To be quite clear, this was a problem that a lot of people recognized early on. Even under the “stewardship” of the prior regime, the inconsistent and lax moderation allowed parts of the service to thrive as a hive of wretched scum and villainy. The arrival of the world’s most divorced man turned a gradual disintegration into a powerdive. I, personally, had stuck around for a couple of reasons:
Having joined in 2006, as user number 3700-something, I’d been around a lot longer than that insufferable shithead, and the way he’d been mismanaging it since convincing some of the world’s worst people to financially back the takeover made me feel I had a good chance of outlasting his ownership.
I’m part of a few online fellowships (notably, the online fandom of Everton Football Club) that had never managed to herd their respective cats into migrating to another space.
It’s easy to say now that the “last straw” for many people was the very prominent role Musk and the site played in possibly fucking U.S. democracy for decades in the 2024 election cycle, but in reality the real prompt was the good old network effects — Xitter became sufficiently bad and the barrier to alternatives became sufficiently low so that a large cohort could move en masse.
The big winner appears to have been Bluesky. Mere months ago, it seemed that their exceptionally slow rollout had ceded all momentum to Meta’s Threads. The problem with Threads, though (at least for me) was the general Meta ick that the service exudes. The timeline is loaded with algorithmic spoo and engagement bait, and it just doesn’t feel like a place to have an intelligent conversation about anything.
Like a lot of geeks, I’d established a presence in the Fediverse (a/k/a Mastodon) early on, but it’s become clear that the non-geeks were never going to follow us over there in sufficient numbers for network effects to take hold. It was going to need to be something that felt more like Twitter from a UI and onboarding standpoint.
Over the past week, I’ve watched as Everton FC fans have migrated to Bluesky, seemingly in the blink of an eye. Anecdotally, it seems the same thing has happened among all sorts of online interest groups. Critical mass happened faster than I could have imagined.
Today is the 30th birthday of Dave Winer’s Scripting News. I’m raising a glass to a guy who’s always had a singular voice and has been a pioneer of so many things taken for granted nowadays — web syndication, podcasting, and (of course) blogging. My first encounter happened decades ago when I network grunt who’d inherited responsibility for keeping the technical side of a technical publishing operational. Winer’s Userland produced a scripting environment, Frontier, that was pretty useful when it came to keeping a bunch of Macintoshes running back in the Classic days.
Over the years, he’s always been a curious mind, and more importantly a doer when it came to designing the plumbing that allowed individual voices to communicate on the net.
One cool thing about building your blog with a static site generator and hosting it on a janky old Raspberry Pi is that the dominant blog hosting platform can reveal itself as being run by a nutcase and you don’t need to care at all.
So, a few months on, it’s clear that I’ve decided not to think about things too heavily. I’ll post occasionally, and I’m not going to throw any real engineering at maintaining a blog. I’m happy to maintain a few static pages and leave it at that.
We didn’t get any peaches this year (boo!) but we did have a bunch of tomatoes, including some cool heirloom ones. Thanks to being busy, we ended up simmering our pasta sauce way longer than we planned (almost 24 hours, in fact.). This was a pretty happy accident, though, because it came out great — it has the most wonderfully rounded, sweet flavor we’ve ever managed, without even a hint of acidity.
It really should be easier and cheaper for individuals to get S/MIME certificates. You should be able to get them at the DMV or post office. Makes a lot more sense than regulating uteruses.
I ordered a couple of mugs from Forever Everton and brewed up the last of my initial Trade Coffee order. Delicious stuff. Note: the coffee link up there will get you 30% off — yeah, I get a site credit, but really I’m just happy to show off the mug.
Did a bit of a “treat yo self” because Jacob’s iPad was out of space — gave him my 3rd-gen Air and got the current (M2) model. Thought (seriously) about the 13-inch model but ultimately decided on portability. Went high-end on the keyboard and Pencil. Pretty pleased so far.
Back in prehistory, I maintained a radio station on a long-lost streaming radio platform, Live365. (Note — there is a business operating under that name currently, but it bears no real resemblence to the service that operated there previously.)
The idea was pretty simple — I programmed the station according to my own whims, which meant that it wasn’t formatted by genre. I listen to a crazy amount of music, and I’m not particularly bothered about using genre to set moods. If I feel like hearing free jazz next to ambient country, English punk, Detroit techno, Mississippi blues, and Swedish organ music, then that’s what I’m going to do.
All that preamble is here to say that I’ve resurrected the idea as a streaming playlist. Generally speaking, I’ll update a 25-song freeform playlist once a week on Apple Music and Spotify. I’d love it if you’d take a listen.
I still haven’t decided if I’m going to try to do anything with the old archives.
I have to decide whether to stick with this template, and if I do, how much effort I want to put into customizing it.
With the old blog, half of the fun was coding up little applet-izers and nonsense for the sidebars. I don’t yet know what that sort of thing really entails when I’m working with a statically generated site.
I really don’t understand this blog engine yet. PyBlosxom (and Blosxom before it) were really, really simple things to deal with conceptually. Drop HTML in a folder structure, crop some photos, and forget.
The machine I’m running this on is comically underpowered, like 2010-cellphone-level underpowered. Of course, that may actually be good enough for serving static webpages to a tiny handful of browsers a day.
Probably won’t bother with comments. I don’t see very many still active bloggers who bother with them and all the annoyances that come with them. If there’s a way to link them to some other discussion platform, maybe. I don’t really like Disqus and the like.
There aren’t feeds yet, because I’m still trying to figure out what I’m doing and I don’t want to keep messing with people’s feed readers while I’m still working out what permalinks will look like, whether or not I can support Etags, etc.
So for about the last half dozen years or so, my blog had been running on PyBlosxom, and hosted on a really cheap web hosting platform not to be named.
Long story short, one day the web host, well, disappeared, and PyBlosxom has never been updated to support Python 3. Running an unmaintained blogging platform written in an EOL programming language on a no-longer-extant hosting provider is no way to live, son.
So for now, think of this as a placeholder. It’s a bunch of static pages hosted on a Raspberry Pi, hanging off of a cable modem, to give an idea of my level of commitment here.
As of right now, that means none of the old content (which would need to be cadged together from out-of-date backups. the Internet Archive, and faulty memories), a default template, ugly fonts, and none of the fun sidebar crap I used to have fun with.
