Archiving my Twitter, Facebook and other social network activity
@FiXato Ugh, that’s got to have been a real pain.
Yeah, some sort of in-between approach like that for existing accounts would’ve been better.
Or at least giving people more time (measured in months) between locking new uploads/hiding old pics and flat-out deleting.
When Yahoo realized they’d missed the smartphone shift, they tried to make Flickr something it wasn’t suited for (Instagram! Look, filters!) & couldn’t sustain (cloud storage for ALL your photos, just like FB!) Maybe chasing FB kept them alive for a while, but it put them in a bind down the road.
It sucks that SmugMug is deleting pics, but taking it back to basics might make it more viable long-term.
Maybe they can become a 1st-rate Flickr instead of a 3rd-rate Instagram or FB.
Expanded on my blog:
1. How did I not know there was a stage musical of Evil Dead?
2. Why am I remotely surprised that it exists?
Rain: *hasn’t started yet*
Me: “I’m going to do a grocery run this morning.”
Rain: *starts*
I was thinking I should convert my Les Misérables commentary blog from WordPress to something static, since I’m basically done with it and won’t need to be able to post from anywhere.
And I realized:
I have to use Hugo.
I feel like I still have a lot of comic boxes cluttering up the place. My project to sell off the ones I don’t want anymore kind of stalled a year or two back.
But I stumbled on an old post and realized: Despite continuing to buy new comics, I have *half* as many now as I did when I moved into my current apartment.
I’ve made a lot more progress than I thought I had!
1. Encouraging people to spread out from mastodon.social to encourage further decentralization is a good idea.
2. Mastodon.social probably shouldn’t be as big as it is, since it’s also the beta-testing instance.
3. Wholesale blocking mastodon.social is short-sighted at best, and will counter-productive to decentralization, because it shows all those people you’re blocking that federation doesn’t actually live up to its promise.
I mean, how many of your friends from Facebook and Twitter have you convinced to move over to Mastodon so they can still talk to you?
And now you’re telling them they have to move again?
Yeah, how do you think that’s going to go?
OK. Your server, your rules. If you personally don’t want to interact with m.s, that’s your choice. If you can’t keep up with the traffic, I get that.
Just make sure your users are OK with it, because they’re going to have friends who won’t move.
I spent 10 years as the sysadmin of a small ISP’s mail server. We blocked a boatload of incoming spam, phish, malware and more, using multiple tools to catch different types of bad email.
We never blocked Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL or Gmail outright. It might have cut down the volume, it might have made *some* people happy, but it wouldn’t have solved the problem, and it would have caused *more* problems for our users and those they interacted with.
There’s a version with Sean Bean? As both the original and the impostor?
It’s like… Schroedinger’s Sean Bean!
@ajroach42 @hummingrain Yeah, Soylent baffles me. The name only makes sense to people who know the reference, and if you know the reference…well…it doesn’t make a food product sound appealing!
@hummingrain IIRC the palantir weren’t intrinsically evil either, it was just that Sauron was on the network and was really good at manipulating people by figuring out how to exploit their psychology.
@hummingrain It’s like…Sauron ran a Palantir botnet that spewed out propaganda to convince Saruman and Denethor that his victory was absolutely certain, and Saruman decided to join the winning team while Denethor lost all hope.
Gotta love recommendation engines that see you finally made that big purchase…and immediately start plugging the next model up.
Are you trying to *create* buyer’s remorse?
Is that actually an effective strategy?
“The oral history of the Hampsterdance: The twisted true story of one of the world’s first memes” by Leah Collins
Some of the behind-the-scenes details are truly bizarre. There was a song on the radio? And it hit #1 on the Canadian charts?
–@nolan@toot.cafe
I was in college at the time. There was a debate over whether or not the song actually came from Robin Hood. None of us had access to it on VHS, and it’s not as if we could look up the clips anywhere.
@FiXato Yeah, it’s gotten kind of ridiculous. Oh, I’m sure they have metrics saying that people typically scroll through X posts per session and they want to make sure you see at least Y ads…but the ads are starting to reduce the appeal of the site.
I’m willing to accept a certain number of ads for a free service or to offset the cost…but eventually it gets to a point where it’s just not worth it.
@FiXato That said, I imagine it really depends on how each person uses it.
If you’re following mostly friends, it’s not going to have topics. It’s only the fact that I’m following so many scenic photographers that it had something to la onto in the first place.
@FiXato Wow, that’s random.
I get the impression that Instagram had the chance to be like a magazine, with ads that at least align with the content, but the more Facebook tries to monetize it, the more jarring and blatant the ads are, and the more they’re based on what FB *thinks* it knows about you than trying to fit with your actual interests as based on what’s posted by the people you’re following.
@FiXato I actually haven’t been seeing those. Maybe it’s doing some targeting after all…just not anything effective!
It’s weird: when Instagram first started running ads in the form of promoted photos, it was actually better at targeting. I’d scroll through pages of landscapes, cityscapes and nature photos from people I follow, and the travel ads fit right in. I almost hit like of quite a few of them because the pictures were good.
Now? Big box stores and fast food. Crackers and cold medicine. Movie posters. Logos and slogans. It’s like they’re not even trying.
And quote this post
– One conversation each and a handful of likes on Flickr, Tumblr and my blog.
– A double handful of boosts on Mastodon (Photog.Social).
– Roughly the same number of likes/favorites on Instagram, Mastodon & PixelFed, with Pixelfed slightly ahead.
– 10x as many views on Flickr as on my blog. (I don’t have stats on other sites)
– No reaction at all on Twitter.
It’s bad enough mailing lists will put textual information in remote embedded images instead of the actual text. But 4MB to find out what hours a coffee place is closing early?
FFS.
I don’t mind formatting or images. But email has to be readable offline and on slow connections.