#mastodons

[geopsych]

From last October. The pods were still hanging on the honey locust tree because the large Ice Age mammals that used to eat them and spread the seeds just never come around anymore. I read but haven’t tested it that the stuff inside the pods around the seeds is sweeter than honey (not recommended b/c I don’t know if it’s toxic). Somebody back in the Pleistocene had a sweet tooth and it seems to be mastodons. Remnants of these pods have been found in their manure. And the huge thorns and spines at a certain height on the trees? They were to discourage mastodons from pushing the whole tree over to get the pods just out of reach! Now you know.

[gwydpolls]

Time Travel Question 61: Middle Ages and Much Earlier

These Questions are the result of suggestions from the previous iteration.

This category may include suggestions made too late to fall into the correct grouping.

Please add new suggestions below if you have them for future consideration.

[antiqueanimals]

Mastodon Americanus by Charles R. Knight. 1907. From Terra: The Member's Magazine of The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Volume 25, No. 2. November/December 1986.

Internet Archive

[uwlmvac]

Mammoths and mastodons are both extinct ice-age megafauna, distantly related to today's elephants. The mammoth eats grass, and its teeth are flat to allow crushing the vegetation. The mastodon has a series of high bumps on the teeth to allow it to eat browse such as twigs. Mammoth remains are found predominantly on the plains, and mastodon predominantly in the eastern woodlands. However, the La Crosse area has remains of both species, suggesting that the vegetation here at the end of the ice age was a mosaic of both grassland and woodland that could support both species. 

Photo: Single tooth from: Left-mammoth, right-mastodon. The mammoth tooth is fragile and some of the tooth is broken, exposing the deep tooth enamel. Mammoth lose their teeth as they are worn down, and new ones emerge to replace them.

For more information about mammoths and mastodons visit MVAC’s video at: https://www.uwlax.edu/mvac/educators/archaeology-terms/?letter=m&term=164813

[deafeningcreationearthquake]

[cyberpunkboytoy]

So there's the idea of "kitchen table poly," AKA "everyone in the polycule needs to be able to sit at a kitchen table together and get along like friends."

One of my roommates just came up with a counter idea, which is "poker table poly." Everyone in the polycule must be enemies. No one is allowed to get too chummy or they're kicked out. They all also likely owe eachother money.

[abbiistabbii]

[cmerrill2]

Speculative Creative Nonfiction

Nonfiction is not made up, right? But I wanted to wander off into my imagination while writing this essay and this is the result, just published in Sentience Literary Journal: “Mastodons, Mammoths, and Morula” by Cheryl Merrill

[weepingwidar]

Yui Sakamoto (Japanese, 1981-2024) - Untitled (2022)

[paleoart]

Early Bird

Patreon • Ko-fi • BlueSky  • Instagram • Prints & Merch  

[amnhnyc]

This Fossil Friday, meet the Warren mastodon: the first complete American mastodon (Mammut americanum) skeleton found in the United States! This fossilized proboscidean was discovered in a bog in Newburgh, New York in 1845. It was remarkable for being preserved in the position in which it had died some 11,000 years ago—standing upright with its legs thrust forward and its head tilted upward, likely gasping for air under mud in which it had become mired. Shortly after its excavation, the Warren mastodon’s tusks began to decay. But thanks to Museum preparators, the tusk fragments were reassembled and restored to their proper length of 8 ft 6 in (2.6 m).

See the Warren mastodon up close in the Hall of Advanced Mammals! The Museum is open daily from 10 am–5:30 pm. Plan your visit.

Photo: D. Finnin / © AMNH

[alex-fictus]

M is for...?

All of the M names in my Paleo Party Cenozoic section! I have so many M names, I had to split them up into a few parts! Are there any I'm missing? (The Maned Wolf is often called a Living Fossil, so therefore they fit into the paleo party still. They are not extinct, no one panic)

Stickers || Phone Wallpapers Masterlist

[netscapenavigator-official]

If Staff ever implements the editing method from Mastodon, we'd be fucked.

Currently, on Tumblr, if you edit a post, all the former reblogs stay exactly the same.

On Mastodon, editing a post changes all the boosts and simply notifies the people who interacted with the post prior to the edit.

Now, can you imagine that on Tumblr?

Surely giving the OP the ability to edit their post after hundreds of thousands of people have reblogged it would be a perfectly balanced feature that I'm sure the Tumblr' userbase has never abused before.

[covidnovelaesthetic]

How do you do? As well as you know, the usual being plagued by antlered worms and attacking earth-eaters. Hopefully wizards and bats and lizards and rats can compete with that, with Carnival Jack. Though the Architect seems friendly, which is probably just swell. Beyond the Architect are the cave spiders, crawling around one another within a great cylindrical star-cavern and paying no heed to the small crab between their feet holding one Dreamsphere (ours). Upon the outside surface of the cylinder trods a great elk, and between the icy-white and ivy-draped peaks of its antlers lies a great network of cobwebs, of silken strings, upon which dances a great Remipede, playing out the Song of Reality on the strings of the great harp, which hums in the ear of the narwhal-squids which pull the chariot of the Hand of Time around the circumference of the great celestial Clown Clock, which crawls with ogres and goblins and spiders and trolls and dragons and squid and emerald crabs and hermit crabs and octopus-belugas, all hanging about in the tide-pools between its infinitely-stretching axial spars. All of this is in turn imagined by the velociraptor-monkey with a spear which lives in a tree and hides from snapping packs of weevil-aardvark-aardwolf-wolves, cougar crabs and angry lobster-tigers snapping for a denied dinner. In a hidden compartment in its tree, the velociraptor-monkey protects a hidden tankful of Architects on a reef which hold Memories in time via Dreamspheres. Butterflies and moths made of jewels flit lazily above it all, more heedless than the vultures and bustards and buzzards which are starting to crowd in the sky and blot out the sun and descend on the land to relieve its remaining carnage that following day. “Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme, Yesterday Holds Memories In Time,” screams Carnival Jack’s enabler with a great cruel sneer and pulls out your heart and demands that you yield. His mouth makes impossible sounds that seem almost like words. You cannot decrypt it, no matter how you scream. We all emerge as particles of unfiltered light from the eyes at the tips of an anemone’s waving fronds.

The Clockmakers are coming.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Billionaire-proofing the internet

Picks and Shovels is a new, standalone technothriller starring Marty Hench, my two-fisted, hard-fighting, tech-scam-busting forensic accountant. You can pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter, which features a brilliant audiobook read by Wil Wheaton.

During the Napster wars, the record labels seriously pissed off millions of internet users when they sued over 19,000 music fans, mostly kids, but also grannies, old people, and dead people.

It's hard to overstate how badly the labels behaved. Like, there was the Swarthmore student who was the maintainer of a free/open source search engine that indexed files available in public sharepoints on the LAN. The labels sued him for millions and millions (the statutory damages for digital copyright infringement runs to $150,000 per file) and, when he begged for a settlement, said that they would accept his life's savings, but only if he changed majors and stopped studying Computer Science.

No, really.

What's more, none of the money the labels extracted from teenagers, grandparents (and the dead) went to artists. The labels just kept it all, while continuing to insist that they were doing all this because they wanted to "protect artists."

One thing everyone agreed on was how disgusted we all were with the labels. What we didn't agree on was what to do about it. A lot of us wanted to reform copyright – say, by creating a blanket license for internet music so that artists could get paid directly. This was the systemic approach.

Another group – call them the "individualists" – wanted a boycott. Just stop buying and listening to music from the major labels. Every dollar you spend with a label is being used to fund a campaign of legal terror. Merely enjoying popular music makes you part of the problem.

You can probably guess which group I was in. Leaving aside the futility of "voting with your wallet" (a rigged ballot that's always won by the people with the thickest wallet), I just thought this was bad tactics.

Here's what I would say when people told me we should all stop listening to popular music: "If members of your popular movement are not allowed to listen to popular music, your movement won't be very popular."

We weren't going to make political change by creating an impossible purity test ("Ew, you listen to music from a major label? God, what's wrong with you?"). I mean, for one thing, a lot of popular music is legitimately fantastic and makes peoples' lives better. Popular movements should strive to increase their members' joy, not demand their deprivation. Again, not merely because this is a nice thing to do for people, but also because it's good tactics to make participation in the thing you're trying to do as joyous as possible.

Which brings me to social media. The problem with social media is that the people we love and want to interact with are being held prisoner in walled gardens. The mechanism of their imprisonment is the "switching costs" of leaving. Our friends and communities are on bad social media networks because they love each other more than they hate Musk or Zuck. Leaving a social platform can cost you contact with family members in the country you emigrated from, a support group of people who share your rare disease, the customers or audience you rely on for your livelihood, or just the other parents organizing your kid's little league game.

Hypothetically, you could organize all these people to leave at once, go somewhere else, and re-establish all your social connections. Practically, the "collective action problem" of doing so is nearly insurmountable. This is what platform owners depend on – it's why they know they can enshittify their services without losing users. So long as the pain of using the service is lower than the pain of leaving it, the companies can turn the screws on users to make their lives worse in order to extract more profit from them. This is why Musk killed the block button and why Zuck fired all his moderators. Why bear the expense of doing something nice for users if they'll still stick around even if you cut a ton of headcount and/or expensive compute?

There's a way out of this, thankfully. When social media is federated, then you can leave a server without leaving your friends. Think of it as being similar to changing cell-phone companies. When you switch from Verizon to T-Mobile, you keep your number, you keep your address book and you keep your friends, who won't even know you switched networks unless you tell them:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/29/how-to-leave-dying-social-media-platforms/

There's no reason social media couldn't work this way. You should be able to leave Facebook or Twitter for Mastodon, Bluesky, or any other service and still talk with the people you left behind, provided they still want to talk with you:

https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook

That's how the Fediverse – which Mastodon is part of – works already. You can switch from one Mastodon server to another, and all the people you follow and who follow you will just move over to that new server. That means that if the person or company or group running your server goes sour, you aren't stuck making a choice between the people you love who connect to you on that server, and the pain of dealing with whatever bullshit the management is throwing off:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/23/semipermeable-membranes/#free-as-in-puppies

We could make that stronger! Data protection laws like the EU's GDPR and California's CCPA create a legal duty for online services to hand over your data on demand. Arguably, these laws already require your Mastodon server's management to give you the files you need to switch from one server to another, but that could be clarified. Handing these files over to users on demand is really straightforward – even a volunteer running a small server for a few friends will have no trouble living up to this obligation. It's literally just a minute's work for each user.

Another way to make this stronger is through governance. Many of the great services that defined the old, good internet were run by "benevolent dictators for life." This worked well, but failed so badly. Even if the dictator for life stayed benevolent, that didn't make them infallible. The problem of a dictatorship isn't just malice – it's also human frailty. For a service to remain good over long timescales, it needs accountable, responsive governance. That's why all the most successful BDFL services (like Wikipedia) transitioned to community-managed systems:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/10/bdfl/#high-on-your-own-supply

There, too, Mastodon shines. Mastodon's founder Eugen Rochko has just explicitly abjured his role as "ultimate decision-maker" and handed management over to a nonprofit:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/mastodon-becomes-nonprofit-to-make-sure-its-never-ruined-by-billionaire-ceo/

I love using Mastodon and I have a lot of hope for its future. I wish I was as happy with Bluesky, which was founded with the promise of federation, and which uses a clever naming scheme that makes it even harder for server owners to usurp your identity. But while Bluesky has added many, many technically impressive features, they haven't delivered on the long-promised federation:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/#tie-yourself-to-a-federated-mast

Bluesky sure seems like a lot of fun! They've pulled tens of millions of users over from other systems, and by all accounts, they've all having a great time. The problem is that without federation, all those users are vulnerable to bad decisions by management (perhaps under pressure from the company's investors) or by a change in management (perhaps instigated by investors if the current management refuses to institute extractive measures that are good for the investors but bad for the users). Federation is to social media what fire-exits are to nightclubs: a way for people to escape if the party turns deadly:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/#graceful-failure-modes

So what's the answer? Well, around Mastodon, you'll hear a refrain that reminds me a lot of the Napster wars: "People who are enjoying themselves on Bluesky are wrong to do so, because it's not federated and the only server you can use is run by a VC-backed for-profit. They should all leave that great party – there's no fire exits!"

This is the social media version of "To be in our movement, you have to stop listening to popular music." Sure, those people shouldn't be crammed into a nightclub that has no fire exits. But thankfully, there is an alternative to being the kind of scold who demands that people leave a great party, and being the kind of callous person who lets tens of millions of people continue to risk their lives by being stuck in a fire-trap.

We can install our own fire-exits in Bluesky.

Yesterday, an initiative called "Free Our Feeds" launched, with a set of goals for "billionaire-proofing" social media. One of those goals is to add the long-delayed federation to Bluesky. I'm one of the inaugural endorsers for this, because installing fire exits for Bluesky isn't just the right thing to do, it's also good tactics:

https://freeourfeeds.com/

Here's why: if a body independent of the Bluesky corporation implements its federation services, then we ensure that its fire exits are beyond the control of its VCs. That means that if they are ever tempted in future to brick up the fire-exits, they won't be able to. This isn't a hypothetical risk. When businesses start to enshittify their services, they fully commit themselves to blocking anything that makes it easy to leave those services.

That's why Apple went so hard after Beeper Plus, a service that enhanced iMessage's security by making conversations between Apple and Android users as private as chats that were confined to Apple users:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/07/blue-bubbles-for-all/#never-underestimate-the-determination-of-a-kid-who-is-time-rich-and-cash-poor

It's why Elon Musk periodically freaks out and suspends users who list their Mastodon userids in their Twitter bios:

https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/15/elon-musk-suspends-mastodon-twitter-account-over-elonjet-tracking/

And it's why Meta will suspend your account if you link to Pixelfed, a Fediverse-based alternative to Instagram:

https://www.404media.co/meta-is-blocking-links-to-decentralized-instagram-competitor-pixelfed/

Once upon a time, we had a solid way of overcoming the problem of lock-in. We'd reverse-engineer a proprietary system and make a free, open alternative. We've been hacking fire exits into walled gardens since the Usenet days, with the creation of the alt.* hierarchy:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/11/altinteroperabilityadversarial

When the corporate owners of Unix started getting all weird about source-code access and user-modifiability, we didn't insist that Unix users were bad people for sticking with a corporate OS. We reverse-engineered Unix and set all those users free:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Project

The answer to Microsoft's proprietary SMB network protocol wasn't a campaign to shame people for having SMB running on their LANs. It was reverse-engineering SMB and making SAMBA, which is now in every single device in your home and office, and it's gloriously free as in speech and free as in beer:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/samba-versus-smb-adversarial-interoperability-judo-network-effects

In the years since, a thicket of laws we colloquially call "IP" has grown up around services and products, and people have literally forgotten that there is an alternative to wheedling people to endure the pain of leaving a proprietary system for a free one. IP has put the imaginations of people who dream of a free internet in chains.

We can do better than begging people to leave a party they're enjoying; we can install our own fucking fire exits. Sure, maybe that means that a lot of those users will stay on the proprietary platform, but at least we'll have given them a way to leave if things go horribly wrong.

After all, there's no virtue in software freedom. The only thing worth caring about is human freedom. The only reason to value software freedom is if it sets humans free.

If I had my way, all those people enjoying themselves on Bluesky would come and enjoy themselves in the Fediverse. But I'm not a purist. If there's a way to use Bluesky without locking myself to the platform, I will join the party there in a hot second. And if there's a way to join the Bluesky party from the Fediverse, then goddamn I will party my ass off.

Check out my Kickstarter to pre-order copies of my next novel, Picks and Shovels!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/14/contesting-popularity/#everybody-samba

[shinesurge]

Crossposting this from Mastodon to try and reach more people!

US citizen that doesn't love protests or big crowds? Like computers? Love data? Contribute CPU time to the Internet Archive backing up government data.

Small contributions add up!