To those currently caught up in the Bluesky euphoria, will you please snap the fuck out of it? Honestly, I hate being the wet blanket, but y’all are killing me with this. There is nothing new here, nothing that hasn’t happened before, and no reason whatsoever to think that it won’t end exactly the same way. I hear Bluesky’s leaders articulating their vision, and I believe that they believe that they’re a force for good, but venture capitalists are the ones paying for all of this1....
It’s been a bit less than 2 years since I parked my Xitter account. I rationalized leaving it in place at the time to prevent anyone from claiming my name. Enough time has passed though that if that were to happen, I don’t expect there would be any confusion. And I really don’t want to contribute to their subscriber count in any way. So I deleted my account.
After nearly 14 years of Twitter, I’m calling it quits. Even before Musk took over, Twitter had become pretty awful; It was already a cesspool of hateful trolls, disinformation campaigns, wingnuts, and the aggrieved (basically, a sea of Karens, Kyries, Kanyes, and the odd Ted Cruz). Its algorithms work to fill your timeline with the content most likely to generate anxiety or rage. The point of which is to increase engagement—and it works—even knowing that this was the case wasn’t always enough to keep me from taking the bait....
I rewrote my blog software again (actually, it was done months ago but I just now got around to deploying it). The last one used Turbogears, but the 1.x branch is getting long in teeth, and 2.0 came a little too late. Besides, Django is the new hotness these days. Somehow the rewrite resulted in about half as much code, which is always cool, and I finally got to make use of mod_wsgi, (it is everything that I had ever dreamed it would be, and more :))....
From time to time I get asked why my blog isn’t comment enabled. There are several reasons for this: It’s my blog. It’s here as way for me to share information, make comments, and express opinions. Incidentally, one of those opinions is that all of these objectives can be met by a site that doesn’t support comments. Comment sections make for a horrible discussion medium, I’d really rather get an email....