[Announce] June 12th 2018 - MUG Meeting

[craig at decafbad.net]

We meet at 6:30pm on the second Tuesday of each month at the
Farmington Community Library.

 Topics Include:

 Mastodon and the State of the Federated Web

 Mastodon is a decentralized and federated social networking platform
made up of multiple unique servers communicating over a shared
protocol (ActivityPub). This allows each Mastodon server to be run as
it's own community. Rather than one large monolithic server dedicated
to general interests and discussion there are servers for many
different interests and tastes. But what makes this system unique as
any Mastodon user can subscribe and follow any other user on another
instance. And with ActivityPub other systems that aren't Mastodon-
based can also communicate with Mastodon instances and vice versa.

 Craig Maloney will discuss a brief history of Mastodon and the
history of federated social media (Mastodon wasn't the first in this
space). We'll cover the basics of Mastodon and how to use it. We'll
also cover some third-party applications that can be used with
Mastodon. Then we'll take an introductory look at ActivityPub, the
protocol that connects up Mastodon instances and the larger federated
web.

 Facebook and Twitter have been in the news for behaving badly with
user data and privacy. With Mastodon and the larger federated web we
have an opportunity to communicate without leaking our data. If you
care at all about the future of social media you won't want to miss
this look at a promising platform and protocol.

 Craig Maloney has been interested in computers ever since he read
about them in the World Book Encyclopedia. He is a board member of the
Michigan!/usr/group and spends his days programming in Python. He is
currently writing about himself in the third person and doesn't think
that's weird at all. Learn more at http://decafbad.net.

 Plus we'll have our regular features: Jobs Looking for People, People
Looking for Jobs, and much more! We'll also be meeting for dinner at
the Buddy's Pizza in Novi (44225 W 12 Mile Road, Novi, MI 48377) after
the meeting.