Tech

Tech-focused ramblings. Computers, blogs, and whatever else fits.

20 Minute Tesla Model Y Review

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Entirely unintentionally and much to my chagrin, I had my first ride in a Tesla today; one of the newest Model Ys, in fact. I’d never have done this voluntarily, but I was taking a Lyft from a work conference at a school about 20 minutes away from my home, and didn’t realize it was a swasticar until it pulled up.

What an absolutely foolish design.

The touchscreen display on a Tesla Model Y, showing the display as described in the rest of this post.

Virtually no physical controls. Nearly everything is on this display, mounted dead-center, so none of the critical info is directly in front of the driver; you have to look down and to the right to check anything. I think the only physical controls were the wheel, with a couple buttons, and the pedals. There was no stalk on the right side to control things like the wipers, I couldn’t see if there was a left-side stalk for turn signals or not.

The left third of the display is a live updating animation of whatever the car sees, which means there’s a large, constantly moving distraction just barely out of your eyeline, primed to pull your attention away from the road in front of you. Every car or pedestrian the car senses is shown on the display. It will even show whether a car is a sedan, pickup, or box truck, if it can figure that out (more likely when they’re crossing side-on rather than directly in front or behind). I’m a little surprised that it doesn’t distinguish other Teslas with some sort of special icon or coloring or something.

The right two thirds are all the controls, presented with a low-contrast dark grey on light grey color scheme, with small text and icons, all of which makes it difficult to distinguish any one control from another at a quick glance. And, of course, because it’s all a touch screen, you can’t do anything by feel, because it’s one flat pane of glass and you have to look at the screen to make sure you’re touching the right spot.

Even if the owner of the company wasn’t a raging monomaniacal ego-driven techno fascist doing everything he can to rip this country apart and grift as much money out of the process as he can (which, to be clear, he is, and if Republicans were actually at all serious about getting dangerous immigrants out of the country, he should be at the top of the list), I’d still be baffled that these cars are approved to be on the roads and that people are as enamored with them as they are. It’s like a master class in designing a user interface that’s as potentially dangerous for the driver as possible.

Weekly Notes: April 7-13, 2025

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  • 🚀 Almost to Norwescon! So, lots of that when I’m not doing other things.
  • 🥚 While we’re not terribly religious, we do like the cuteness and spring celebration of Easter, so since Norwescon takes place over Easter weekend, we continued our annual tradition of celebrating spring a week early. It was a gorgeous day, so we took a nice walk in the morning, and then dyed eggs in the afternoon.

📸 Photos

Eighteen eggs dyed bright colors sitting in an egg carton in the sun.

Colors and speckles and eggs, oh my!

📚 Reading

📺 Watching

We got sucked into the reality tripe of Million Dollar Secret. It’s ridiculous, many of these people are horrible, and it’s keeping us entertained.

🔗 Linking

  • Online Markdown is a pretty impressive web-based Markdown editor. I’m starting to find some annoyances with Markdown (it focuses on presentational markup rather than structured markup — for example, _using underscores_ to add italics adds italics as <em> tags rather than <i> tags, but since I’m often marking up book titles, <em> is the incorrect tag to be using), but until/unless I decide to go another way, this looks like a good tool to know about.
  • Daniel Hunter at Waging Nonviolence: What to do if the Insurrection Act is invoked: “With the Insurrection Act looming, now is the time to learn how it might unfold and the strategic ways to respond — including the power of ridicule.” I’m hoping this is just paranoia, but afraid it isn’t.
  • Nicholas Barber at the BBC: ‘It was a magical chemical balance’: How Monty Python and the Holy Grail became a comedy legend: “An independent British comedy made on a shoestring by a television sketch troupe? It sounds like a film destined to be forgotten within weeks of leaving cinemas – assuming it reaches cinemas in the first place. But Monty Python and the Holy Grail is still revered as one of the greatest ever big-screen comedies, 50 years on from its release in April 1975.”
  • Nancy Friedman at Strong Language: “Smut”: “Although the lyrics reflected a set of social and legal circumstances specific to mid-1960s America, their sentiment has proved to be timeless. In honor of its 60th anniversary and Tom Lehrer’s long, remarkable life, here’s our salute to ‘Smut.'”
  • Ex Astris Scientia: Design Issues of the Original Enterprise: “The article discusses problems or uncertainties about the design of the original Enterprise by Matt Jefferies, as it appeared in TOS.”
  • Tim Hardiwck at MacRumors: How to Adjust Mac Volume and Brightness More Precisely: “Before you press the volume or brightness controls, hold down the Option and Shift keys together on your keyboard. Now go ahead and make your adjustments, and you should see the onscreen indicator move forwards and backwards in smaller increments (four over each segment).” I’ve been using macOS since it was Mac OS, and I never knew this trick.
  • Bauhaus Clock: “A Bauhaus clock screensaver for Mac, designed to be present even when you’re not.” Pretty! But apparently I should have downloaded it sooner; the page is now saying “currently unavailable”. Oh dear….

Weekly Notes: March 31–April 6, 2025

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  • 🚀 This weekend was a little bit of convention conflict, as Saturday we had the final Norwescon 47 planning meeting before the con, and Sunday was Seattle Worldcon‘s announcement of this year’s Hugo finalists. Got everything done, but it did make me glad there aren’t many weekends where I’m trying to do stuff for two conventions at the same time.

📸 Photos

Single-panel comic of two men sitting on a park bench, one is about eight inches tall. The small one is saying, "You think you've got problems! Not only am I the incredible shrinking man, but I've also been bitten by a werewolf so every full moon I turn into a gerbil!"

From a conversation with a friend, one of my all-time favorite Bizarro comics, clipped and saved back when I was in high school.

📝 Writing

📚 Reading

🔗 Linking

  • Guillaume Lethuillier: The Myst Graph: A New Perspective on Myst: “Upon reflection, Myst has long been more analogous to a graph than a traditional linear game, owing to the relative freedom it affords players. This is particularly evident in its first release (Macintosh, 1993), which was composed of interconnected HyperCard cards. It is now literally one. Here is Myst as a graph.”

  • Jessica Bennett at The Cut: If Hetero Relationships Are So Bad, Why Do Women Go Back for More? A new straight-studies course treats male-female partnerships as the real deviance.: “‘In this class, we’re going to flip the script,’ she went on. ‘It’s going to be a place where we worry about straight people. Where we feel sympathy for straight people. We are going to be allies to straight people.'”

  • Nilay Patel at The Verge: Best printer 2025: just buy a Brother laser printer, the winner is clear, middle finger in the air: “This is the third year in a row that I’ve published a story recommending you just stop thinking about printers and buy whatever random Brother laser printer is on sale, and nothing has happened in the miserably user-hostile printer industry to change my recommendation in that time.”

  • Sarah Jones at the Intelligencer: Then They Came for People With Disabilities The right-wing effort to roll back civil rights finds a new target.: “Though the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans With Disabilities Act had bipartisan support and were signed by Republican presidents, it’s hard to imagine Trump signing either piece of legislation. A more ruthless strain of conservatism always percolated within the party, and now it dominates and threatens the protections that Cone, and Lomax, and so many others once fought to win. At risk is the concept of civil rights itself.”

  • Shelly Brisbin at Six Colors: Twenty Thousand Hertz Dives Deep Into Apple Accessibility History: “The latest episode of the Twenty Thousand Hertz podcast takes a stab at telling Apple’s accessibility story through sound—not only the sound of a host and his interview subjects, but the way Macs and iPhones sound when they speak to people who use their accessibility features.”

  • Watts Martin: What makes an app feel “right” on the Mac?: “So it’s possible that the right question—at least for me—isn’t ‘is this app using a native UI toolkit,’ it’s ‘is this app a good Mac citizen.’ In other words, does it embrace long-standing Mac conventions?”

  • Seattle Worldcon 2025: 2025 Hugo Award Finalists: “Seattle Worldcon 2025, the 83rd World Science Fiction Convention, is delighted to announce the finalists for the 2025 Hugo Awards, Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book, and Astounding Award for Best New Writer.”

Weekly Notes: Feb 24–Mar 2, 2025

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  • 🍃 Big storms hit the Seattle area on Monday and Tuesday, with lots of power outages. We didn’t lose power at home this time, which was nice. Work lost power early Tuesday morning, and though it was back by the time we got in, there were DNS issues that kept campus offline until almost 8:30. Not an auspicious start to the day.
  • 💸 Friday was the “don’t spend anything” economic blackout day. Honestly, this one was easy for me, as I rarely if ever buy anything on Fridays anyway (don’t get coffee or anything on the way to work, bring my own lunch, all household shopping is generally done on Saturday or Sunday, etc.). I have to admit, my cynical side doubts that enough people actually participated for any company to even notice, let alone for it to actually make an impression. But it’s a start, which is good, and hey, you never know — maybe my cynical side will be proven wrong?
  • 🚀 Saturday was this month’s Norwescon planning meeting, so I got to hang out with con friends for a while. This year, in addition to my usual behind-the-scenes duties (website admin, social media admin, Philip K. Dick Award ceremony coordinator, assistant historian) and visible duties (Thursday night DJ, Philip K. Dick Award ceremony emcee), I’ll also be paneling! I posted my tentative schedule earlier today.

📸 Photos

Panoramic view of trees and grass under a bright blue sunny sky with the Puget Sound and Olympic Mountains in the distance.

The view from the balcony outside my office at work on our first really good (false) spring day this year.

📚 Reading

📺 Watching

  • Finished S19 of Project Runway, and though some contestants left earlier than we would have liked, we were not disappointed with the winner.

🔗 Linking

  • NYT (non-NYT link), The Man Behind the ‘Economic Blackout’ Served Time for Sex-Related Offense: “In 2007, Mr. Schwarz was sentenced by a Connecticut judge to 90 days in jail and five years’ probation for disseminating voyeuristic material, according to a representative from the Middlesex County criminal court clerk’s office who reviewed court records while speaking with The New York Times earlier this week.”

  • Marlies on Mastodon: “The vatican needed a latin word for tweet, because the pope tweets. Or tweeted, I suppose, given the whole dead or dying situation. Anyway, they call them breviloquia (s breviloquium) which is honestly a great word even tho it’s not very brief itself. Given its nature and etymology I think we should be able to use it platform-independently and apply it to toots, skeets and even Truths as well. Anyway thank you for reading this breviloquium.”

  • Joan Westenberg, Why Personal Websites Matter More Than Ever:

    The Internet used to be a connected web of message boards and personal websites. I’m talking 1995 to 2005, when being online meant owning your piece of the web, carving it out yourself, maintaining it, giving a damn about it. It was the age of truly sovereign digital identity and content, built on a direct connection between creators and audiences, who found and fell in love with each other on their terms.

    HTML was an almost democratizing force, giving a generation of people the tools they needed to stake their claim and plant their flag in the ground. The personal website was a statement of intent, a manifesto, a portfolio, a piece of digital architecture you could be damn proud of.

    And then something changed.

  • Apple has its issues, but at least this isn’t one of them. Shareholders voted against removing DEI policies; the board had already recommended this decision.

  • If (like me) you’re still using Facebook (or, unlike me, Instagram/Whatsapp/Meta services), you should follow these simple steps to minimize the amount of data you give Meta. (Also, since this is from John Oliver, the URL is great.)

  • Trivial Einstein on Mastodon: “We have a whole classic parable on the subject of not crying wolf, to the point where ‘crying wolf’ is something of a dead cliché. In the English-speaking world, pretty much everyone knows what ‘to cry wolf’ means, even if they’ve never actually heard the parable. We don’t think about the story. We make the semantic leap from the phrase to ‘false positive.’ And we are taught over and over that crying wolf is always bad. Which is why we find ourselves in situations like the one in which we currently find ourselves.”

Minor Feedbin RSS Bug? (EDIT: Not a bug.)

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I think I just uncovered a minor bug in Feedbin‘s RSS parsing.

Update: Not a bug! Feedbin support confirmed that they “aggressively” sanitize markup, for various reasons including security and ensuring that any CSS doesn’t break Feedbin’s rendering when viewed on the Feedbin site.

I used some inline CSS to flip an emoji upside-down in a recent blog post, but it’s displaying right side up in Feedbin (and therefore in NetNewsWire, so at first I thought it was a bug there, but if I let NNW read the RSS directly instead of pulling from Feedbin, it displays the inverted emoji properly).)

Screenshot showing the inverted emoji on my website on the left and right side up in Feedbin on the right.

I’ve confirmed that the inline CSS is present in the raw RSS feed (which makes sense, since it displays properly when loaded directly in NNW).

Screenshot of the proper HTML/CSS in the RSS feed as seen in BBEdit.

But when I use Safari’s inspector to peek at the HTML that Feedbin is rendering, though the span tag is there, the style argument with the inline CSS has been stripped out.

Screenshot of the HTML as served by Feedbin showing a span tag with no arguments.

Is this a bug? Or is Feedbin intentionally stripping inline CSS style declarations out for some reason? Update: Not a bug! See the added note at the beginning of this post.

iPhone security: Hard locking and lockdown mode

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An iPhone showing the Lockdown Mode pre-activation warning screen.

IF YOU’RE GOING TO BE PROTESTING or in any sort of situation where there’s a higher-than-average chance of having potentially adversarial encounters with the police, and if you have an iPhone, please remember these two tips:

  1. Memorize how to quickly “hard lock” your phone. It’s easy to do, even as you’re pulling your phone out of your pocket or bag: hold the power button and either volume button for about two seconds. Your screen will flip to show the “slide to power off” toggle, along with the Medical ID and emergency call toggles. Once you’ve done this, Face ID/Touch ID is disabled, and you must enter your passcode to unlock the phone. (If you keep holding the buttons for five or more seconds, your phone will automatically call emergency services.)

    While there are some legal disputes over this, currently the police cannot force you to surrender your phone passcode, but they might be allowed to force you to use Touch ID/Face ID to unlock it. By hard locking your phone, you’re locking them out until/unless they get a warrant. If the police ever ask you to surrender your phone, hard lock it as you hand it to them.

    I also recommend switching from a standard 4- or 6-digit passcode to a longer, alphanumeric password. To set this up, go to Settings > Touch ID/Face ID & Passcode, tap Turn Passcode On, and tap Passcode Options and set your passcode. This is much more secure than a short numerical passcode, and if your phone ever gets confiscated, will make it much more difficult for authorities to gain access to your phone.

  2. Either before you join the protest, or if you see the police presence start to ramp up, TURN ON LOCKDOWN MODE.

    Settings > Privacy & Security > Lockdown Mode > On

    Note: This is not a setting that most people need to have enabled full-time. It’s designed, in Apple’s words, “for the very few individuals who, because of who they are or what they do, might be personally targeted by some of the most sophisticated digital threats.” Turning it on will severely restrict how your phone works in a number of ways (see Apple’s Lockdown Mode support document for details). However, it also makes it much more difficult for anyone to track you, intercept your communications, or otherwise gain access to your phone.

Make your voices heard! But keep yourself safe as you do.

Android users will have to do their own research for these or similar techniques. Or get better phones. ;) (Yes, I’m kidding. Use what works for you.)

(Image yoinked from AppleInsider’s Lockdown Mode post until I can make my own.)

Answering the blog questions challenge

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While I wasn’t specifically tagged (I’m not that well known), I saw Matthew Haughey do this (via his Mastodon post), and figured I’d jump in. Nothing like a little narcissistic navel gazing to distract from <waves hands around expressively>, right?

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

Trick question (kind of, unplanned): I didn’t even know I was blogging in the first place, because the “blog”/”blogging” terms hadn’t been coined yet! I created my first personal site probably sometime in 1995 (that archive is from February of 1996), and that site had an “announcements” page that was essentially an early blog, with short little updates mostly detailing what changes I’d most recently made, but also with occasional bits about my life. All hand-coded, of course, as this was well before any sort of website builder apps existed, let alone CMS software. It wasn’t until February of 2001 when I discovered the words and realized that I was “blogging”.

Screenshot of my 1996 website, titled 'Woody's World of Wonders'. It has a repeating gif background of my signature, and a 'Netscape 2.0 enhanced' warning at the top.

What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it?

I’m using WordPress (self hosted), and have been since November 16, 2006. At the time, I had been using Movable Type, which was the Big Thing for self-hosted blogging in the early 2000s. However, they’d been moving towards a more corporate model, and I figured I’d check out this new up-and-comer. Almost 20 years later, I guess it worked out.

Have you blogged on other platforms before?

Yup! Between WordPress and the previously mentioned Movable Type, I was also on TypePad (a hosted blogging platform originally by the Movable Type people, though I have no idea if there’s any relationship anymore); before Movable Type I used a system called NewsPro (which no longer has a web presence). I’ve also at times dabbled with Blogger, LiveJournal (no link because that account got purged), Tumblr, and others; I currently mirror this blog to a DreamWidth blog (like LiveJournal before the Russians bought it).

How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?

Most of the time, as long as I’m on my desktop or laptop, I use MarsEdit. If I’m mobile on my phone or iPad, I just use the WordPress web interface, because I haven’t found a good mobile app. (Yes, I know WordPress has an app; it just annoyed me when I tried to use it.)

The MarsEdit post editing window showing this post being written in Markdown format.

Sometimes I’ll start writing elsewhere as I get thoughts together; if I do that, it’s likely to either be in Apple’s Notes app or BBEdit.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

When I’m really excited about something or really ticked off about something. Other than that, it’s kind of random. And it’s been more random than I like for a long time (honestly, and unfortunately, my blogging frequency has existed in somewhat inverse relation to the rise of Facebook/Twitter and other non-blog forms of social media), but I’m in the midst of (yet another) attempt at making a real push to blogging here more regularly instead of pushing it all to Facebook. Facebook and its associated Meta products becoming an ever more overt dumpster fire and prompting an exodus is certainly helping with that.

Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?

Usually I write, publish, and go. If it’s something I’m really invested in (due to the aforementioned excitement or rage), then I might take a little more time to work and polish it before pushing it live. But my general approach is to just dump it out of my brain and onto the pixels.

What are you generally interested in writing about?

Whatever catches my interest. This is definitely not a single-topic blog; hence the “Eclecticism” name.

Who are you writing for?

My first audience is me — in large part, because I so rarely know if anyone else is reading (few people comment, and I long ago turned off any sort of site statistic tracking). My secondary audience is friends and family or anyone who might be interested enough in my ramblings to read regularly, whether by stopping by my site, following the links I put on social media, or who have me in their RSS feeds. The tertiary audience is whomever else happens to stumble by for whatever reason.

What’s your favorite post on your blog?

With 29 years of archives (34 if you include the earliest entries in my “beyond the blog” category that collects email list and usenet posts I made before I had my own website; the oldest one dates from October 17, 1991), that’s a difficult question to answer. However, I do keep a “Worth Reading” page that I’ll occasionally update with posts that I think are among the most…well, worth reading…and of those, I’d say my current favorite is the most recent addition: Change is good, where I advocate growth and learning and my own journey ever leftward, as occasionally evidenced by older posts here.

Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?

Nothing solid. I do occasionally look at options for moving away from WordPress (most recently due to what I consider highly questionable choices by the primary face of WordPress), but so far, between having limited time and energy to devote to diving into my computer (my wife does appreciate actually interacting with me from time to time, after all) and not having found quite the right solution to move to, things are probably stable for the time being.

I do have a wishlist of what I’d like to have in a blogging tool (summarized as “early-2000s MovableType, only with some modern updates”) that, if I could find a solution that supported all of these, would get me off of WordPress in a heartbeat. But until someone builds my dream blogging tool, inertia is probably going to keep me with something that works, even if I’m not entirely happy with it.

Who else do you want to tag?

I haven’t got a clue! Especially since “tagging” as a way to notify someone is more difficult over multiple services. Of course, if anyone finds this and wants to jump in without being specifically tagged (like I did), feel free! Harken back to the pre-Facebook/Twitter days when blogs like this were how we kept up with each other and these were memes instead of silly text on an image!

Dreamwidth crossposting test post

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As part of the Great Facebook Exodus of January 2025, I’ve seen a few people talking about Dreamwidth, generally in the context of going there, going back there, or already being there and letting people know.

So, what the heck? Since I already have this blog, I’m not moving there, but I did set up an account (with my usual djwudi username) and, assuming I have things configured correctly, any posts here should automagically mirror over thataway. This post is mostly a bit of rambling so I have something to send that way to test the setup.

If it works? Great! If not? Um…more fiddling, I guess.

Edit: Well, it worked! So that’s good.

Facebook alternatives (an incomplete list)

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With a lot of people (including people I know) talking about leaving Facebook and other Meta properties, but also often expressing frustration with the most popular other options not having the same functionality, I started thinking about what could be done, where, and how. Here are my initial thoughts. This is not a complete or comprehensive list. It may not even be entirely accurate in all respects. There are generalizations in descriptions that may lead to “well, actually…” and “yes, but…” impulses in some readers. I’ll do my best, but corrections, suggestions, and other alternative options are appreciated.

Where are people going?

There’s no simple answer to this, because there is no single alternative site that offers Facebook’s entire feature set. Instead, I’ll look at some of the basic features that people use on Facebook and talking about some of the options for duplicating those features in other places.

Posting things for other people to read

Bluesky

Generally, most people seem to be migrating to Bluesky (I’m on Bluesky). However, Bluesky is much more of a pre-Elon-Musk-Twitter clone than a Facebook clone, so it doesn’t offer the same functionality.

Bluesky, like X/Twitter, lets you post short (300 character) posts that are publicly visible. While you can block other Bluesky users from seeing or interacting with your posts while they are logged in to Bluesky, since every Bluesky post is public, everything you post can still be seen (but not interacted with) by someone who isn’t logged in to Bluesky.

Bluesky is also another single-entity service. While they make a lot of noise about being open and federated, so far that’s nothing but noise, and you’re still moving from one monolithic silo to another monolithic silo (albeit one that’s newer and shinier and that is getting a lot of attention). If (when?) the Powers That Be at Bluesky eventually find themselves swayed by the hundreds of millions of venture capital dollars that are funding them and start doing Questionable Things, well, that’s just the way it goes, and don’t be surprised.

Mastodon

Some people are moving to Mastodon (I’m on Mastodon, and it’s my preferred choice). It’s also essentially a pre-Elon-Musk-Twitter clone, that allows you to post short (usually 500 characters, but this can vary) posts that are publicly visible. It allows you to set your post visibility to public, just people who follow you, or just the people who are mentioned, so it allows for a little more privacy than Bluesky does. However, it does not allow you to set up custom “only show this post to these specific people” lists, which is one of the Facebook features that many people are looking for.

Mastodon is a federated service (these are often referred to collectively as the Fediverse), which is both a strength and a weakness. It’s a strength because it’s not a monolithic silo: There’s no one single Mastodon server, and no single entity in control of all of Mastodon as a whole. If you join a Mastodon server that you find isn’t run in a way you like, you can move to a different Mastodon server (or even a Fediverse-connected server that doesn’t use the Mastodon software) and still interact with everyone you want to interact with. However, this does mean that Mastodon can feel fiddlier and more confusing when new people join: people don’t want to figure out what “joining a server” means, they just want to “join Mastodon”, and this can be and has been a barrier for many.

An imperfect analogy is email: when setting up an email account, you can’t just “join email”; instead, you have to pick which email provider you want to use (Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc.), and which email provider you use affects your email address, how well spam is handled, how the user interface looks, and so on. Mastodon is similar: you don’t just “join Mastodon”, you join a Mastodon server, which affects your Mastodon address, how well spam and abuse is handled, how the user interface looks (to some extent), and so on. But just as you can send email to any other email user without worrying which email service they use, you can interact with other Mastodon users without worrying about which Mastodon server they use.

Blogs

Blogs are still a thing! You’re reading one right now! And they’re great: You control the content. You can say anything you want. You can make your posts as short or as long as you want. You can post photos or video. You can link to what other people or organizations post. You can allow comments or not. Depending on the blog service or software, you can make your posts public or restrict them with passwords or other access control methods. You can use different themes to change the way your blog looks. Some platforms are more extensible than others. Basically, it’s your space, and it’s up to you to do what you want with it.

And they’re not even difficult! There are a lot of ways how you can set up your own blog. Some are very simple, where you just sign up with a service and start writing; others are for the more technically-minded, where you install software on your own web host.

Some options:

  • WordPress is very popular, and is available in two flavors: WordPress.com, where they host your blog and take care of the backend maintenance, or WordPress.org, where you download the software and host it on your own web server. I use the self-hosted version, and it’s served me well for years.
  • Micro.blog is a “sign up and start writing” service. The standard version allows for easy cross-posting to Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, Tumblr, Nostr, LinkedIn, Medium, Pixelfed, and Flickr, and they just introduced a new, very low cost ($1/month) Micro.one option that connects to the Fediverse. I occasionally consider moving away from WordPress, and if I do, this is the most likely choice for where I’d go.
  • Other options exist as well, though I haven’t used these often or at all, so can’t say much more about them. These include Google’s Blogger, Tumblr, Dreamwidth (remember LiveJournal? Dreamwidth is a LiveJournal clone not owned by Russians), and probably many others.

Posting things for other people to see

Photos

Flickr is one of the largest and most long-lived photo sharing services (I’m on Flickr). You can upload photos, create albums, and share them out from there, allow people to comment and download them or not, and either retain your copyright or set them to use Creative Commons licensing to allow other people to legally reuse or remix them.

Pixelfed is a Fediverse clone of Instagram. As with Instagram, you can upload photos for other people to view and comment on, but as with Mastodon, there’s no one singular “Pixelfed” service. Instead, you pick a Pixelfed server to join, and then you can follow and interact with other Pixelfed users (or any other Fediverse user) without worrying about what server they are on. This has the same strengths and weaknesses as described for Mastodon above.

Video

While both of the above options for photos also support video to some extent, they are primarily focused on still photos. For video, especially longer form videos, the only two major players I’m currently aware of are YouTube and Vimeo. They’re very similar; YouTube, of course, is run by Google and is the metaphorical 800 pound gorilla.

The people behind Pixelfed are working on Loops for short-form videos on the Fediverse, but it’s currently still in very early stages.

Reading things that other people post

Okay, so there are all those options for putting your thoughts out on the wider internet…now how do you keep up with everything that the people you want to keep up with are posting, especially when they’re now scattered over so many different sites and services?

This is one that feels like a big barrier; one of the strengths of monolithic silos like Facebook is that everything is right there, and you don’t have to do anything to find it. It just lands in front of your face as the timeline (or the algorithms behind the timeline) decrees.

The good news? This is actually one of the easiest barriers to surmount. It’s extremely simple to build your own timeline, in chronological order, without mysterious algorithms deciding what you see, and without ads or “suggested posts” popping up in your feed, and you’ll be able to follow along with most virtually (and maybe entirely) all of the sites and services I’ve suggested above.

All you need is an RSS reader.

RSS (short for Really Simple Syndication) is just a specially formatted text file (a “feed”) with the most recent posts someone has posted to their site. By adding RSS feeds to your RSS reader, you see whatever has been posted, all in one convenient place. And the best part is, RSS feeds have been around for years, are a big part of the underlying technology that makes much of the modern internet work, and are provided by nearly every website! Blogs like this one, news sites like CNN, Bluesky, Mastodon, and many, many others.

When you’re on a website that you want to keep up with, just add the website’s main address to your feed reader, and your feed reader should automatically find the RSS feed. If that doesn’t work, many websites will have a link to their RSS feed visible somewhere on the page so you can copy the address directly to add to your feed reader. And that’s it! Whenever you open your RSS reader, you’ll have a nice, simple, clean, chronological list of everything that the sites you follow have published since you last checked in.

You can also add your Bluesky and Mastodon friends to your RSS reader to see what they’ve posted without having to individually check in with Bluesky or Mastodon. I do this because I follow a lot of accounts on both services, and there’s just no way that I’ll be able to read everything that gets posted — but my putting the RSS feeds for my most important accounts (generally, friends I know in the real world) into my feed reader, I know that I’ll see their posts, even if I don’t happen to see it when I’m on Bluesky or Mastodon.

As an Apple user, my preferred and highly recommended RSS reader is NetNewsWire, which is available for the desktop/laptop, for iPhones, and for iPads. I’m afraid I don’t have my own recommendations for native Windows or Android readers, but I’m happy to add recommendations here if I get any suggestions.

There are also several web-based RSS readers so that you’re not dependent on an app on your computer or mobile device, and many of these can be accessed by on-device RSS reader apps. I use Feedbin and have it connected to NetNewsWire, which allows me to use NetNewsWire on my computers and mobile devices, log into the Feedbin website if I’m on another device, or even experiment with different RSS reader apps, and always have my reading list up to date.

This often seems like the most complicated part of keeping up with everyone you want to keep up with, but with RSS, it’s actually the easiest part of this whole thing.

Events

Unfortunately, this is an area that I don’t currently have any pointers for. I’m open to suggestions from others, though!

Private groups

This is another area where I don’t currently have good pointers. Discussion board and forums used to be really good at this sort of thing before Facebook and social media in general virtually killed them off. I know they’re still out there and being used, they’re just not as prevalent as they used to be, because Facebook offered everything in one single place. Once again, I’m open to suggestions!

Personally, I think a resurrection of private discussion boards and forums would be a great way to go, but I haven’t looked yet to check into the current state of things in this arena.

But what about Discord? Or Slack?

Though I use both, I’m not a big fan of Discord or Slack, because, like Facebook, they are monolithic silos. They don’t feel like it, because you’re logging into this Discord server or that Slack server, but they’re still all controlled by their parent entity. (Much like Facebook groups are seemingly private spaces within Facebook, every Discord or Slack is just a seemingly private space run by Discord or Slack).

They’re also quirky, often confusing for new users, and very difficult to search through. To me, they’ve managed to combine all the worst features of social media, chat, and discussion forums, making them a kludgy mess rather than a convenient solution. Your mileage may vary (YMMV), of course.

Final thoughts

The best thing about Facebook was that everyone was in one place, there were some pretty impressive granular control over who could see what you posted, events could be promoted and shared, groups could be built, and you didn’t need to go anywhere else to do it, and it was “free” (in scare quotes, since it was free because we were the products being sold, not the customers).

The worst thing about Facebook…well, there’s no single “worst thing”, but if you’re seriously considering getting away, you’re likely already quite familiar with all the smaller individual “worst things” that add up to it becoming an ever-worsening trash heap surfacing and promoting the worst impulses of humanity.

Moving away is possible! Because there is no one single place to move to that offers all of Facebook’s features (in my opinion, this is a good thing, as anytime there’s “one single place” for everything, the chances of that place eventually falling over and turning into what Facebook has turned into steadily increases with time), a little bit of work in learning new things will be necessary. But much of it is already out there and not that difficult to figure out. And the figuring out is worth doing.

Internet Outage Movie Catchup

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We’ve had two internet outages in the past week, one for most of Tuesday, the second for 36 hours from 2 a.m. Saturday to 2 p.m. Sunday.

During the Tuesday outage, I realized (once again) that Plex, home media server software that allows you to stream media over your home network, doesn’t do that if there isn’t an active internet connection. Having home media server software that doesn’t work as a home media server in a situation where you’re quite likely to want to use it because you can’t stream from external sources is more than a little frustrating, and finally pushed me over the edge into looking into alternatives.

So, I started getting Jellyfin set up as my media server, and when the internet went out again, it quite happily and easily let us watch a couple movies over the weekend. I’m still figuring out some of the ins and outs (Jellyfin doesn’t have its own native macOS or tvOS app, and the Infuse app that I’m using isn’t showing movie special features, but I don’t yet know if that’s a limitation or user error), but it was easy to set up, read my existing media files as originally set up for Plex just fine, and is doing what I wanted it to, which Plex doesn’t seem to be prioritizing anymore as they pivot more towards building their own streaming service.

All that said: Even when Plex was being a snit, we still have a DVD player, so between that and getting Jellyfin set up, we did manage to get three spooky-season movies watched:

Sleepy Hollow (1999): ⭐️⭐️⭐️: Tim Burton during his peak years still holds up. I’d forgotten just how strong the cast was in this one. Still a lot of fun.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992): ⭐️⭐️⭐️: This one doesn’t hold up so well. I still mostly enjoy it, but between the constantly varying stylization and Reeves’ and Ryder’s flatness, it drags on more than I remembered. Also, I’d totally forgotten just how horny this film is (not necessarily a bad thing, just didn’t remember that).

Young Frankenstein (1974): ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: Still and always a classic.