Move Slowly and Build Bridges

Review of Move Slowly and Build Bridges by Robert W. Gehl (book site):

  • Compare Mastodon to Twitter & Facebook
    • Mentioned the Brexit referendum & the Cambridge Analytica issues, but no mention of Careless People
    • Since Musk took over Twitter:
      • All moderation is gone
      • From the section "Final Straws and Dead Feeds": Others left because they realized that Musk's post-takeover purging software engineers - including high-level executives in charge of safety and security - would make the site insecure.
      • How much "free speech" is there on Twitter? "Twitter blocked the mention of Mastodon on Twitter. I saw this in real time - one day, when I was posting links to various Mastodon instances, an angry red warning box appeared with the text this link has been identified as potentially harmful. Essentially, Musk's Twitter was using a system intended to help people avoid fradulent phishing sites as an anti-competition tool."
  • Federated services are not as easy to sign up for as centralized commercial services - the 'unique username' problem is a simple example. Some help is available at https://joinmastodon.org
  • Chapter 4 on Codes of Conduct - these are generally found in the /about for an instance
  • In the section describing Gab.com, the author brings up Jesus and John Wayne
  • After a survey of economic models for Mastodon the following chapter focused on:
    • Degrowth - value in small instances and reduced services - https://small-tech.org
    • Solarpunks authors like T. X. Watson sound interesting, would love more examples
Posted by John Borden at 3 May 2026, 4:43 pm link

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