12.05.20
Gemini version available ♊︎Twitter Will Abandon Older Systems/Geeks on December 15th and Fediverse Rots Away (Pleroma.site and Pleroma.fr Shut Down Without Notice)
Because you need megabytes of HTML and complex JavaScript code to read (at most) 280 characters of text?
Maybe “social control media” is best suited for short memory span people who can’t put together more than a single sentence, just unverified and random strands of thought, at best (as Merkel, Macron and others testified about Donald Trump’s lunatic ramblings)
Summary: The promises of “social control media” are repeatedly being broken; it’s time to focus on simpler and more reliable means of communication (journalism cannot fit into short bursts of text with a fancy GUI)
READERS of our IRC logs (or my personal social control media accounts) are probably aware by now that Pleroma.site and Pleroma.fr went offline without prior notice, without an explanation, without responding to queries (the person behind both, “href” by name, is incommunicado). It has been nearly a week now. The net effect or actual impact, on us at least, is that none of our IRC bots work now, except one. The chain of dependency has caused this before, rendering obsolete both our identi.ca bot and our Twitter bots (the ones syndicating them inwards — into IRC). A lot of development effort down the drain as APIs get deprecated, sites go offline and so on. That’s aside from the fact that I myself, personally, lost all my Fediverse connections and about a quarter million posts. This is the third time I lose my Fediverse account (the last time it was also an instance shutdown, but at least it was announced in advance and had no effect on IRC bots).
“Many people have abandoned Git (Free software) and moved to GitHub (Microsoft proprietary software, the E.E.E. modus operandi) because they wrongly believe that bloat and “social control media”-like UI (the “UX” cargo cult) makes them more “hip” as developers.”Yesterday in IRC it was suggested that we also get off Freenode and start our own IRC server. That’s actually creating an infrastructure maintenance dilemma. As for social control media (all of it, including federated and Free software-based), it’s all turning out to be a waste of time, eventually. Far too much data loss, especially in the long run. Come December 15th, Twitter is going to block all browsers that are old and won’t run JavaScript (or not run it the way Twitter wants to). This means that most old computers won’t be able to access Twitter. Seriously! Twitter just doesn’t care. It’s all about brainwash, surveillance, and censorship. It’s about money. “Twitter is about social control rather than enabling people to communicate,” psydroid wrote moments ago in IRC, “nothing has been lost and it’s better to move on…”
I won’t be participating in Twitter anymore. It just gets copies of what I post in Diaspora (same as the past decade or so).
I’ve meanwhile begun making local copies of posts (e.g. today’s, updated in real time) and if Pleroma.site does not come back, we’ll code something as a contingency for IRC channels. This is all far from ideal but this conjunction or intersection between several incidents (Pleroma.site, Twitter) serves as a cautionary tale and important lesson; we need to get back to blogs, RSS, and simple interfaces based on plain text at their core. The Web is becoming obese, overly complex, unreliable, and expensive to maintain. Many sites go offline, let certificates expire (those certificates do not assure privacy; the servers and clients can still sell all the data), even become spam farms.
One aspiration of ours is to ‘innovate’ all sorts of “suckless” Web technologies, including text-based articles, Web-less site access, P2P for article distribution and browser-less interaction, including over IRC. Matrix was suggested to us last week, but we see no practical benefit (some outsource their 'IRC channels' to the ICE facilitator, Salesforce/Slack). Embracing so-called 'novelty' just for the sake of it isn’t “smart”; it’s just obedient, or mindless embrace of fashion-like trends, imposed on us by corporate media that rebrands servers as “clown computing” to compel us to give away control/sovereignty over our computers — in the same way social control media weakens or eliminates broad networks of blogs (what we use to have a lot more of 10-15 years ago). Many people have abandoned Git (Free software) and moved to GitHub (Microsoft proprietary software, the E.E.E. modus operandi) because they wrongly believe that bloat and “social control media”-like UI (GUI sans the “UX” cargo cult) makes them more “hip” as developers. How wrong are they… █
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