Trying to convince Derek Sivers to join Mastodon
So… here we are. I was listening to a Tim Ferris Show podcast, episode #668, with Derek Sivers released on April 21st. It lasts for nearly 3 hours, bunch of good stuff, really recommend. But at some point Derek was talking about technological independence. As somebody who saw the dotcom bubble, he said you should expect to outlive most companies. (Also, I’d add, you should expect companies to change management, go through rough patches, change policies, etc. etc. during your lifetime.) So, because of that, it makes sense, if you care about your data, that you try to really own it, instead of depending on them. He explained how you can setup a backup server (or even better, 2 of them) with cheap VPSs, to keep your files, contacts and calendars safe and in sync. Also, how can you run your email under your domain. Altogether this costs some money (domain, VPS, email delivery service) and effort, but if you care about your data, it’s a worthy goal, I agreed with him.
But, after a while, I was thinking: you can do the same for your social media presence with Mastodon! You can run your own server under your domain, own all your posts, stored in your PostgreSQL, all your media files in your file-system, and depend only on open source software (Mastodon) and open protocols (ActivityPub) to generate a social media presence, being able to connect with people.
So, I decided to… try convince Derek to support Mastodon by joining or talking about it. Yeah, I know, cold emailing a celebrity, what are you thinking, boy? But, Derek is different, he has a form in his website sive.rs and he says he replies to all messages, usually within a week. Actually, many years ago, I wrote to him because I had read The Little Book of Talent by Daniel Coyle and created a one page summary of it, and I think I read something about Derek talking about this book and so I sent the summary to him. He actually replied something like “That looks useful”.
Also, another reason why this might work (I’m not as crazy as I sound). Derek likes Ruby on Rails. Actually, he tried once, in a 2 years effort, to rewrite his whole platform cdbaby from PHP to Rails, just because he thought Rails was the right way of doing things. That by the time Rails was pretty young. And he failed, very hard, you can read more about it https://sive.rs/rails2php. But his romance with Rails kept going. So I guessed he might feel attracted by the largest open source distributed system ever written in Rails, yep, Mastodon, that’s it. And in general he seems to favor the culture of old time geeks, open source and so own.
Of course, for a person with so many possible things to be doing, and scarce time, it might not just worth it for him at this point. If he’s going to create an account in Mastodon, it should be because he’s supporting the cause. Thinking this might be a good thing for the world. I just really really hope that he thinks so, because it would be so awesome if he joined. We really need good yet popular guys like him in the Fediverse.
By the way of conclusion, I just wanted to say, if you have people you like, and you know they might be a good fit for Mastodon or the Fediverse in general, you might try to reach them. Just an idea. We really need more content creators and thought leaders here, to make the Fediverse a hotter place.
Edit 2023–05–05
Derek actually replied!
Hi Armando -
Cool! Thanks for the recommendations and such thorough explanation! I’ll check them out.
It seems maybe he didn’t know about Mastodon. This is something we often don’t expect: that many people won’t know nothing about the things we care about. Still waiting for his decision, but in case he didn’t know, just sharing that Mastodon exists seems a valuable result by itself.
This is the original message I wrote to Derek:
Hi Derek,
I’ve heard your recent episode in Tim’s show. It was awesome, thanks for sharing your wisdom!
As a programmer (PHP, Python, backend), I’ve found the part on technical independence quite awesome. Well… did you know that you can do the same with your social media presence? Maybe you have heard about Mastodon and the Fediverse? It works very similar to emails. You can use somebody’s server or you can have yours, under your own domain, and you can follow and be followed by people from other servers.
By far Mastodon is the most mature project in the Fediverse, with around 10 million users and growing. It’s 100% OSS and it’s built on Rails!
I’ve found the Fediverse an amazing place where people connect much better, away from the interference from ads, data collection and “engaging” feeds optimized by AI. It takes a few days to adjust but then it’s really a great experience. People are much more polite and caring here.
The Fediverse is on its infancy, it’s still weak in many regards. It needs more popular figures and content creators. I guess what I want to say (blushing here) is: It would mean so much if you joined or talked about Mastodon. Of course, I understand your time is valuable, and you already use Twitter, also that you’d start in Mastodon with 0 followers, but you don’t need to spend that much time in it, just posting something occasionally would mean so so much.
If you want to join, there are a few options:
- For starters you don’t need to create your own server, you can pick one from https://joinmastodon.org/servers, https://mastodon.social is the most popular. Later you can migrate your account to your own server if you decide to have one. I’ve heard is relatively easy, but haven’t tried a migration myself.
- If you want to have your own server the official docs for it are very good: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/run-your-own/. I’ve recently experimented launching a Mastodon server cubatech.social with a $10 VPS and it was fairly easy, but there are managed hosting services and a 1-Click Install Image for DigitalOcean that make it even easier.
I’d be super happy to help if you want any assistance joining.
And please, if you do join, post about it so I can follow you :))My Mastodon accounts
@armando_rp@fosstodon.org
@cubatech@cubatech.social
