Trying out Mastodon

It is so painful watching Twitter go into a horrible tailspin.

I was always against the idea of selling Twitter to Elon Musk but I never imagined it could get this bad, this quickly. He never wanted to buy it, he clearly doesn’t know how to unlock its potential and he’s just flailing. Just this week he has suspended a number of independent journalists without warning and banned any and all tweets mentioning competing social platforms. Unsurprisingly many of my friends and creative folks I follow have either left or are substantially using it less.

I am not giving up entirely on Twitter. But I will use it less. And I’m now giving Mastodon a shot.

I’m still getting the hang of it and suggest a few tidbits if you want to learn about it as well.

Start by reading Joanna Stern’s article which provides a great intro and overview on how it all works

Next, visit Fedipages to find your friends on Mastodon (I’m @bijan@home.social)

The onboarding is clunky for sure. But it’s also a breath of fresh air.

Also leave me a comment with your Mastodon username. Unlike Musk’s Twitter, you can do so freely on my blog

There is so much opportunity to build what’s next. I don’t know if Mastodon is the answer but it’s worth our time to find out.

ps: oh, and please don’t delete your tweets

Rome, 2022

In June of this year I made a quick five day trip to Rome for a set of meetings. It’s been years since I’ve been to Italy and even longer since visiting Rome. And I just loved every moment. The people, the language, the food and the Italian spirt on every street and every interaction. I carried one camera and one lens everywhere and tried to capture little moments here and there.

Oh, Italy. You are amazing. I miss you already.

Iceland, 2022

We have been wanting to visit Iceland for a long long time. We made plans and had a trip on the books for April 2020 but that trip was canceled due to the pandemic. Two years later and a lot has changed and we felt like it was a safe time to make the trip. So last month we visited Iceland for the first time.

Iceland is truly magical. Many Icelanders believe in elves. And after my first trip I can imagine why. So much rich history and a breathtaking landscape combined with the heavenly northern lights makes for a place of wonder. This first trip was clearly too short. We only had time to visit Reykjavík and a portion of the southern coast. The weather this time of year was also extreme. Blistering winds and rain, followed by blue sky and then hail. All within the hour. And then the cycle seemingly repeats throughout the day. But it was an amazing experience and I’m grateful for the opportunity.

Iceland, you are amazing. We will return.

(All color photographs made with a Hasselblad 503cw and Kodak Portra films. Black and white photographs made with a Leica MP and Kodak Tri-X 400. Developed and scanned by Richard Photo Lab in California.)

Keeping the internet weird

I very much enjoyed this recent interview with Matt Mullenweg (founder of Automatic, developer of WordPress and the most recent owner of my beloved Tumblr).

This particular response from Matt was my favorite part of the conversation

I will add that one of the most amazing things about the technological revolution was allowing for economics of abundance, not scarcity. Things get more valuable the more copies there are. We were talking about the positive flywheel of open-source earlier. WordPress gets more valuable the more free copies there are. Now we’re getting more things to introduce scarcity and the value of scarcity into the web, perhaps even programmatically with stuff like NFTs. The difference between what’s come before — from tens of thousands of humanity’s advances — is this idea that, in the world of bits instead of atoms, you and I don’t have a zero-sum way of prospering. We can both benefit from the same thing. We can perfectly copy that software and that actually enables entirely new business models that are pretty exciting. Or maybe that it’s not a business at all, which is okay. Everything doesn’t have to be for profit.

My love affair with the internet, online communities and the web came from this ethos. And it still does today.

Photography is not reality, and for me, it is not about capturing exactly what was there. This is one of the reasons why I love film. With different film stocks you get different looks to the work. Either it is a colour difference, or a contrast difference or perhaps both. I use Fuji Velvia for most of my landscape work. Fuji Velvia does not record accurate colour. More or less, each time I get the films back, it is like I am staring at images made in a parallel universe to the one I was photographing. I also love film grain because it ensures that the images aren’t hopefully considered to be ‘real’ or ‘verbatim’. Film has a tendency to roll off the highlights so they don’t hit a sudden wall. And lastly, I like to use film because I understand there will be a big disconnect between what I am seeing and what I am recording.

Bruce Percy