Social

I don't know what the over/under was on my Fedivers-via-Ghost experiment, but yeah, it’s paused.

I’ve stopped being able to think for myself. I need you all to get out of my head for a minute.

You may have noticed that I’ve been toying with the idea of moving my main blog to Ghost at https://copingmechanism.com. This all started because the folks developing Ghost have been working on implementing ActivityPub features directly into Ghost, and I like the idea of blogging and reading/posting to social media in one place.

The evidence of the past decade and a half argues strongly that platform corporations are structurally incapable of good governance, primarily because most of their central aims (continuous growth, market dominance, profit via extraction) conflict with many basic human and societal needs.

I’m finding it difficult being “off” social media right now. Every time there’s a lull in my thoughts, I want to reach for one of my feeds. It’s how I avoid doing anything useful.

Bombs with blinking lights. Obsidian? Harvard. Bluesky.

Dammit I just lost an hour on Mastodon even though I’m supposed to be “off” social media. I have nothing to show for it, either. It’s insidious!

Being away from social media is good for me, but I hate it. Kicking video games to the curb. TheBrain for my PKM system…or not.

Oh goody, another “Why I’m leaving social media post”! Feel free to skip this one. We’ve all read many like it.

Twitter was the place I liked to be from 2006 until 2022. Or more accurately, it was the place I liked to be from 2006 until around 2015. After that, it was the place I felt I needed to be. Still, I managed to curate my Twitter feed well enough to avoid most of the awful bits. I’m a CIS white male, which made it easier of course.

I decided that a single-player Mastodon instance isn’t ideal. It’s overkill for one person, and it’s lonely! The #local feed is just me shouting to myself. That’s no fun. What’s the point in having a giant Rails app with all sorts of moderation tools, user management, and monthy costs if it’s just me? That’s what I thought, so I’ve moved.

This is not a review, but I wanted to jot down some notes after a few days in a new app that I’m enjoying very much: Wavelength Messenger. You might like to read John Gruber’s post for details.

In mastodon technology Shutdown, Ash Furrow writes:

I’ve played on and off with twtxt a little and keep the feed out here: http://tilde.club/~jbaty/twtxt.txt. Here’s a snippet of my old twtxt.txt file…