Mastodon supports RSS out of the box, the way twitter did way back at the very beginning. So, easy to read people’s toots (ugh) without following them, or to read them in your RSS reader if you don’t want to miss a beat. An upside of the transition even for people who aren’t making the leap.
Category: ersatz tweets
About ersatz tweets
ok, yeah, I’m on mastodon
Seemed like the right moment to sign up and catch the wave of new subscribers. The instance I chose — mastodon.nz — seems to have good momentum and there’s a solid enough mix of the folks I follow now on-board and posting. Find me at mwolfe@mastodon.nz.
I’m playing around with wordpress plugins now, but in the future some (many? most?) of the posts here should automatically pitch up over on mastodon.
you can’t go home again
Obviously, I’m a big proponent of a platform-light social internet, which I’ll admit is largely nostalgia for a simpler time when we all had blogs and then could read each other’s blogs using RSS. Of course this was also better when Google Reader (RIP) added a little layer of sorta semi-private social sharing on the top, but that dream is well and truly dead.
In any case, as much as I want everyone just to jump off twitter and spin up a personal website, I know it’s probably not happening. One element here is cost. That other website is, famously, free. Running your own microplatform, not so much. Here’s what I pay in USD:
- domain name: $14/year
- hosting: $48/year (though, granted, I run three or four sites off the one plan)
- RSS reader (feedbin): $50/year
And of course there was a little time overhead in getting everything up and running. Can it be done cheaper? Definitely — it’s easy enough to get most of the feature set by cobbling together free offerings. But when competing against effortlessly easy, zero-cost platforms . . . I’m not actually as sanguine about the rebloggening as I like to pretend.
Nothing embarrassing in not blogging
I’m learning — or trying to learn — how to overcome the embarrassment that comes with being bad at things. Like most people, I’m very bad at most things. How could it be otherwise?
But somehow I’ve been prone to feeling ashamed at publicly sucking at things as an adult person. Shedding this is liberating: I now get to be a shitty surfer, a shitty photographer, a shitty musician. And it all makes life so much better.
This is a long way of saying that I’m bad at blogging. Nothing new there, I’ve had many blogs over the years and I’ve always been bad at it. The difference this time is that I won’t just delete the thing in a fit of embarrassment. I mean, honestly, what’s more embarrassing than writing a blog post about blogging embarrassment?
Anyway, I still hold out hope that people will wise up, flee twitter, and start blogging again. It’s fun even if you’re bad at it.
Authors Alliance on enforcement of foreign copyright judgments
Authors Alliance has a really great little summary of a relatively unimportant Ninth Circuit decision on a hugely important legal question, that is, whether US courts can refuse to enforce foreign copyright judgments that fail to provide a fair use -style defense as repugnant to public policy.
And you can find the opinion itself here.
Back on Twitter, really?
I’ve only disappointed myself by not blogging here much in these early days. I attribute that mostly to a mix of busyness and contentedness that didn’t leave me itching to write much anything of any length.
I am coming back here though. In the meantime, NZ has announced a free trade agreement with the EU that would throw away the (supposedly) hard-won fifteen year grace period on the copyright term extension we promised to the UK. This is an outrage, and so I’m yelling about it on the platform that people might actually sometimes read, that is, my twitter.com profile.
Chart of the day
More thoughts on reading tweets
The only way to manage the tweetiest twitter users is to consign them to a place where they can be safely marked as read.
Reading Twitter on Feedbin
I've learned one thing over the last handful of days, where I've ported ~95% of my twitter reading to Feedbin, and it's that people tweet a lot.
Getting unread counts on individual posters is incredibly illuminating.