BunkBlog

It’s been a few months since I did a survey of my current social media presence. Some things have stayed the same, others have shifted, and the various major platforms are becoming whatever they will be.

Threads, of course, is the biggest alternative for people leaving Twitter. It’s got the built-in Facebook and Instagram user base, so network effects have been conquered pretty thoroughly. Sadly, it also seems to have fewer features than the other big platforms. I can choose between “following” and “for you” or the unlikely to ever be used “saved” and “liked” posts. I have a shortcut on my browser to the “following” mode, because that’s what I want – duh, it’s what I chose. As with every social media site that has a profit motive, it defaults to “whatever the algorithm thinks you want to see” mode.

BlueSky has a pretty stable integration with ActivityPub going, although it’s still missing basic reciprocation – comments stay on their own sites, for example. Maybe the integration will grow to the point that BlueSky is a full fediverse member, but it may be a while. What BlueSky does have going for it over Threads is the ability to curate your own feed into subfeeds, and make those “lists” available for others to use. You may want a list of all the best FIFA players in the world, or whatever – make the list, and maybe other people will think it’s a good thing. There doesn’t appear to be a way to bookmark specific hashtags, but it seems nobody on any site is actually very consistent in using those anyway (it’s kind of why the algorithm has become so important).

Friendica remains a footnote – I repost things to it, but virtually nobody on the fediverse is using anything other than Mastodon. Also, I can’t get to Venera (my Friendica instance) from work, which really reduces my interactions with it. The interface is also a bit clunky compared to Mastodon. Because it does integrate as a peer with all ActivityPub sites, if I could get to it from work, it may have become my go-to. I do chafe at the character limits of Mastodon.

Mastodon, which looked like it was going to gain an actual respectable user base, seems to have plateaued at around one million active users per day, across all the various Mastodon instances. I have been happy with IndieWeb, and I love how easy it is to interact with people on all the other instances in the fediverse. Alas, that terminology may be killing engagement for non-geeks.

I still post a lot to Facebook. I am aware that Zuckerberg is awful, and that his site has done a lot of dirty things. But, it’s where people are, and it allows me to post more than a paragraph in a single comment.

How are y’all navigating the social media diaspora?

The Fediverse continues to gain momentum, albeit slowly. Threads now let’s you auto-post from the Facebook app (seemingly not the Web site, though). More importantly, posts from Threads can be made available to read on the ActivityPub protocol. It’s publish-only so far, so no comments return to the parent post. Baby steps, I guess.

BlueSky keeps teasing federation plans, but what they’ve built so far is useless to normal people.

Meanwhile, the big ActivityPub instances continue to grow and develop new features.

I still have a difficult time breaking through the network effects on the new sites. I was never a Twitter user, so its self-immolation is mostly a spectator sport to me. But, none of the decentralized sites have anywhere near the critical mass of “people I know” yet.

So, I mostly still post on Facebook, and cross post shorter pieces to Mastodon, BlueSky, and Threads manually. Longer pieces tend to stay on Facebook alone, since the other three have character limits of about one or two paragraphs. Although Venera exists, since virtually nobody I know is using it, my account there is just a relay of what exists on other federated sites I actively post to.

How have you adapted to the new social media landscape, or have you not changed in the past two years of disruption?

Once upon a time, I tried to get the WordPress plugin for ActivityPub to work. I spent weeks, and failed every try. The plugin author was stumped, other than, “shared hosting on Dreamhost with LetsEncrypt does weird things to the .well-known path.” And so I gave up.

It looks like a kind person on the internet was able to find a fix. It involves editing a file on the server, so requires a bit of geek power, but I run Linux and live on the command line at work, so no problem.

This is the test post. Does this populate to ActivityPub? Can I see it and “boost” it from my Mastodon and Friendica accounts? I’ve got my Friendica account set to auto-post anything from my blog, because that makes the most sense for long-form content. From my Mastodon account, I’m just following myself so I can choose to boost things if I want. Let’s see…

It’s been twenty years since the first post on this blog, the still-topical Rude Online Bastards piece. While I have one of the oldest blogs still extant among my acquaintances (John Scalzi has me beat by a few months), the traffic definitely dropped some years back. The rise of LiveJournal and MySpace didn’t change things much, and in fact helped to drive traffic around the entire web. But, Facebook has really crushed the standalone web log (as it was once known). I did eventually learn to not cringe at the neologism “blog,” and now it’s essentially a relic. Ah, well.

Meanwhile, there are still trolls and jerks online, and twenty years of progress has not reduced their numbers in the slightest.

There are some people who are expressing incredulity that anyone believes the Internet Blackout scheduled for the 18th is a good idea. The argument goes something like this, “Not producing content on Wednesday is like not buying gasoline on Wednesday. You’ll just do the writing on Tuesday or Thursday, so what do you gain?” This fungibility theory of content is, I think, missing the point. While boycotting Texaco for one day is relatively pointless and unnoticed by the corporation you’re trying to hurt, that is not at all like blacking out Wikipedia for one day.

While gasoline boycotts are intended to send a message to the big oil companies (who don’t even notice the blip), the Internet Blackout is intended to raise awareness among the non-geek set. Those of us who read Gizmodo or Slashdot are very well versed in SOPA/PIPA and DMCA and all the other acronyms we hate to see pop up in a news story. But, think about your less-geeky friends who don’t know that DMCA is evil and don’t know what DRM is. They are like Jon Stewart, who only last week had someone in his audience ask him about SOPA and he had to profess complete ignorance. The normal folks in the world have not been following the SOPA debate and they aren’t mad about the United States attempting to erect the same sort of censorship plans as China (with the added benefit of giving corporations nearly unilateral police powers to shut down any site they don’t like).

How to get those non-geek people to add their voices to those of Vint Cerf and Eric Schmidt (who have already been ignored by Congressional committees because they don’t understand all that computer stuff)? You need to get their attention in a way that is hard to ignore. Since most people use Google regularly and Wikipedia frequently, slapping a giant black banner on those sites with, “Imagine if this site was down forever” will make at least some of them pay attention to what our elected representatives are proposing to do in our names. SOPA is bad legislation, it’s bad information security, it’s bad business. And, it won’t stop one damned pirate anyway.

Andysocial.com will be offline tomorrow. I know nobody will notice, since I have virtually no visitors, but it makes me feel better anyway.

I’ve uploaded a boatload of photos to randomly rotate through the header in my blog. All are my own photos, so no more stock photography in the header. Of course, those viewing these messages through FB or LJ will just have to imagine.

Wow, that was a long outage.  My hosting service has had a rocky week – I spent two days with email being rejected (if you sent me something and it said I didn’t exist, I do now), and then the servers lost their network connectivity this morning for about six hours. For Dreamhost, that’s very unusual. When I was with CCLhosting, I expected random outages but DH has been very reliable for years now. I’m sure this was just a really bad coincidence of unlucky events.

Back to ripping my CDs – I’m up to nearly 39000 tracks now.

The rather useful service Loudtwitter seems to be dead.  Thankfully, the geeks who program for WordPress have a cool tool I can use in its stead. So, you’ll continue to get all my blog posts, and tweets on my blog (and Facebook), and all that plus locked LJ entries on LiveJournal. Myspace’s RSS support remains MIA, so that particular backwater is not on my list of things to worry about. Or, you can just link to the Unhub bar and be done with it.

This has been your overdose of geekery for the day.

I’ve deleted nearly 600 pieces of comment spam in the past two days.  I’ve noticed, in the past, one or two legitimate comments being tagged as spam, but I didn’t look through this recent flood for such stragglers.  Every time a legit comment was tagged as spam, it’s because the commenter was using an obviously fake email address in their info; no email address is needed, so if you just don’t put one, it should be good. If you’ve commented recently and it didn’t post, there ya go.

Frickin’ spammers…

I have moved from the moribund and seemingly unmanned CCLHosting to the more vibrant and hopefully operational Dreamhost. We’ll see how this goes.

Right now, I’m hoping that the LJ crosspost plugin still works. And…it does! Woohoo!

I killed Concho Online today. I attempted to launch this site a couple years ago, as a citizen journalism site, or hyperlocal media site, depending on your inclination. Since nobody but me had posted anything on it since last winter, it had obviously devolved into another personal site. Eh. I’ve got enough self-aggrandizement going on.

I’m bored.  Happy New Year.

Off for five days of vacation fun with my son.  Don’t break anything while I’m gone, ok?

Taking a cue from Bob Cringely, I have tweaked my site’s CSS pages so they now are automagically “printable” when used with any sort of modern browser. I rock.

Since Qumana didn’t work, and I finally got my host to unlock the xmlrpc functionality so Performancing can work now. Let’s see how this goes.

Checking out the Qumana blog editor for posting to the site. It’s also supposed to work with Livejournal, but it’s not working for me.  Maybe in the next beta.

Since Livepress is stuck in version 1.5, and I’m using WordPress 2.0.2, the automatic post synch doesn’t function directly.  This is my attempt to get there through a different route.  Maybe another way, since this isn’t ready yet.  *sigh*

The gallery is back, after a long bout of “what the heck” with the hosting company and with the PHP-based installer script.

The photos that are up now may or may not be the same exact photos that used to be up, but it’s a start.  You try posting 300+ photos in an evening and remember which ones you used to have on the site.  Yeah, I didn’t think so, biotch.

I’ve added the new and improved WordPress 2.0 software to the site.  It’s nice, the upgrade was simple, etc.

Somehow I ended up trashing my photo gallery setup completely, though.  Hopefully it will be back in business by tomorrow, but we’ll see.  What’s perplexing is that many directories moved around, as if by magic.  Magic because I don’t actually have permissions on those directories, so I shouldn’t have been capable of moving them even inadvertently.  Mysterious.

After five days of cruising, the last one in some fairly choppy seas, it now feels like my house is swaying.

We’re back, safe and sound; photos and videos and all that are awaiting my attention. Feel free to talk amongst yourselves.

OK, you little deviants. I’m taking off for a week, cruising with my son and assorted family members to the Yucatan. It was supposed to be Cozumel, but I’m told that island is kind of hosed right now, so it sounds like we’ll be hitting Progreso and Veracruz. I promise to take a bajillion photos and videos – gotta justify the new memory cards and batteries, after all. 🙂

Try not to blow anything up while I’m away, k?