I’m playing again on Mastodon, mostly because Twitter is starting to feel more broken than ever. I’m not altogether happy about it, mind. I think a big part of it is that all the things that Mastodon wants to fix in Twitter, I don’t have a problem with. I just want Twitter, but not run by some techbozo.
I have an account on the mastodon.social server (that I even need to say this highlights a problem for mass adoption of Mastodon) while Mark says it’s actually better to just run your own (ditto). I suspect the biggest problem I have is the size of my network (76 following, 45 followers on Mastodon vs 7,076 and 7,693 on Twitter) which is going to take time and effort to build up.
Bluesky is apparently another Twitter replacement that has some momentum, but is currently invite only and I’m not invited. The fact that it describes itself as a "protocol for public conversation" worries me. Most people don’t want a Twitter like service to be portable and federated. They just want it to not suck.
Maybe as I type these notes into my text editor I ought to be copy and pasting them individually across Twitter and Mastodon too… or maybe I ought to look into rigging something up so it all kind of works automagically.
"a comprehensive guide to the story of mel" – I can remember obsessing over bits of hacker folklore like this when I first discovered the internet and this particular bit of its subculture
This from Matt Mullenweg, ruminating on the 20th anniversary of WordPress, struck a chord with me: "That’s what is beautiful about blogging. It’s too bad the advertising and social media platforms got us all caught up in status games for the past 15 years…All you need is one view, one like, one comment, to change your life."
The Theranos story is one of the most interesting chunks of Silicon Valley hubris in recent times. I really enjoyed reading Bad Blood by John Carreyrou which documented the story, although was published before the legal process completed. This Guardian article is a useful primer
I’ve been busy getting married! and also being ill
Saturday was amazing, beautiful weather, a nice simple ceremony and then a party with many of our favourite people. Am a very happy and contented man right now
However I then got a cold almost immediately, with the coughing, sneezing and sore throating meaning I haven’t slept well all week. Just pleased we didn’t go on an immediate honeymoon, otherwise it might have been wrecked
I’ve finally finished and published a long article I have been working on and talking to people about for forever. Am hoping it’s the start of many more conversations
I survived my stag do at the weekend, although to be fair, it was a quiet affair. Just me, 3 of my old school mates and my 22 year old son. Wedding is next Saturday, so exciting!
Despite being split in two following some local gov reorganisation, the digital folk up in Cumbria are still on their blogging A game
My birthday passed without incident. Some lovely messages from folk, and some delightful gifts, including some impressively chunky history books, those Penguin ones with the orange spines that look so fabulous on a shelf. Also Peter Rex’s book on Hereward the Wake, which I am really looking forward to.
OneTeamGov for local government this morning, brilliantly facilitated by Kit Collingwood. Great chats and a lovely group to be a part of.
Lloyd is continuing his own daily note experiment, and mentions mine, and now I am mentioning that, and so the circle closes. I guess what we are doing is similar to the Dave Winer view of blogging. I’ve just never got my head around using an outliner to do it, so will never go full Winer, I don’t think.
A terrific conversation with Chris Thompson, who is charge of computers and that at Northumberland Council. First time we’ve spoken properly, and I enjoyed it thoroughly.
It turns out, little did I know, that the links haven’t been working on these notes for some time. No idea why but they aren’t properly being added to the posts in WordPress when I hit publish in Obsidian. I’m going through adding them in manually, which is a pain.
Another thing lacking in the current setup is a way to tag posts, which might be a useful way to find stuff after I’ve published it. There doesn’t seems to be a way of doing that right now.
Maybe I need a proper offline blog editor, but other than MarsEdit on the Mac – I’m mostly on a Windows machine during the day – do they even exist any more?
I wrote a thing the other day about digital culture and mindset and how important they are to organisations wanting to do a bit better in this space. I published it on LinkedIn, which nows feels a bit eccentric and I should probably stick it on here too, or maybe on the SensibleTech site.
I quite like the look of Traffic by Ben Smith. It’s a bit of a guilty pleasure of mine, these books about Silicon Valley companies. I particularly like it when everything goes wrong.
I’ve been rubbish publishing here for a couple of weeks. Been super busy, is my excuse. Nice to see one of my blogging inspirations Lloyd is trying something similar.
The end of computer magazines in America – I used to love buying computer magazines in my teens. This was in the mid-nineties, and as a proud owner of an Amiga 500 all my pocket money got spent on magazines where the word Amiga was followed by Format, Power, Shopper amongst other things. The free stuff on the attached floppy disks were always a delight. I’ve not looked at a magazine rack in years, so couldn’t say what the situation in the UK is…
