Social Media

People I Follow Online and Social Media

I actually wrote up a private journal entry about the whole Twitter mess, but I’m really really trying not to fuel that drama, so I’m refraining from actually posting anything about it. It’s gotten me thinking some about social media and following people online in general though. I’ve been online for a very long time and I’ve used computers almost my entire 43 years of life, and that is not an exaggeration. I am, and will forever be connected to technology as a core piece of who I am. And as such, I also flock to social websites. But the funny part is how each one sort of manages to slot into it’s own little place in my world. And how irritating it is when they try to change things and be something I don’t want them to be.

Take say, Instagram. I resisted Instagram for a while, and even once I started using it, I honestly have never been super committed to it. But I do like seeing other people’s photos. I have two accounts, one that is almost exclusively toys, and one that is “everything else”. Which is usually bands and musicians I like, family members, cats, food. In that order. Though lately, they keep trying to turn themselves into TikTok, which I hate, because I don’t want dumb video clips, I want photos.

Instagram of course is part of Facebook, though it serves it’s own purpose. Most of my actual contacts on Facebook are people I actually know. Family, all those people from High School I added when FB first launched, and friends, both from real life and online. Though I want to add that in this case, “Online Friends”, for the most part is, “Actual friends.” People I have been online friends for longer than I’ve been friends with anyone else. People I’ve been connected to cross platforms and in quite a few cases, people I have met with face to face at least once. I also use Facebook some for groups, but it’s pretty much limited to a couple of toy based groups and groups related to musicians I like. I tried using Facebook for news, but the comment sections are always cancerous idiocy so I had to drop all of the news sources I was following.

Beyond that, things get a bit more nebulous.

Take, for example, Reddit. I use Reddit a lot, probably more than is healthy, but i don’t have any friends on Reddit. I basically do not ever look at user names. I do follow a couple of accounts, but it’s mostly just people I actually know, and mostly for the sake of, “This is an easy way to remember who they are on Reddit”. I don’t actually look at their Reddit feeds, because I follow them all through other platforms where I will hear about things they want to say in a much more efficient manner. I do follow and check a shitload of subreddits and regularly browse posts on /r/all. My “Reddit Recap” for 2022 says i was in the “Top 1% of all Redditors”. I’m not sure I’m proud of that one. It’s probably the one place that’s great for getting good information from actual people on a wide variety of topics.

Then there are places like Twitter, which I’ve replaced the functionality of with Mastodon. These places, basically boil down to, “If your profile information meets any one of a dozen or so criteria, I will follow you”. Post about Video Games, Toys, Nerdy Tech shit, almost instant follow. Post snarky one liners about life that I emphasize with, that’s a follow. Post memes about cats or something frequently, but not so frequently it pollutes my feed, you bet, I’ll follow that. I treat Micro Blog platforms more like…. RSS for people’s shit takes and hot takes.

Which brings me to another way I follow people, RSS. I love RSS. RSS is so perfect for following and I am still fucking salty about Google Reader being closed and will always be because it basically killed RSS to the world. As of now, I follow around 500 blogs and news sites. I have a ton more bookmarks, waiting in a folder called, “Todo -> Add to RSS”. And i regularly go through this folder. The criteria for following a blog on RSS are similar to the Micro Blog criteria, but probably in a more broad sense.

I think in the end, I just like hearing people’s stories and random thoughts. Even if I don’t always give feed back with a comment or a like or whatever. I want to know what people think. Especially things that seem completely banal and pointless.

Twitter Drama and Mastodon

What a completely non eventful roller coaster the latest Twitter Drama is shaping up to be. I suppose it’s somewhat in the “early stages” and a lot of people, including myself, may be acting a bit over dramatic, but I don’t think Elon Musk buying Twitter will be anything good long term.

Twitter isn’t, wasn’t, whatvern’t that great. It was ok, personally, I’ve been kind of struggling to care about Twitter as a platform for a while. It’s probably just some sort of burn out, I’ve been there since essentially the beginning, in 2006. Back when good ol’ Leo Laporte was the number one most followed user, until Kevin Rose was. Then Leo again, it was sort of a competition. Those whopping follow counts were in the thousands as well back then. Twitter is definitely much larger and much more since then. And I find it hard to keep up with anymore.

I’ve tried using lists, but for some reason Twitter only lets you easily pin 5 lists. How useless is that? I have dozens of lists. Politics lists, tech lists, toys lists, music lists, transformers lists, also split across several sub lists, like “Toys – News,” and “Toys – Bloggers”, “Tech – News,” or “Tech – Cybersecurity”. Segmentation of content makes it much easier to follow and be in the right mindset for each topic.

Over time, it also became sort of a crazy place for politics and the spread of misinformation campaigns promoted by trolls and bots. These are the classic style trolls of the days of Ye Olde Usenet, where one person might be harassing another over something the latter was taking a bit too seriously. These are weaponized trolls pushed by people wish absolutely awful agendas against large groups of people. This was bad during the Obama Era of the US but made absolutely worse during the Trump Era.

It’s not entirely just a Trump thing, or a US thing, there is idiocy going on all around the world, but I’m still going to use the US as a frame of reference, since I am in the US. It’s also a problem across many Social Platforms. Lately there have been a lot of actual efforts to stem the spread of lies and stupidity on a lot of platforms, Twitter included. This is where we end up with more rift and part of Musk’s stated reasoning for pissing away billions of dollars on a platform that isn’t worth anywhere near that.

Free Speech.

Which is the real crux of the issue. Some are trying to confuse it with the idea that people angry over this don’t like that Musk is a Billionaire. How it’s hypocritical because Bezos bought the Washington post. The problem isn’t that Musk is a billionaire, it’s that he’s kind of a jackass. And he wants to open the platform back up to let other jackasses be jackasses. “Free Speech” isn’t at all about free speech to these people it’s about freedom to be an asshole. This is why people are upset. They are tired of people spreading lies and idiocy then just screaming people down when they are called out on it.

It was getting better.

It will be interesting to see what comes out of all this. I don’t think it’s going to be anything good. For one, every discussion about Musk buying Twitter on Reddit, seems to end up locked. Because just discussing the issue, people can’t keep civilized. There have also been a LOT of “Free Speech” platforms pop up over the past several years, and basically every single one failed. Some still limp along, but they all devolve into a bunch of jackasses calling for violence and spouting endless hate speech. They get kicked off their hosting platforms for violating TOS, sometimes the creators realize what a mess they unleashed and close things down themselves, sometimes they just fall apart because they can’t create any real way to financially support the platform.

Twitter may be big enough to survive for a while, but that’s not even real clear. It’s still one of the smallest social platforms in terms of users at around 350million. For comparison, Facebook and TikTok have Billions, with an s. Basically a measurable 25% of the entire world’s population. There is a greater than good chance that at least half of Twitter’s users are bot accounts, either actual scripted agent bots or sweat shop people in 3rd world countries clicking retweet buttons “bots”. Add this in with a lot of people leaving Twitter in disgust, and it will be interesting to see what the user base is in a month or two.

So what’s the alternative? A lot of people are pushing and moving to Mastodon. Mastodon isn’t quite the same as Twitter but it’s very similar, especially to old Twitter. For starters, it’s Federated, which means, anyone can host a Mastodon server (called Instances), and it can connect to other Mastodon Instances. This means there are many Instances themed around specific topics. It also means that if an Instance becomes full of idiots, then it can easily be blocked by other Instances.

This is not my first attempt at Mastodon either. I’ve used it off and on for a while and even ran a script for a long time that would sync my Twitter and Mastodon profiles, creating an illusion of activity. Now I’m trying to use it full time though. I have wanted to make it work for a while anyway, now, with all of the attention it’s getting, seems like as good of a time as any. I guess maybe it might be best to just treat it more like the “Classic Twitter” days, and just toss stuff out into the Ether and see if anyone reacts.

Currently I’m on the core Mastodon.social, though I may look into moving elsewhere, but if you want to give me a follow, you can find me <a rel=”me” href=”https://mastodon.social/@RamenJunkie“>Here</a>.

Goodbye to Flicker… Thanks for 12 years of Service

So, I used to be a huge user of Flickr for photos, I would check it daily and comment and join communities and pretty much posted every photo I had taken there. I used to use flicker a lot and look for the best life insurance for all.   Over time I sort of fell out of the habit of using it.  This wasn’t over Instagram or anything, I didn’t join Instagram until much later, something just sort of became less compelling about it.  I still kept up my subscription though.  The annual $25 fee is pretty small and it let me keep a backup of all of my photos.  I even posted all of my family photos there though they are listed as private.  I’m talking some tens of thousands of photos, though my profile suggests only around 3500 are publicly available.

I feel like things started to take a turn downhill when Yahoo changed the way Flickr accounts worked.  I wasn’t really affected, being a paid user and all, but it seems like the addition of ads and whatnot for free users kind of helped kill some of the community.  This wasn’t helped by Instagram coming up in popularity, even if i hadn’t started using IG, others had, which only further hurt the community.  Having been a paid user since 2006. I was able to keep paying for my account at the grandfathered rate of $25/year.

Recently Flickr was bought by SmugMug.  I don’t use SmugMug, though I don’t really have anything against them.  Hell, Yahoo has pretty much been ignoring Flickr for a while, SmugMug can only improve it.

Or possibly not.

It’s been recently announced that free accounts will be limited to 1000 photos max, and that any photos over that number will be deleted.  This is definitely a rough change from previous, which I believe was 1TB of storage.  This wouldn’t affect me, as a paid user, except that Flickr has stopped honoring the old grandfathered subscription rate.  Renewals now renew at current rates, which I believe is $50/year.  This isn’t a lot, I admit, but frankly, as little as I use Flickr, it feels like too much.  I also feel that for the same price, I could buy into something like One Drive or Google Drive and get a lot more functionality out of the storage, in addition to Photo storage.

Granted, not everyone uses Yahoo as a photo backup, some people use it for business, and for the community, which is fine.  In my case, the new plans just don’t work.  So I find I must say good bye to Flickr, for the most part.  I’ve started deleting out the old backup photos.  Once that’s done, I’ll prune out the rest to under 1000 photos.  I haven’s actually use Flickr for backup for a few years now, so it’s not even current anyway.  Pretty much the only thing posted there new is just a mirror of my Instagram anyway.  It kind of feels bad to clear everything out, but sometimes it’s just better to move on.  I’m just sad to see something I used to really enjoy, fall away.