now they're on mastodon dot social with me I click it's done It's instantly done.
I don't have to do anything else. If they are already following you, you click follow, you're done.
But if they are not following you and you click on follow, you're going to have to type your instance in.
It's going to go back and then you follow them. Again. It's friction. It's not as easy as Twitter or Facebook, but there's reasons why it has to be that way because each since its own little individual thing.
Does that make sense for everybody? I hope so. So what I want to talk about is These 2 things right here.
Local timeline and federated timeline. Home is showing me everybody I follow. That's it.
Remember that's the that's the no algorithm you see the post by people you follow in reverse chronological order.
That's home. Local time line shows me every post by everybody on my instance. Now, if Slug set up an instance.
And we were on there, right? And I click on local time.
What Scott, this is Stan, where is this local you're talking about? I see the home column.
Right here.
Thank you.
So let's say that Lee set up an instance for sloop. Okay, salute. And there are 20 of us on there.
If I clicked on local timeline, it would show me every post by everybody on sloop dot social.
So local means your instance. I want to see every post by everybody on slew even people I'm not following.
So if I followed Lee and Stan. But I didn't follow Grant. On. Dot social.
If I go to home, I'm gonna see Lee and Stan but not Grant. If I click on local, I'm gonna see Lee, Stan, Grant, you know, every Robert, everybody that's on salute.
Dot social. Now, here's the thing, I never do that because I'm on mastodon. Not social.
I don't want to see 500,000 people's post going like that. If you're on a small instance with people that are focused on one particular topic, that could be super useful.
But on an instance like Mastodon. Dot social with 500,000 people forget it. Federated shows everybody on Mastodon.
Everybody on Mastodon. So I'm going to click local timeline so you guys can see this.
On mastodon. Dot social. If I clicked on federated timeline, that's everybody on Mastodon that mastered on that socials federated with.
Everybody. I don't know why you'd want to do that. But here you go.
And you can see that's going a lot faster. Like that. Bam, bam, bam, bam.
I don't see how that'd be useful to be honest. But that's what it is.
If I want to see mentions people have made in me, I could use this or this. This shows my bookmarks.
This shows favorites. And then we get to one of the most useful features on Twitter that is also incredibly useful for Mastodon and that is lists.
If you only follow 5, 10 people on Mastodon, you don't need lists. But.
My page on Mastodon shows. That I, I, by the way, I'm proud of the fact I joined in 2018.
I am currently following 276 accounts. I have a hundred 34 followers, which I do not care about.
I do not care about how many people follow me. I just, I don't care. I'm following 276 people.
Okay, well, back over here. I don't want to look at 276 people going by.
Cause to be honest, some people I followed thinking that's something I like to look at every once in a while.
Some people I followed because they followed me and I know them and I thought well I better follow him back.
Some people I thought well this is something maybe I'll find interested if it's something useful. Well, what you do with lists.
Is you make a list you make as many as you want and you assign the users into those lists. So I have a list called Apple.
That's all the Apple stuff that I follow. So if I click Apple, This is everybody that I have put into the Apple list because they tend to post about Apple.
Not just Apple, but they tend to post a lot of stuff about Apple. And so I can very quickly go here and WW DC is going on right now and I can very quickly go on here and see what everybody's saying about that.
I can see what the people I like follow about Apple have to say. I've got one for entertainment.
I've got one for friends. I've got one about history. Okay, now this guy is posting about our corrupt Supreme Court, but the mostly the guy post about history.
You know, so I put him in the history category because that tends to be what he talks about. Humor, news, politics, tech.
Right? All sorts of stuff about tech that I phone into there. I could make a Linux list. I made one called essentials and that those are from all over the place but they're like ones I always want to follow.
So some of them are tech, some of them are apples, some of them are arts, but they're ones I want to make sure I read every day.
So if I don't have time. I always read Apple and I always read essentials. Oh, hacker news.
I love Hacker News. I learned so much from it. Well, there's a hacker news bot that post the stuff that has gotten into the top of Hacker News.
So that's how I keep up with Hacker News. I never go to the website. I just follow this hacker news bot.
In Mastodon. Today I learned. That is actually a Reddit community. That I can follow here.
That's it.
You know? You know, Lisa Milton is a very popular, booster on mastodon.
He boost all sorts of stuff. Yes, you can add people to multiple lists. I don't like doing that because then I'm like, well, now I'm seeing it here and here and here.
So I'd rather have it in one place. So I don't see duplicates everywhere.
But yes, you can do that. You can easily do that. So what you do is let me go back over here to Dr.
Script. So if I click on it. What do I add? If I click on him, I click right here.
And add or remove from lists.
So I'll put him on there and I'll put you down into tech. Does tech sound appropriate?
Yes.
Is tech appropriate for it? Excellent. So you're now on my tech list. If I wanted to add a new list, I could do it here.
Cool.
And there you go. So now. When I go back.
Okay. When I go back, if I go down to tech now. And I scroll down because this was a little while ago.
Not 3 h. You should be more recent than that. It could be because I just added, I just added you.
That's why you're not showing up on the list. That's why. So you'll show up next time you post.
It'll show up over here. So anyway, I strongly urge you to check out lists. They're very helpful.
This shows what's trending now. So if you want to see what people are talking about and follow that.
The other thing is this right here, you can do searches. So you can do a search for people or you can do a search to like Apple announced it's AI stuff on Monday and it's called Apple Intelligence.
Get it? It looks really cool and I can't wait to talk to you guys about it in the fall.
Well, here are people talking about it. Here's a hashtag about it. Here are posts mentioning it so I can very quickly go through and go, oh, that guy, that looks interesting and follow that.
I think that's pretty cool. And notice you can do. Has a poll has embedded is a reply language codes before date during date after day and so on.
So you've got a lot of ability to search stuff and follow. So this is mastodon.
In the web. But I wanted to show you the app I use as well. Now I use an app called Mona.
There are lots of free apps for, well I know for Mac stuff and Apple stuff and I'm sure for Linux I'm not in the Windows world, but this sort of thing.
I'm sure there are. Mona, I think was a whopping $10 and to me it's worth every penny because it's so customizable.
I found it extremely useful. And so the way I like to operate is I like to have my lists over here.
And I click on my Apple list. And here it is. And if I click on a post. It shows me his post and then any replies people had to it.
If I wanna reply to him, I click this. And if I click that and I type that, it would then show up at the bottom.
And he would see that and actually Matt Birtler I don't know the guy personally but he's an Apple blogger and video maker out in Chicago and he and I have interacted several times, you know.
And He's a good dude and he and I have come converse several times about stuff. I could retweet him.
I could favorite him. I could book marking. I could translate. Oh, that's kind of cool.
It has translation built in. So if I did see one of these that were in Chinese or French or whatever, I can translate it.
In line. Here are some of the other things I can do because of Mona. Because of the app.
So. I can select text. I can open in my browser. I can copy the text all at once to pay somewhere else.
I can copy the link. I can I can take a screenshot of that and then share the screenshot automatically.
I don't have to do anything. I can mute him again notice a lot of different opportunities besides the built in ones in Mastodon.
I can view my favorites. I can view links that Matt Birtler is posted. And see what he had to say.
I can, I'm already following that. And so on. So there's and I can customize stuff.
So there's lots of things I can do with the app. That's not built in to mastodon itself.
And the other thing I like about the app is Notice when I go to the browser, it just automatically shows me what's at the top.
I don't like that. I want to see everything people are posted and I don't want to have to scroll down and go, okay, where's the last thing I saw?
Where's the last thing I saw? Where I don't want to do that. The app, most apps do this by the way.
The app, you'll notice, remembers the last post I read in my and that's where it goes to.
So I now have to start scrolling to see the post that I have missed. Now, some people don't want to do that.
Some people like I don't I don't care about the stuff I missed or I don't mind scrolling down and reading the last 10.
But that's it. I read really, really fast. And I want to see everything people have posted in my lists.
So I want it to go right to the last place I was and by the way I use Mona as I said on my Mac, my iPad, I was.
And by the way, I use Mona as I said on my Mac, my iPad my iPhone that sinks among all of them.
So if I got on my iPad right now and got on Mona and scroll it would open right to here if I scrolled and read a few more up a couple of seconds later this would update and jump me up to that place as well.
So, it's really nice for that reason. Now, Grant said, I would suggest getting your feet wet in the web.
Okay.
I agree. Get your feet wet there and then start exploring apps. Again, a lot of them are free.
To me, $10 for this one time.
What's that?
Okay. Oh, that was, wiki, Sher I was looking.
What was somebody talking to me or somebody else?
Second.
LEAVE is talking to Gary. I didn't mute him soon.
Okay. Oh, oh yeah, that's okay. And so anyway, down the side here, these are searches.
These are, notifications. He's on mastodon everybody. Ed howland@fosterdon.org.
That's another really popular server for open source people obviously. Hashtags that I follow, you can follow hashtags.
So if I click on mac OS, it shows me all post in the entire Fedaverse having to that were hashtag with Mac OS.
I can, that's my home, which I don't use. I use List.
Explore I can explore post people and so on messages to people
That's me, my post, my page. Oh, by the way, one of the other things.
With Twitter, I could go on Twitter right now. And make a Twitter account saying I'm B Gates.
You know, Bill Gates and say I'm Bill Gates. Well, you see these green links right here.
Mastodon includes the ability to validate who you are. And so. You on my website, granite.
Dot com, they give you a little tiny chunk of code or a file. I can't remember which one.
And you put that there and then they check and they're like, okay, this guy that says he's granamin, yes, he controls granama.
Dot com and you can do that with GitHub as well. So I did it for both so that anybody seeing that would see the green and the check marks and go, oh, so this really is the guy that owns granamin.
Dot com and this is that guy at GitHub to validate who I am so you could be sure that no this really is Scott these are the favorites.
These are my bookmarks. These are drafts so you can save drafts of posts. And then finally, this is my mute list.
So this is everybody either individuals, our topics, our phrases, our words, our hashtags that I don't want to see.
And so oops got turned off. Now it's not turned off. So now all this stuff's not gonna, I'm not gonna see it anymore.
Any post with dim.mo or any post from ad surge@babc.social. I'm no longer going to see.
And then finally down here I click that. And I can write my post. And attach the various things I already talked to you guys about.
And there you go. That is Mona. Now, I like Mona. There's lots of other apps out there.
But if you're an Apple user, I highly recommend you check it out. The other really popular one.
That a lot of people use and it's a very good app. Is called Ivory. It's by the same people that did Tweet bot.
It's very slick. It's very nice. It doesn't have nearly as many features as Mona, and that's fine for a lot of people.
Me, I'm a nerd. More features, the better as far as I'm concerned.
So I would to see as much as possible. So, that's why I own Ivory.
But I decided to start using Mona instead. Hi, quit using ivory.
Because it suits me better. I know people that love ivory and use that and there's people that use plenty of others.
So, there's a lot of variety out there that you can check out. To see if you can find an app that the meets your needs.
Couple of things about Mastodon.
Like I said, you gotta pick a server. It's a little harder to find people to follow because you have to do the work.
To find the people. I showed you about following people. Oh, if you're on an instance.
And the administrator of the instance just pulls the plug on it and goes dies or like I'm tired of doing this and unplugs it you cannot move your followers and so on.
You have to create a new account. So again, that's 1 of the reasons I went with Masted on social because I know he's not going to flake out like that and do that.
It's very rare. It has happened. Very, very rarely. More often people burn out, and say, Hey, in a month or in 2 weeks, I'm shutting this thing down.
You need to migrate. But again, that's not common, but it is happened. There have only been Less than a handful of times I can think of where somebody just unplugged the thing without any warning and people lost their stuff.
So that's something to keep in mind. And so I talked about that. Here are some of the topics.
Oh, I wanted to show you that. So.
Here we go. So these are some of the servers at Mastodon. Right? So mastered on social is the 1st one.
MSTDN dot social is the second one. Is another one. These are all very, very popular.
Then we have all of these. Okay, these are all different things. Okay.
You know, here's 1 for, all languages are welcome, but English, Dutch and Spanish.
Are preferred. Everything is welcome here. Humor technology, politics, cats, dogs. Here's some of the topics up here, gaming.
So these are all ones about gaming. Here are ones about LGBTQ.
Music. There's for metal heads.
Academia, there's a strong academic presence on Mastodon. Lot of historians because a lot of a lot of the academics just moved off Twitter on moss because they were like, I don't want to be associated with this.
Farries? Books? Religion.
Food?
Right? Of course, technology is a big.
You can also do regional. As well. So, this tells you if you, get manually.
Reviewed 1st if somebody has to approve you. This tells you their legal structure. Okay, so and look you want to read about it you're like you know what?
This is a very popular one info sec exchange is widely used for security people and others. So you can either click create account.
And this is what I want you to notice every single one says, okay, great, here are the rules.
And you're expected to abide by these rules. Okay, cause the every instance shows you the rules before you can join and you have to say, yep.
I am going to agree to these. So no gratuitous obscenity marked content with a content warning.
No spam. Hate speech, abusive content warning, no spam, hate speech, abusive, and not allowed.
Don't be a jerk. You know, you may get permanently banned without any warning and notice if you violate this, no doxing, no harassment.
And if you click except, then it's going to ask you what user name do you want, what's your password, and so on.
And you will now have an account there. Now, of course, I don't need to have an account at INFOSEC exchange to follow people using INFOSEC exchange.
In fact, I follow a bunch of people that use that. So always keep that in mind. You do not need accounts on a on an instance to follow the people on the instance.
This is the Fedaverse we're talking about after all.
If mastered on social defederates and a person, I don't think they do.
If mastodon dot social defenerated from somebody and you went, oh my god, I don't want to be here anymore and you moved.
I don't think so. I think you're gonna have to redo stuff because it got it got blocked.
So again, that's why you need to be careful about who you join. You know, most of these places you're not gonna have a problem, but there are little instances that have been de-ederated because spam doxing.
Crappy behavior, things like that. So if it's like free for all anything you want and you look at those rules and the rules don't say anything about doxing and they don't say anything about harassment.
I'd be very hesitant to get on that instance because that's an instance that's heading toward getting defed.
So I'd be careful with that one. See, you can move.
Oh, if, if you use Twitter, go look at the people you follow on Twitter because like me.
If you go to my Twitter account, it says, Hey, I'm now on mastodon.
Here's my mastodon account. Go follow me there like that. You know, Hey, I'm a, a, a, mastodon.
Dot social. That's all I said. That's enough. You know, but moderation, we talked about that.
I, I showed you guys that. That's who I am on Mastodon if you want to follow me.
Another way of saying that is mastodon dot social slash at gran. So you can either search for at Granamin at mastodon.
Dot social or you can go to mastodon. Social slash at granamin and follow from me from there.
I do post text stuff. I post some politics stuff. I'm on the left side of the dial, so I'm just warning anybody on here.
And you know, I post a little bit of everything stuff I find interesting and so on. So I'm a bit all over the place.
I'm just warning you guys. This is great. I ended up spending most of my time.
On Mastodon. So and it's 9 20 so. That's great. I had some others.
But one more I will say this I want to mention this for 5 min. I want to talk about threads.
I mentioned this last time. So on July 5.th When Zuckerberg saw how badly, Elon Musk was destroying Twitter.
They rolled out threads, a Twitter clone, ASAP. And within 5 days, they had a hundred 1 million users, which is the fastest growing app in history.
As of now, I checked. Threads and that should be zoom, not July, sorry.
They have a hundred 30 million monthly active users. They have a lot more accounts than that, but they have a hundred 1 million active monthly users.
Okay, well, here's the thing, it's tightly coupled with Instagram. If you have an Instagram account, when you log in to Instagram, there's a little thing that says, wanna start a threads account?
And it's all tied to your Instagram account. And then if you do start a threads account, it says, do you want to follow everybody you currently follow on Instagram?
And you can do that. Anybody that's already on threads. That you already follow on Instagram, you can now follow them.
Will that makes it super easy for people? Right? In fact, your threads handle is your Instagram handle at threads.
But if you delete your threads account, you also delete your Instagram account. So be careful.
Okay. And you know. Zuckerberg knows how to run a run a social network unlike Elon Musk.
So no surprise, he's done pretty well with it. And here's the thing from the get go.
They promised we are going to support activity pub and threads. We are gonna allow people using threads to read anything with Activity Pub and vice versa.
And in fact, they did it starting earlier this year. They have now rolled out beta support. So if you are a threads user and your posts are public You can choose, you can opt in to say people and the fedaverse can follow you and I in fact follow people that use threads.
Inside mastodon. It's really nice. I like it because there's stuff otherwise I wouldn't have seen.
So I think that's cool. Yeah, they don't and they're adding more.
I think they're actually sincere about this the guy in charge of threads at Meta has been like from the beginning, we want to support activity pub and he's done it and they are doing it.
So I will give them credit. When credit is due. They currently can see the number of likes, but they don't get notifications.
That's coming and so on. So We don't know exactly what form, but they're doing it and it is progressing.
Now, a lot of people in the Fed are like, oh my God! We don't want people on threads to be able to see us because somehow they're going to destroy things.
And my response is, it's already public people. If you're posting on the Fedaverse, unless you've locked up your post and approve anybody that sees it, Right?
If your posts are public, Facebook can already scrape all of it. Right? I mean, that's the fact.
So. You know, screaming that thread people on threads might have access to your Fed averse posts when they're already public anyway is completely illogical to me but it went to the point where some instances have blocked threads entirely.
Now, Eugene Rochco said, I'm not going to do that. He said as far as I'm concerned the more people using the feta burst the better.
And I agree with that. So I'm cool with that. But You need to look. Because in check before you join an instance to see if they have defederated from threads because that might not that might or might not influence your decision.
As I said, I prefer being able to follow threads and I don't care if people on threads follow me.
I don't care. Yeah, my biggest concern is that, you know, it's meta and they collect data.
So they're not, you know, they're gonna be looking at those posts, but like I said, they're already seeing all my post anyway because they're public.
So notice I showed you guys that privacy nutrition label back at the beginning. This is the one for Mastodon.
Please look on the right there. The developer does not collect any data. What about the app I use Mona?
The developer does not collect any data.
What about threads? The developer collects a lot of data. That's why I will never install threads.
That app collects way too much. However, using Mastodon, I will follow individual threads users.
Because they can't collect all that because I don't have threads installed. Now, remember that means if the threads user does not opt in and let the Federverse interaction occur, I can't follow.
Oh, well. You know, that's not gonna make me go, well, darn it, I'm gonna go ahead and sign up for threads and install it.
Nope. I'm just like, well, well, I'm not gonna do it. But for people that, and you, I could of course reach out and say, would you mind?
Opening your post up to the Fed averse and maybe explaining that and hopefully over time more and more and more people will do that right now.
A decent number do but not everybody.
And the thing is right now, threads, no ads. So right now, people on threads are like, my God, this is great.
There's no ads whatsoever. Well, Zuckerberg said, once we reach hundreds of millions of users, we're going to add monetization, which means it's gonna, get ads vomited in it.
Well, the thing is there are a hundred 30 million. We'll see what that means. Nobody knows what that means when they're going to do that.
Here is the question I have. Am I gonna see if I follow somebody on threads? Am I gonna see ads in Mastodon?
I hope to God not because that's gonna make me unfollow them right away. I'm thinking that's not the case I'm thinking they're going to say, we're going to show ads to people using threads.
But if IA mastodon user, follow a threads user, I'm not gonna get ads.
Cause like I said, that is against the entire ethos. Of Mastodon and the Fedaverse at large.
And I predict that would cause Massive defederation and massive heartburn by a lot of people.
So there you go. This worked out great. I got to talk about the. The 2 things in depth, I talked to Gary and we talked about doing a lot of demos.
And showing you guys. That stuff so trying to see if there's anything else. Hello.
This is kinda cool. This is a website called feta db.org feta database.org.
Feta database.org. And this shows, across the entire Fed, 11 users, 11 million users, 11 users, 11 million users, 29,000 servers.
11 users, 11 million users, 29,000 servers. Over a million monthly active users and you get these nice charts and stuff like that.
So again, and that shows you most of the people are on Mastodon, but not everybody.
Popular content, popular servers, popular countries. And so again, it's small. I will say that it is not going to have the reach of a reddit or a Facebook or a threads, but I like it.
It's the people there are interesting. They they produce good content. They have interesting things to say.
They're nice. It's quiet. There's not a lot of garbage going on.
There's not trolls, there's not bad people out there. No, there is no way to follow Facebook accounts in the Fed.
Oh, please take this nicely. Are you crazy? Why would they do that? Facebook would never allow people to do that.
They have, they have said nothing about in integrating activity pub with Facebook that they want to lock you into that so tight you can't get out.
So no, they're not gonna do that. And I'm not sad about that either. So no, just threads.
But anyway, I hope this is kind of giving you guys some interest, some encouragement. Check it out.
There's a lot of great stuff. You know, maybe, we could email on the list.
And, you know, if we're, if we're on, if we're on mastodon or the federverse, maybe we could contribute that.
I'll send out an email. Yeah, Discord Stan, Discord is great.
If you're playing a video game and you want to do video chat or text chat, it sucks as a repository of knowledge.
And unfortunately, a lot of open source projects and a lot of companies have said, oh, just use our discord to get tech support as our as our knowledge base and it is.
The absolute worst way to do that, the day discord shuts down, terabytes of knowledge will disappear.
Already, even without shutting down. Gigabytes of knowledge that people have contributed are basically unfindable, unsearchable.
Will never be seen again. Whereas if they had posted on a forum, on the web, even Reddit.
You know something more open not locked into an interface that was never meant to be used as a knowledge ever.
We wouldn't have this problem so yeah I would I would, you know, I use discord for what it's intended for, not for what so many other organizations are trying to shove it into it.
I mean, sure. Okay, Kerry. Yeah, you're right. You can screen scrape Facebook and do it, but that's a lot of extra work.
Right, as opposed to just clicking follow. But yeah, of course. That's possible. As a friend of mine says, it's all ones and zeros, right?
We can program anything to do anything. But the question is how much effort and how much time and how much time effort money is it worth?
So, I'm available for any questions right now. If anybody has any questions, they want to shoot my way.
Can you take what you posted? No. You can't take what you posted, but you can take your followers.
Now that said, you can export. Your stuff. So If I go into here. And if I go into, is it settings?
Yep, right here, import and export. I can request my archive. And it will give me the 174 meg's of stuff I've posted all 4,964 posts.
A CSV file of all my followers the CSV file of my list a list of my, of people I follow and followers, all the things I mute, all the people I block, the domains I block and all 1,500 which I had no realize is that big.
All 1,500 bookmarks. So, I, I can export everything and then do whatever I want with it.
But my followers go with me, but not my post.
But like I said, you can export it, right? And that's pretty dang good. That's pretty danga.
Yes, Kerry, I think I just answered that. Yeah, you can back up all that stuff.
It said you can do it once a week. So once a week you could do a backup and save everything.
And you know, you'd be good to go.
Anybody else? Anybody got a verbal question or just written question?
In the we put it in the in the chat there a little bit earlier but examples I wanna see what kind of latest discussions are on the quiver language for quantum computers.
How would I do that?
How do I spell that? . T
You are.
ER.
T. One Cute the way he spelled it is QUIP RT. Is that wrong?
Now is a typo. It's the ER, not RT.
No, no.
Yeah.
Like that. Oh, Got it. And, quantum all type now. I, I have no idea what's gonna happen, man.
Maybe nothing.
There you go, there's 1. That's an archive article.
Okay.
Here's another archive article. That's it. 3 things.
So from 2,003. 2,003?
That one? Is 2,024 April to this year. That one's October, 23.
And that one November, 23.
Yeah.
2020. Okay. Okay. And, okay, we got a team of people who want to do a Debian 10 to Debbie at 12 upgrade.
That's a boon to.
Is that supposed to be a question?
Well, I'm just searching for keywords.
Yeah, see. That's not what this is. I mean you can search for stuff like that.
Okay.
But that's something that I would use an AI tool for or Reddit. That's like custom made for Reddit.
You know, so if I went to Reddit. I just searched and put Reddit.
Right. If I did that. There you go. There you go.
Okay. Yeah.
Do I mean? So that sort of very like specifically detailed thing. You may or may not find anything on Mastodon.
Okay. More like look for a word or words. Topics. You know what I mean?
Or find a person. All in mastodon, that's a Debian guy and post about Debian all the time and follow them.
You know what I mean? Or get on a Linux server and post that question to the group. You know what I mean?
On that. So that's an that's an example. We're joining say a Linux instance would be helpful.
You see what I mean?
So kind of like having a discuss email. Server.
Yeah, kind of like that or kind of like, you know, I'm interested in cooking Chinese food.
I'm gonna join a Chinese food listserv. Now, we can still talk about. Mexican food, but mostly we talk about Chinese food.
You know what I mean? So that would be that instance.
You see, that's where we got a number of conversations after your talk last, July.
Is This doesn't seem to lead to anything useful. Yeah, there's
Wow. I completely disagree. That's like you saying, man, this library, there's nothing useful here.
Well, what did you, what shells did you go to? Why did you look up? What authors did you find and look up?
That's like walking in the library and saying, This library is useless.
Exactly, exactly, but the library you can go to the card catalog and say, okay, of Debian upgrade.
And it will give you number of authors and code.
At a library? I would argue that's not what you're gonna find at the library. You what you might look up Debian.
Okay.
And find books on Debian. You might even find a book on Debian 12. But I doubt you're gonna find a book at the library on migrating Debian 10 to Debian 12.
Okay.
You see what I'm saying? But you might also know that this author that I really like is written a lot of books on Debian.
I'm gonna go look up that author. And see what he has to say. You see what I mean?
So for me, this Apple list here is tremendously useful. Because I learned about new software. New concepts.
New stuff all the time. Same thing with the essentials. I mean, I find out new stuff on that every day because of the people I follow on here.
You know, like.
Back back from the world of journalism and publication. That's why editors have a job is they're supposed to know who the authors are, who's worthwhile.
They pay them to do something and collect it.
Absolutely. And so my suggestion is why don't you go to the new stand by the latest issue a Linux magazine.
Oh, right, we don't have that anymore. Cause they moved online because people weren't paying for it.
You see what I'm saying? So yeah, editors are fantastic. Curation is a fabulous thing.
And that's why follow certain people on here who do the curating for me. I'd rather follow somebody.
Go ahead.
Okay, now. Okay, Did I miss that? Who are those people?
Well, again, hacker news is a fantastic source for the latest and sometimes old technology news and a great and often great discussions and the discussions lead me to more stuff.
Here's an article here. That's hacker news. I just added today I learned, which is like, some trivial stuff.
Let me scroll down pass that.
This person is a scientist that studies ants. And I never thought I'd be interested in that.
I saw some of their posts and I was like, this person makes it really interesting. You know, I like science.
So I look at space stuff and other things like that. So if you'd asked me 8 months ago, would you like to kind of read a little bit every day about ants and science?
What was this? Back. It's another.
I'd be like, no, but actually it's been very interesting. Dan Gilmore is a journalist who works at an institute trying to make the news better and trying to have more journalists talk about fascism and the problems we're actually facing instead of this horse race journalism.
He keeps, he posts lots of great stuff that I find useful as a person interested in politics.
This guy is critiquing Kevin Beaumont is critiquing, Vigil Studio code plugins.
Good to know. You know what I mean? So it's like you choose the stuff you're interested in based on the people or topics.
So don't forget I can always go back to those hashtags and say, I want to see what anybody has said about hashtag Mac OS.
Our hashtag Ubuntu, 24 dot. Oh, 4. You know what I mean?
So. That's what we're talking about here. It's a way of dipping in to the conversations and information people are sharing that you can catch up with that news that interests you that you found interesting or people you find interesting and if you don't find him interesting on follow them I've done that many times.
I'll see a post or 2 by somebody and go, that person sounds interesting. I'm gonna follow him.
And then a week later I'm like, oh, that was like apparently the only 2 interesting things I wanted to hear from him.
So you mentioned hacker news and what was the second one you mentioned?
Well, Hacker News bought. Let's see. Well, a fun one I just subscribed to.
Is Lisa Melton. Boosts a lot of stuff. Everything from trans to politics to dogs to technology just that's kinda what she does.
She boosts everybody. And that's kind of her thing. So if you follow her, you will discover a lot of very different people that you might then wanna follow.
So he's kind of famous for that.
Again, the idea is the exact reverse. Narrow it down to the actual tech topics, not
Okay.
Right, she's the curator. She's the curator, so you follow her because she acts as a curator and I have found a lot of stuff through her that I found very useful in interesting.
Yeah, but if you follow or don't you have to look at all the other crap?
Filter it, man. If you don't wanna see dogs and cats, make a filter and say, I never want to see the, I, I never want to see any post about dogs.
I mean.
What's easier not not to follow L Lisa.
Right, but here's the deal, guys. It's a value proposition that each person is going to value differently.
You know, you might follow somebody that I find like oh my god this person talks about all this crap I don't care about but you're like oh no I think it's kind of interesting I mean, I'm not saying every person should follow this person.
I'm saying these are things I have found useful for specific purposes. Lisa Melton, I found useful as showing me stuff and people I never would have found or thought about.
That's why I find are useful. Am I saying Lee Lammert or Stan or Gary would find him useful? No, not necessarily.
You might, you might not. Who knows? You know, you just never know.
Well, it's certainly understandable that's certainly true with a general everyday newspaper in the in the old day.
Of course.
But we're trying to focus on a technical journal here. Track down.
Right, well, here's the thing. You find somebody and let's say you find like you follow Lisa Melton whatever who cares I don't care if you do it She's gonna post technical stuff.
If you're like, oh, this is kind of interesting and you click on that person. Okay, here's the guy I think is great.
Dari Abassanjo. He is great. He does a lot of tech stuff. A lot of business management type stuff, some politics, not a lot.
I think he's phenomenal. You know, this he talks a lot about AI. This article is also a great example of the genre of press release masquerading as a news article.
You know, I really like his stuff. I think he's great. I might not always agree with him, but he's always worth thinking about.
George Decay from Star Trek is one of like the top 10 people on Mastodon Now, mostly politics.
Huh.
And funny stuff, mostly humor in politics. Well, Life is not all tech. You know what I mean?
So I'm like, I like George decay. I think he's a good man. I think he's done a lot of good stuff in life.
Oh yeah.
I like seeing the stuff. He usually posts on that makes me at least once a day. And I agree with this politics, so I'm happy to follow.
I like George too. Yeah.
Yeah. Oh, cocky.org. Cocky is one of the oldest bloggers on the on the internet and been around for ever and just post stuff about art, some tech, try I mean just anything.
You know, all sorts of stuff. You never know what you're going to get with him. I find tremendous.
Scottish guy who posts about a little bit about tech and about his family. And I found him interesting as a person.
And don't follow him!
The thing is, I don't have enough. Enough years left in my life to worry about his family and if I'm looking for Well, I'd say I'm looking for how to narrow down the information.
Gary, if I gave you the New York Times and said, here you go.
Yeah.
I doubt you're gonna look at every single article in the paper.
That's right. We're looking for how do you flip through the pages of social media here?
Mine.
Right. And so you can search. You can find somebody and go see who they follow. Are who they who follows them and check them out.
You can search for hashtags and follow those hashtags. You can search for somebody like a Lisa Mountain that's a giant curator of anything and everything.
You can follow hacker news, cause that's always gonna be, you know, technology stuff. Charlie Strauss is a science fiction writer.
He posts a lot of stuff about tech and art and books. That I find interesting.
One of the issues I see is I've looked for or 15 people so far mastodon that I follow on Twitter.
And I'm there.
Oh, I agree. It depends who you follow. Oh yeah.
No, I'm talking about major. Major presences in their respective fields.
Oh, I'm sure. That doesn't surprise me. A lot of people.
Would never move and frankly a lot of that is well I've got 10,000 followers on Twitter.
I don't want to move over here and have to start over from scratch. George decay to his credit.
Said, I don't like the direction at Twitter's going. I don't want to support it and he was he was enormously popular on Twitter and he moved over to Mastodon is rebuilt it.
You know, the other thing, by the way, is I see a lot of people say this. They say, you know what, I don't have nearly as many followers as I do on Mastodon as I do on Twitter, but the conversations a lot better.
I get more engagement. Why? Because remember, if Lee Lammert is posting on Twitter and you have 200 followers.
Not all of them are going to see your post because Twitter is not going to show it to everybody mastered on they will.
Yeah, and the other thing. And the other thing is, Macedon, every 3rd post isn't an ad.
That's true. There's no apps. So I mean, guys, it's a it's all a balancing act.
I know people are like, no, I like Facebook. I'm gonna use Facebook. I would, I don't do that.
I absolutely will not do that.
Okay, now question. If I'm using the on app, which I'm assuming is a cleanish way to do it on a Android device.
If I don't look at it for a day, where does it open up in the in the stream?
Well, that depends on the app and the preferences you set, right? So in mine, I said, don't move.
Stay with stay where the last place I followed I could also set a setting that said, always take me to the top.
You know, it just depends. Yes, the BBC and NPR are on Mastodon, so CNN, I believe.
So there are, especially because Elon Musk. Basically said NPR was a tool of the state and you know which was bullshit and so they left and started their own instance.
And they've done, and in fact, they've specifically said they've done great at mass done and are very happy with the engagement.
So. Yeah, it just depends, you know? It just depends whatever you follow.
Shirt for Macedon on Google Play and it comes up with through social.
Well, truth social is built on mastodon. Alas. Now by the way, it doesn't federate.
You cannot use true social to read. Mastodon dot social or anything else. Cause it's a bubble.
So you cannot you cannot use it. It is de-ederated from everything else on its own.
Yeah.
You know. You know, I mean, look, go down here to tech. Tim Carmody is a writer I follow.
Let's see. Boying boing bots a classic. They've been around forever and ever.
They post about all sorts of crazy random stuff. Some tech but some not. Plus remember You know, you might follow somebody that posts about tech.
They're not required just to post about tech. They might post about their pizza. You know, or video they liked or who knows what You know, here's the markup.
That's a new source I really like. They do some tech stuff, they do other stuff. You know?
Nixelby I follow. Ars Technica. Ars Technica is on is on mastodon.
So I think they're great.
You know, here's the guy, Ben Word Mueller, I think he's a journalist.
People speaking out against pending California legislation would make it illegal for police to use face recognition technology as the sole.
Reason for search or arrest. To me that's at the intersection of technology and the law which I've always been fascinated by.
Now is that something, Lee Lammert is going to be interested in or Robert Levitt? I don't know.
You know? It's just you gotta kinda dig in and find your stuff.
That's the cool thing and Bruce Sterling, the sci-fi authors on Mastodon.
He doesn't post a lot, but he post interesting stuff.
Alright, so what's the, on the app?
What's the format?
Well, remember, you have to have an instance.
At, I've tried it both ways@fossil.org slash my ID. At my ID or
No, no, go to go to foster.org.
No, I'm saying the server Earl for the app.
Understand what you mean by app. I think
If the Mastodon app.
Well, remember, there is no
Play store.
I don't I don't use the Play Store guys. I don't know. I don't use that.
Pay store.
If you have, what.
Here, do this. Go to get mastodon.org. Sorry, not.org.
I have the massed on app Scott. I'm asking what format is it expecting the Earl?
I tried it both ways from what you talked about.
To do what? I'm sorry, I'm not trying to be dense, but I think I am being.
Log in on Mastodon. It wants your handle in your server.
Of course!
Right, but have you created an account on a server somewhere? Oh, well.
Well, Lee, I mean, again, it depends on the app because if I'm in Mona.
Right here.
So what is it in Mona?
Let me get to it here. One sec. Okay, so I go down here and I wanna add an account.
So I click sign in and it says put the server first.st So you'd put foster don dot social or.org or whatever it is.
You know, I think it
And it says there@foster.org. Is there, is there an add sign there or not?
Well it didn't show how do you spell
Never mind. Never mind. It doesn't want the app signs. I don't see that.
No, it wants this, it just wants the instant server name. Probably. Like. You know, if I was doing info sec, whoops.
Okay, I got it. I got it. Okay.
Click that and then it says, okay, now log in to that instance. Yeah, I'm sorry.
Right.
I'm sorry. I, I'm sorry. We're talking across purposes there. I wasn't trying to.
Yeah, no worries. I got it.
Thanks.
No problem, sorry. It wasn't clear.
What happens is the meeting. Did you have a new instance of a cell, a meeting chat went away?
I'm sorry what?
Oh, I haven't touched anything. Still there here. I forgot it here. 6.
Oh. One
Yeah, I don't know. It says what?
We're still seeing it.
Join mastodon.org. Go to join mastodon.org. That's where you start out by picking a server.
Logging in and do that. That's the 1st step. You have to join an instance for you can do anything else.
Okay.
Okay, worth playing with. Alright.
And by the way guys, I mean, we're all nerds here. If you guys find something cool, post it, you know, let's share.
With the understanding that my cup of tea may not be yours. You know, we all have to understand that.
But if you find something cool, man Share the account to follow. I'd love to do that.
I'll post some of the ones I've talked about. To to the list. And, you know, let's, Let's check them out.
You know, see what each other discovers.
It reference to the question of what happened to the chat. I just posted a test at 9 54 and it acknowledged that it's
I'm looking at it.
I think you might have closed the window or something maybe.
Unfortunately, if you log off of Zoom and then you log back into the meeting. It doesn't show you the chat from the beginning.
It just shows you the chat when you logged back in.
Right. Although mine automatically saves the chat on my. On my file system when I'm done.
Maybe that's a setting you gotta go into Zoom make, but I have it set up. So if I meet with students or have a class or do this.
When I'm done, the chat automatically gets saved into a folder on, on my computer.
Are you using an app or is that on the web?
I'm using the Zoom app.
Cause you get more control. I found it works better than the browser. I mean the browser works but
No.
Alright, well I'm not gonna go around and ask everybody. What they thought was most interesting, but I am curious if some of you guys could tell me what you found.
Useful and interesting out of this. Before I completely lose my voice.
Okay.
Well, this is Stan. I wanna recommend. That everybody go back and look to prior. Presentation you did last year in August.
Cool.
2023, I believe it was. And, I appreciate the mention of this Kirchhoff's law or whatever.
Okay.
Because I remember way back when the, I was subscriber to a magazine that I forget the exact name of it was kind of database thing or whatever.
No? Huh.
And they actually posted the. Code for something that was going to be selected as the the national standard. And then the next issue, they said, it was sorry they withdrawn it because they called, they told us we can't do that if we posted a code.
Okay.
And that was that was a number of years ago and I think that I think that was for nefarious reasons they did that because they wanted something else.
Instead.
Right. Yeah.
Because I believe that was the ulterior motive on it.
That's pretty silly.
Yeah, well that was years and years ago.
Different time.
Yeah, and another thing I'd like to mention is I've heard a lot of
Yeah. Okay.
There it is. There it is, right. By the way, here it is right here. That's Kirkoffs or whatever his name.
Yeah, that I really appreciate because I wanna check into that. Also I'd like to comment that YouTube I've heard a lot of complaints from people that posted up there, they're being limited by what their followers see.
Hello.
They may have, like you said, 10,000 followers but they don't all see everything it gets posted.
Yeah.
It's the algorithm. Yup. And a lot of people like that. They don't want it.
Look. Doing what we're talking about, about I have to go find people and then I have to reverse everything's there and I got that's a lot of extra work a lot of people like you know I just want to follow Courtney Kardashian or whoever and a couple of other people and let them show stuff to me I don't like that, you know? I'm a nerd.
I'm like making my own decisions and making my own. I'm, I imagine most of you applies that to you too.
You don't want to whatever Twitter or Facebook thinks you need.
Well, well, I'm talking about YouTube. YouTube.
No, same thing though, that's my point. You don't want. What the company thinks because what they're choosing is stuff to get you pissed off.
Well, I think it
Our scared and more, you know, more interaction.
Well, I think it's they want to limit what They're telling the guy that's got the channel.
He says, oh, you all your people are, I don't know for sure, but it's like.
They're saying that all your people are not seeing what you post. You want to pay us more money to see that so that more your subscribers will see that?
Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Yep. You got it.
And if oh, also my final thing is I want to mention. When people say nothing to hide, the correct response is, oh, but you've got everything to protect.
Good point. I usually just say show me your wallet, please. Or your phone, and me your phone, please.
Mr.
Yeah. Oh, oh, I did have one question I forgot. Data birth, is there a age limit on these things?
If there is, it'd be 13 and that's because of federal law.
Okay.
Alright.
I think 13 is the law on that stuff. You know, so. Anybody else? Anybody else got something they thought was interesting or?
Useful? Out of what I said? Okay.
That whole concept of following people but then having to make lists that that Just turn it completely upside down for me because it.
It. That was always one of the things that dissuaded me from hanging out on social media. Why would I want to look at something that has 5,000 followers or vice versa.
And it's like. Yeah, I I want the subject matter. I don't want a whole bunch of followers who are But.
Well.
Well, Gary, people are not limited to one topic.
Yeah.
Right. So.
Yes, but you know except for you know my close friends and those people I'm interested in. I go on like the social media.
I'm going for a topic not to make 4,000 new friends.
You
Well, no.
Sure. And there thing is you might not always want to read the post about it. Like I have humor.
I hardly ever look at that. Like, you know, I'm like, yeah, I don't need that.
You know, if I feel like it, if I've got time to kill, I might go in the humor list and poke around, but I normally don't look at that every day, but there are several I look at every single day because I know it's gonna have stuff in there.
I want to keep up with.
Oh yes. Yeah.
That is a list that you have created Scott, right? No, no, there's no pre list out there for humor.
Nope. Nope. In fact, every single time I add somebody, I add them to a list.
I never, I don't have anybody that's not on a list.
That was the new stuff I needed. Thank you, Scott.
It's all segmented that way. That's it. Absolutely. Anybody else for close or I close?
Oh.
Scott, I again like to say you always deliver a hundred 50% of what I expect. Thank you.
Thanks. Thanks guys. Well, I hope it's useful. I'll post some stuff on the list like I talked about my mastodon.
I'll post a few recommendations and let's everybody do that and see what we come up with.
And then I think one of you volunteers like Lee who has a ton of extra time. Should set up a mastodon instance for
Yeah.
Good luck with that.
Yeah, sure.
Okay. Yeah, I know. Alright guys. Thanks a lot, guys.
Thanks, Chat. Thank you.
To get around.
Good night.
Take care. Talk to you also. All right. 99.
Thanks. Good night.
Anybody have any? Other comments or topics they want to quickly ask questions about. Not necessarily remain to tonight now that our speaker is gone.
Remind Lee to save the, the chat things.
SAY, it's saved automatically, Stan.
Okay.
Is it save is the chat saved when in the archives?
Yes. Yes, when we when they're made, they're up on the archive page.
Okay, cool.
Yes they are.
They are. Oh, so yeah. You get them Tuesday?
Yeah. Hi, Paul.
Okay.
I thought it was just the recording.
No, I pulled down the video, the sound. The chat room and the VTT recording if it makes it sometimes it doesn't but usually does And, The thing is, if you can use DLC to combine.
The video with the text file, the VTT file, that VTT file has the timestamps in it.
Okay.
So you combine those things with the with the DLC it'll actually display The, the, subtitles in when you're looking at the video.
Cool.
And I'm, you know, I don't have enough time in the day to automatically combine that and re record the damn thing.
If I wanted to do that and spend more time, I could do that. But I don't.
It's all this dead air, I suggest we end the meeting.
Okay.
Okay, and, I see, A note from Sam in the chat. But having some networking fundamental sessions that is a good idea and We'll see if we can't get get some people together to work on that.
There is, as you probably noticed, the series of tutorials. We just did the second one tonight, version only last month on sniffing.
But, but yeah, we probably should have just some more fundamental, networking topics as well, but,
Well, I've included that hot topic of our next series is going to be. Remote, networking.
After the scanning thing.
Alright, okay, Gary. Okay, this was the monthly. Monthly general meeting of the St.
Louis Linux Unix users group, today's date was Wednesday, June the 12.th
Hey there.
2024. Main speaker tonight was Scott Graneman who was talking to us about social media for nerds or social media for techies our tutorial basic presentation earlier was Lee Lambert and Grant Taylor, sorry about that, Grant, who we're talking to us about, sniffing, specifically Wire Shark and TCP
Dump. This was part 2 of a series they've been doing. So that was what we did tonight.
Thank you all for coming and tune in. Next Thursday night. Or the St. Louis Linux, user group meeting.
And our topic is kind of in flux. It's changed here in the last couple of days due to some health issues and.
So, if anybody has any good presentations, will work and getting a good presentation lined up here in the next day or 2 and get it out there.
On our, web pages, calendar, beat up, things like that. So anybody have any suggestions, please, send it to editor at sloop.
Yeah.
Dot com. I'm sorry, sloop.org. Yup, that'll help us get something organized.
So thank you all