mastodon.xyz is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
A Mastodon instance, open to everyone, but mainly English and French speaking.

Administered by:

Server stats:

815
active users

One thing that drives me *bonkers* about tech culture is teaching designers that the bureaucracy is more important than the output — journey maps, documentation, multiple iterations, user research etc etc. All of these are fine tools but the goal is a good product and you can spend months producing mountains of all these design artifacts and *still* end up with junk.

Mastodon isn't perfect.

But the fact a social network exists that is completely free to use

has no venture capital investors

has no shareholders to answer to

has no growth targets

with a web interface with zero tracking cookies

and mobile apps with zero trackers at all

with ten thousand server administrators who donate their time for user safety

is - in my opinion - mindbogglingly cool, given the state of the world we live in. Not everything has to be shit. People make things better.

A new report found that the for-profit US healthcare system ranks last among peer nations.

We spend twice as much per capita on healthcare and have the worst health outcomes.

Reminder that Medicare For All would save $450B in health care costs and 68,000 lives per year.

FYI, for those of you who upgraded to macOS Sequoia and are having WiFi issues. Try disabling Little Snitch. I had to disable it in the Network > Filter settings to get WiFI working reliably again.