Saturday 5 September 2026
6.48pm
Every generation has catch phrases and words associated with them. Currently, the word is “slop.”
I’m just going to be very blunt with my thoughts on this. If you use the word slop in your post, article, blog, whatever, as soon as I see it I will have lost all interest in what you have to say.
Why? Because you are a hypocrite.
You are ranting and raving about something on the premise that it was created without “human thinking.” When you use that word, you are doing exactly what you are ranting about – not thinking by gratuitously using the current rallying cry against AI instead of having a thought of your own.
I scan though posts on bubble.town, Reddit, mastodon.social, indieweb.social, and Lemmy and this word get’s tossed around so much that people using it think they are coming across as being on “team human” when in fact it feels like they can’t think, on their own, of a better word or original thought than slop.
I would rather read “AI slop” that at least has the excuse in that it is only regurgitating human input, but what is the excuse for those humans producing their own “slop?” Every post ranting against AI slop is the same, repetitive, boring as fuck party line. You are not saying anything new. You are not making a case against AI. You are just doing what AI does: repeating what you ingest.
So yeah, ride your high horse and think you have something useful to say.
You don’t.
Saturday 29 August 2026
4.44pm
My brain still thinks I am 30 and my body fights it tooth and nail. I had a band gig last night, old school 9pm to 1am. The gig was over an hour away so I loaded my vehicle at 5pm with all the PA and my gear then drove out there. two hours to unload/setup, four hours of playing, and other hour of tear down and then another hour and 15 minute drive back home put me home at 3:15am. 10 hours for a few days of gas money.
It’s a good thing I love playing music.
But I woke up today around 9am, sore, tired, and lethargic. I didn’t unload last night so I still have to do that, and I am putting it off. My body hurts. People don’t realize how physical it is to be in a local band. We don’t have roadies, and instrument techs. We do more than just “stand up there an play” (which is also exhausting…if you have ever performed at a biker bar you know how energetic it gets and it is easy to get lost in the “moment”).
Yet I keep on doing it, at 60 years old. Ask me today If I want a gig this week and you would think I would turn it down, knowing how exhausted I get… but I would take it.
To be honest, I don’t know how long I can hold this pace up. I “really’ love playing for an audience. It’s like a drug. But my old, out of shape, dad bod that has ailments a lot of guys my age have, it’s starting to complain, loudly and clearly.
Part of me thinks I should find and pay a young person to help with the hard physical labor portions of gigging, take the pay cut and be happy with it because I am still doing what I love. I have truly considered this. But the money, while not enough to pay my bills is pretty solid income to fill in the gaps. Taking a pay cut would be noticeable I think.
I am honestly just thinking out loud here, on a day that I have been napping and nursing my old ass all day. But getting old is become a very real reality.
Sunday 23 August 2026
5.33pm
Spend enough time poking around Mastodon instances, looking at who runs the bigger ActivityPub servers, or reading about governments experimenting with decentralized social media, and a pattern starts to show up. A surprising amount of the interesting activity has happened outside the United States.
Japan, Germany, India, and even China come up again and again in the history of the fediverse. American institutions, meanwhile, have mostly watched from the sidelines while Silicon Valley platforms grew larger and more centralized.
I went looking for academic research to see whether that impression holds up. The answer is: maybe, but the research I found does not really answer the question I was asking.
Two studies from Arizona State University looked closely at migration away from Twitter. One focused on the Twitter-to-Mastodon exodus after Musk’s takeover. A later study looked at migration to Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads at the same time. Both examined who left Twitter, why they left, what made them stay on another platform, and how the different platforms shaped user behavior.
Neither study breaks the data down by country.
The researchers were interested in behavior, not geography. So if you’re hoping for a clean chart showing “Mastodon users by nation,” you’re going to be disappointed. I was.
That missing data is worth mentioning because a lot of what gets said about international fediverse adoption, including what I’m about to say, comes from scattered reporting and institutional history rather than good comparative survey data.
Still, the scattered evidence is interesting.
Mastodon was reportedly much bigger in Japan than in most other countries for years before many Americans had heard of it. A big part of that came from Pixiv, which launched a Mastodon-based server called Pawoo not long after Mastodon itself appeared in 2016. Pawoo quickly became one of the largest individual servers on the network.
Germany’s role looks different. Its influence is less about one giant server and more about the institutional side of the project. Mastodon is developed by a German nonprofit. The German state of Schleswig-Holstein runs its own instance through the project. Germany’s Sovereign Tech Fund has also provided more than half a million euros for infrastructure work.
The European Union went a step further with EU Voice, an official Mastodon instance intended to give EU institutions an alternative to American-owned social networks. The experiment lasted a couple of years before being wound down.
India has its own chapter in the story. In 2019, nearly 20,000 Indian Twitter users temporarily moved to Mastodon during a dispute over moderation. Homegrown Mastodon-derived services such as Tooter also appeared, although Tooter became controversial over changes it had made to the underlying code.
China is a very different case. Mastodon has been used there as a way around domestic censorship. That’s not really the same phenomenon as Americans leaving Twitter because they dislike a new owner or recommendation algorithm. For some Chinese users, decentralized social media has been about access to open communication in the first place.
Australia had another kind of example. Switter was a Mastodon instance built specifically for sex workers. It eventually shut down in 2022 after legal and regulatory changes in Australia and the United States made operating it increasingly difficult.
None of this proves that the United States lags behind the rest of the world in fediverse adoption. I don’t think the available evidence supports a claim that strong.
What it does suggest is that institutions and communities outside the US have sometimes treated decentralized social media as something worth building deliberately.
In Japan, the motivation was partly cultural and community-driven. In Germany and the EU, digital sovereignty played a role. In China, censorship circumvention mattered. In India and Australia, particular communities had reasons to create alternatives that served needs mainstream platforms were not meeting.
The American experience has looked different. Mastodon tends to get attention here when something goes wrong somewhere else. Twitter changes ownership. A moderation policy changes. Another platform does something users hate. People rush toward Mastodon, create accounts, look around, and some of them stay.
That is not the same thing as deciding ahead of time that decentralized communication infrastructure is worth having.
That distinction between reactive migration and deliberate infrastructure-building may be the more interesting question. I just haven’t found the dataset that would let me prove it.
The broader small web is even harder to pin down. I’m thinking here of Gemini, old Gopher servers, personal HTML sites, webrings, and the various little corners of the internet that never quite accepted that five giant websites should become the internet.
I have no solid numbers on where those people live.
My own experience gives me the impression that Germany, the Netherlands, and the Nordic countries are overrepresented in those spaces too. That would make some sense given how often those countries appear in open-source and digital-rights communities more generally.
But that’s a hunch. I can’t point to a study that demonstrates it, and I’d rather call it a hunch than dress it up as data.
If anyone knows of research that actually maps fediverse or small-web adoption by country, with real numbers behind it, I’d like to read it.
Until then, this is an observation built from scattered evidence rather than a documented trend. And when it comes to the small web, that may be about as much certainty as the available data allows.
