metaruss

Wow, so it’s been almost a decade since I last posted here.  I’ve switched hosting situations multiple times in the intervening years and this site has suffered its fair share of bit-rot along the way.  I actually took it down at one point, as I assumed no one would notice.  It turns out there are a number of forums and whatnot that direct links to files in here, so I brought it back after receiving some frantic emails.  WordPress was hopelessly out of date and when I jumped to the latest release, it broke this ancient theme, a number of plugins, and there were also some problems with the DB due to its age (using a very old storage engine).  I thought all was lost, but I somehow got it going again.  I’m sticking to my guns on this highly dated-looking theme and I absolutely hate the new WordPress editor, but I found this plugin called “Classic Editor” that has saved the day.

So yeah, why am I even posting on here when I know no one will ever read it?  Mostly for my own posterity, I guess…and maybe the web crawlers will find these posts and show them on page 6 in their search results.  I’ve learned a valuable lesson over the past couple of decades: letting a few huge social media corporations hoover-up all of the discourse on the Internet and move it into their walled gardens has effectively ruined it.  A lot of the hobby-related discussions that had moved from email lists into Internet forums back in sepia-times have now moved into Facebook or Reddit.  Many of the forums still physically exist, but they’re mostly cobwebs and crickets and/or a fire hose of spam with maybe a few gray beards lurking here or there.  Facebook Groups are a terrible replacement for something like a forum, as it’s impossible to find anything and the same questions get asked over and over.  Alas, this is where we are now and I don’t see it ever turning around.

I stopped using Twitter about 5 years ago, as my feed slowly morphed into an AI stream of consciousness.  I was never into micro-blogging, but I used it as an RSS feed of sorts for the topics and publishers I was interested in.  Since it was no longer capable of performing that function, I started playing around with things like Mastodon…even setting up my own instance.  It kind of did what I wanted, but like so many before it (Diaspora, GNU Social, etc) it didn’t really work because no one was there generating content.  It’s the age-old problem of adoption.  That all changed in 2022 and now I find Mastodon does pretty much what I want thanks to relays and folks just plain-old posting there.  I do have a Bluesky account and that place feels a lot like Twitter did back when it was useful.  But I think we know the inevitable result will be the same once the VC money runs out.  I’ve also been playing around with Pixelfed and, thanks to the train wreck over at Reddit, Lemmy.  Something to be a bit excited about, at the very least.