lkngrrr<p><a href="https://hachyderm.io/tags/Mastodon" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Mastodon</span></a> is notionally in the shape of <a href="https://hachyderm.io/tags/Twitter" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Twitter</span></a>, but has developed a fundamentally different culture.</p><p>And I’m into it.</p><p><a href="https://hachyderm.io/tags/NavelGazing" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>NavelGazing</span></a></p>
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A rant:
Someone just boosted into my timeline a post from a thread by some social media mucky muck (on mastodon.social natch), proclaiming how Mastodon will never be the new Twitter and how he spends all his time on Bluesky because of all the usual well documented issues with Masto and all the cool features that Bluesky is shipping... et cetera.
Just wait until Bluesky starts shipping advertisements, my dude. But more to the point, why can't there be both? Everything doesn't have to be for everybody, and Mastodon can be its own nerdy, weird thing.
Cool that Bluesky is figuring out moderation/quoting features. They seem useful. I'm genuinely glad for the users, and that people are thinking these things through. But Bluesky, since the app is one and the same with the protocol atm, can adapt its federation protocol as necessary, whereas Mastodon can't force its will onto ActivityPub if they don't want to break Federation with a bunch of other software. It's slow and frustrating, I guess, but it's not like their aren't people on here enjoying whatever it is they do on here.
Anyway, I'm not trying to sell anyone on anything. This doesn't have to be for everyone. It's just these kinds of posts are my least favorite genre of Mastodon navel gazing: people who try to force their expectations on the platform and castigate people for not Mastodoning the way they think they should and/or gripe about what they think are essential missing features. And because it doesn't meet their expectations they declare it a failed platform.
For sure, it's a bummer when people whose posts I like disappear. But new people show up, old mutuals check in now and again, and the rest of us all just keep on keeping on. Devs can poke and prod at ActivityPub and it can contribute to its maturation, its possibilities.
Have fun with Bluesky, genuinely. But, frankly, fuck marketshare and exponential growth. I, for one, hope there remains an ecosystem of social media that can resist the need to please Silicon Valley VCs idea of what success is.
Looking at the memories from both Google photos and FB On This Day, I see that we've had some really difficult times over the past 5 years. Joy was hit one block from our home by an SUV that was stolen. It took 2 years before we got any compensation. It's why we currently have a car payment each month.
Then I have a mass on my left ovary. I've been evaluated for several cancers due to abnormal blood readings which persist but still no diagnosis.
A woman of seven and twenty
A woman of seven and twenty,said Marianne, after pausing a moment, can never hope to feel or inspire affection again.”
~~Jane Austen
The Metal Dog #TheMetalDogArticleList
#punknews.orgpunknews.org
Navel Gazing for April 21, 2024
Welcome to Navel Gazing, the Punknews.org commenter community's weekly symposium, therapy session, and back-alley knife-fight. Chime in below with your latest playlists, record store finds, online time wasters, and site feedback....
https://www.punknews.org/article/82638/navel-gazing-for-april-21-2024
If I’m lucky, there will come a point where I’ve been married longer than I’ve been not married, or that I’ve kids longer than I’ve not had kids. That’s weird to think about, but weirder is the fact that I’m soon crossing (or have already crossed) the point where, if something new comes into my life, there’s no way it will ever be in the majority of my years lived. #NavelGazing
It didn't take much before Livia discovered her own website. I am wondering what will happen when she'll visit it...
Why do arseholes always win?
Why are there so many of them?
If you were Joan of Arc, gifted and cursed with glimpses of divinity, and there was a doctor or mystic who could "cure" you, would you let them?
(multiple choices allowed: check all that apply | fit for you)
#Philosophy
and | or
#NavelGazing
#BoostsWelcome
FIRST FULL PASS EDIT COMPLETE. 20 minutes of awesomeness (I hope). But it feels good to get to this point.
Now I need to take a break and have a late dinner.
I'm beginning to wonder if, for my mental health, I should not look at YT videos from content creators whose content closely resembles mine. Granted, I'm in an extremely niche topic, but that just means the other folks are HIGHLY visible.
My stuff doesn't duplicate theirs, but they are PROLIFIC. A video a week, and they're long and they have a studio and and and. (and a lot more subs than I do).
I'll succeed on quality, yeah, that's the ticket.
Haven't even *lurked* on Twitter in over a week now. There are a lot of people who have ended up here (a little bit) and at bsky (a little bit). Really do miss seeing some folks who haven't made the leap away yet. #navelgazing
Welcome to the newest iteration of the same ol’e blog. I change this website almost as often as I post content on it. The thing is, I get bored. I don’t often have much to say, but I’m endlessly fascinated with the various ways people can publish themselves on the web. I don’t archive much of my own blogging. Keeping back-ups of my old content seems kind of pointless, and I don’t necessarily think I’m pumping out timeless prose here.
A lot of people are interested in the internet as an archive, and that’s great. In fact, one part of my day job is helping to ensure other people’s content does stay online, gets backed up in all the possible ways, is immediately recoverable, and can more easily be repurposed as needed to circumvent censorship. It’s satisfying to assist in keeping content accessible that some regime is desperately trying to flush down the memory hole. The ethos is called “beat the bastards.” I’m developing a whole Theory of Change around it. Maybe.
But for my own endeavours, I’m more keen on the ephemeral version of the internet, and it too has some really valuable use cases. I like volatile content that has an expiration date. I don’t necessarily think everything has to stick around on a web page for the rest of history. Human beings shift and change over the course of their lives, and their digital presence should have some of that flexibility as well. We are not immutable. Websites can be like sand mandalas. So, whenever I make one for myself, I realise that the WayBackMachine may snarf a copy of whatever it looks like at any given point, but I don’t really keep many copies around. My version control process is tabula rasa.
Motivations behind this current incarnation…
I’m moving back to WordPress. For some work and non-work related reasons, I wanted to better understand how WordPress Blocks work. I’m also interested in how websites can use ActivityPub to both syndicate content and create author presences in the Fediverse, which is really the next phase of the more open web (calling it now for “I told you so” rights later). Finally, as much as I enjoy a good flat website system, after running the site using Hugo, Jekyll, Publii, and sometimes just some plain old, hand-coded html pages on Github Pages for a while, I wanted something that didn’t need the command line or so many git workflows just to post something ridiculous if not regrettable, and a publishing system that I could update with an app on my phone if I felt the inspiration, without (yet) resorting to something like a Medium blog, or Tumblr.
WordPress and Blocks:
I don’t really like Blocks, but I’m getting to know them and maybe at least appreciate the intention behind WordPress going all-in on something that’s still so very beta. From a purely visual point of view, what ultimately convinced me to give WordPress Blocks another go was the website for the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure. It’s just not pretty, but sure does the job. And that’s what I’m going for here. That, and a work project has obligated me to have some minimal understanding of them. Like Blocks, this website isn’t really done, and is kind of glitchy.
Perfect may be the enemy of the good. So is lousy, though. I still think I prefer my design being implemented through nice, hand-rolled, bespoke, GMO-free css files and templates that don’t give random authors such an easy chance to ruin your aesthetics with one, albeit well-intentioned wrong move. There is also a lot missing in this method of styling a website, and I’m not keen on how it saves design elements all over the place. For what are still very good reasons, content and design should be sequestered from one another and securely compartmentalised. WordPress once had as its mantra, “code is poetry.” Blocks seems to be saying, “most people’s poetry sucks.” There’s some truth to that.
I can bang on far more about this topic, and at some point soonish I probably will, and likely reuse the same jokes. I do really like WordPress as a writing tool, though. It has one of the nicer wysiwig interfaces going. It’s better than a lot of writing software. It’s far better than Microsoft Word, and more affordable.
ActivityPub and the Fediverse:
I wanted to make a blog that could be instantly part of the Fediverse, and ActivityPub is currently the prevailing protocol to achieve that. In a poorly shaped nutshell, The Fediverse is the truly decentralised social web, with the potential to let participants better control their identities, content, and decide what kind of walls they do or don’t want around their garden.
To me, it’s a redo of what Web3 could have been about instead of a marketing scheme for grifters trying to convince people that jpegs of cartoon apes had any intrinsic value. There is also some promising anti-censorship properties to how content can migrate through federated services. I’m also interested in how creators can claim identity in the Fediverse, bypassing gatekeepers such as the Blue Check process of legacy Twitter, while having more authenticity than, say, Elon-era Twitter’s blue check, that just goes to anyone with $8 and proves nothing.
At present there aren’t many production-ready alternatives to accomplish my goal of a federated blog, but that will be changing, and I think fairly soon. The main blogging platforms to do this are currently either WriteFreely or WordPress + a plugin. Neither is ideal. Both have trade-offs and some hidden costs. In the end, I went with what I know better.
Posting ease:
The final hurdle I am trying to get past is being able to publish more easily, quickly and briefly. Crafting markdown pages or using flat site generators can be great, but it’s limiting, and janky, and there’s no real mobile phone publishing options. Most FOSS, self-hosted CMS don’t recognise that people primarily want to do things on the web with their smartphones. WriteFreely seems to have started down this path, but only for iOS, when much of the world is on Android. WordPress is one of the few in this area that makes it possible.
Treachery:
The overarching theme of our blog has not changed. Technology keeps its promises and delivers on what it’s asked to do. The problem is that people don’t often realise what they’re really asking for, what’s entailed, and what else it can do to the world. Be careful what you ask for.
@gnosticdaemon Aside, as you say, the people who control media outright by owning it, I've noticed that what drives the media is simply conflict. And anything that is based on ad-driven revenue will eventually sell you story rather than information. And many things like that feel like a conspiracy when they're really just an inevitable consequence. And I guess that is a fundamental indictment of capitalism. #USPOL #NavelGazing
That thing when you're waiting on a call/email but only get spam is getting on my nerves kinda extra today. #NavelGazing
QUITE INTERESTING
RE THE #TwitterMigration
"To the Twitter people it feels like a confusing new world, whilst they mourn their old life on Twitter. They call themselves "refugees", but to the Mastodon locals it feels like a busload of Kontiki tourists just arrived, blundering around yelling at each other and complaining that they don't know how to order room service. We also mourn the world we're losing." @shug
https://www.hughrundle.net/home-invasion/
#QuiteInteresting #witty #TyreKickers #NavelGazing
www.hughrundle.net · Home invasion - Mastodon's Eternal September beginsThe fediverse is dealing with a huge wave of Twitter people bringing toxic ideas with them.
Warning: Shitty mood ahead.
JFC it's hard not to get depressed at stuff going on in the world, particularly in the US.
Musk is being a total jackass. It's hard to be a booster for what is in many ways the only set of companies actually advancing technology in a meaningful way, when they have such a DIPSHIT spouting garbage day in and day out.
Combine that with the US political system being a shambles, and 2024's elections looking terrifying... sigh.
A bit of navel gazing for the night.
I'm realizing a pattern in things. I tend to not want to go to bed when I'm worried about something in the back of my mind. Could be work, could be personal, could be health.
You see, goign to bed means "the next thing that'll happen to you when you are awake is that hting you're worried about."
So I refresh reddit, and scroll feedly... until i'm half dead.
This is probably not a healthy pattern.