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Posts categorised ‘Internet’

Like of “webmentions make me sad” by Alex Sirac

Original post found at: https://alexsirac.com/webmentions-make-me-sad/

I love webmentions. I love the concept of them and I love how they allow for high-quality conversations and sharing.

I’m just sometimes tired of high quality stuff, you know? Sometimes, all I want is to comment on someone’s post to say « lol » or « nice thanks for sharing » or « saaame! » and that’s not something that warrants a whole blog post and entry in my RSS feed.

Ironically, given the effort I’m going to to “like” this post (but also simultaneously reply?! see, what even are webmentions), I totally agree. Also, given the debate about the ethics of “backfeeding” public replies on platforms like Mastodon as webmentions back to your own site (cf. one blog post on that topic(external link)). Recently I’ve been wondering if it wouldn’t be better to add something like Tinylytics(external link)’ kudos for “likes” and maybe even on-site comments, instead. I like the idea of webmentions, but I can’t help but feel they’re so clunky 🙁

Got an email this morning that my Tumblr export was (after 2½ days) finally ready for download, so I’m doing that now. Unfortunately, I still have no idea what the total filesize will be, or whether it’ll fit on my computer! Giving me that basic info is a bit beyond Tumblr, apparently. An exciting adventure ahead 🙄

Update (45 minutes later): My Tumblr export was 1.22GB of media files and ZERO posts. wtf is with this useless fucking export file, Tumblr

Logged back into Tumblr for the first time in ages to opt out of my data being used to train AI(external link) (and found it was pre-opted out, apparently because I’d already opted out of being indexed by search engines). This prompted me to, once again, do the old mental dance of “Ugh, I haven’t even used this account in years, should I just delete it?” followed by “But I’d want a backup first…” culminating in the power move of “omg how many thousands of photos and gifsets did I reblog on this account? The backup’s going to be like 100GB!” (OK, I guess that’s not a power move? The “dancing” metaphor got away from me a bit.) I really don’t even care about 99% of this; I just want the political theory stuff I had so meticulously tagged. I requested an export anyway, but if what it produces doesn’t let me browse posts by tag (as I suspect it won’t) it won’t be very useful to me.

Oh and, I also found that my crazy online hater who’s been sending me the odd hateful screed since I was literally 16 years old sent another couple just last month. Sounds like they’ve embraced full-on Nazism now, which makes a change from when they were just obsessed with Michael Jackson. (Basically, this person hates me because my teenage self made a really sensitive and nuanced blog post, as 16-year-olds do, that I didn’t care about ol’ MJ dying because he was probably a pedo. Little did I know I was creating a nemesis who would dog me until the end of time…)

I wish there was a federated, ActivityPub-based LiveJournal. I know there’s stuff like write.as(external link) but it’s not really what I’m envisioning. What I basically want is a blog, where I can make occasional friends-only posts (not private or password-protected posts), and take advantage of ActivityPub for authenticating my friends. A Dreamwidth-like distinction between true “friends” and more distant “subscribers” wouldn’t go amiss, either. And “access list” posting, if you only want certain subsets of your friends to see.

Maybe this is something for which one could look to Bonfire(external link)? I mean, its ideas about “Circles” are pretty similar to what I’m thinking of. It’s still a bit more “social media” and less “journal/blog” than I’m thinking, but I guess this blog is already like that anyway… 😅 Maybe I should make an account on their test instance and play around.

I noticed today how close GoToSocial(external link) is to entering beta! It looks like they just need to add a way to create an account through the web interface (rather than the server admin having to create accounts manually), and add support for the ActivityPub Move activity (so you can migrate your account from, say, Mastodon). There’s other stuff they want to add after that, but nothing that would hold back “beta” status.

I can’t really see myself migrating my main Fedi account to GoToSocial in the near future, but I could see myself trying it out for my auxlangs or “political toots” accounts. Hopefully some more parties will get on board with offering managed GoToSocial hosting once it’s in beta, though, because working out how to deploy it and put it behind a reverse-proxy and whatnot might be a liiiiiittle beyond me 🙃

Link: “The Quiet Death of Ello's Big Dreams

Original post found at: https://waxy.org/2024/01/the-quiet-death-of-ellos-big-dreams/

A blog post about the rise and fall of Ello, a social media site which promised users they weren’t the product, but ended up locked onto a certain road by their choice to take VC seed funding at the start. Could it ever have gone another way? The article suggests, probably not. But it is an interesting read about the economic considerations behind new, upstart social media sites (or online platforms in general, I guess).

NaNoWriMo Is Disintegrating

One of my guilty pleasures over the past few weeks has been frequenting the NaNoWriMo forums and reading all the posts about what an unmitigated clusterfuck that organisation has become.

For some background: I first did NaNoWriMo when I had just turned 13, in 2005. I loved the experience, the encouragement to “just get it written”, the creative experimentation (I didn’t have a …

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a cartoony avatar of Jessica Smith is a socialist and a feminist who loves animals, books, gaming, and cooking; she’s also interested in linguistics, history, technology and society.