The Thursday Newsletter - Issue #12

Functions or variants, take your pick

Surprising no one nowhere, Las Vegas (and Nevada, but definitely Las Vegas) us putting up some good growth when it comes to COVID-19 test positivity, hospitalizations, and worse. Who could have seen this coming?

That link there goes to my most recent tweet as of this writing, at the end of a thread that I started on 17 May when relaxation of mitigation measures commenced here in Nevada. As if by magic, 45 days later (July 1 or so), the win goes to epidemiology. Let us hope Lambda and Delta (functions for some, variants for all) are only visiting for the gaming and that they’ll run out of cash soon, but we know they’re sticking around with a few residencies, for the duration. smh.

(And by the way, this newsletter is published on Revue, owned by Twitter, and it doesn’t embed tweets well at all :/ )

There was the weird Diaspora project that didn’t get so far, trying to be the new, decentralized Facebook, and there have been a few other endeavors that end up skewing hard right (Minds is one), not to mention the Twitter knock-offs like Parlor and now Gettr… distributing discussion in a decentralized way seems like a problem that had been solved back in the early 80s with Usenet news and other uses of NNTP, and while you might think that Usenet died with DejaNews getting bought and assimilated by Google, no, not the case. Usenet lives, and NNTP is most definitely still in use, and you can use it as well!

I signed up with Gettr as I did with Parlor, to see what these alt-right platforms end up doing. Apparently I should feel better having used by usual spam magnet address. The thing I don’t like about these platform-as-a-weapon ideas is, they’re rolled out under pressure, by people who are not motivated by secure platform technology deployment concepts, and they are yet more places to expose your personal information and in the very best case, re-establish a brand. This can apply to the main stream silliness also… what if your business name doesn’t match your Facebook/Instagram handle? Sorry, no checkmark for you. What if your twitter handle is already taken? Sorry, you’ll have to re-brand yourself or your project.

This is my take-home with just the newsletter experiments I’ve been pursuing, for the DanHugo words (this one and on Substack) and for show notes via Substack and end-of-week engagements via Revue, for the HugoFloss, FFSTalk, and QuogglingSand podcasts (Links on the Buy Me a Coffee profile page, no obligation don’t worry)… neither Substack nor Revue are particularly great, and while they are both free, free only counts if your time is worth nothing (credit to jwz for that famous quote).

We should all be self-hosting (the cloud probably counts until everybody has fiber to their skulls) and self-publishing, so that anyone who wants to consume our content, whom we allow to, can do so.

I’m planning to head to a Tech Alley networking meetup in the Downtown Las Vegas Arts District area, after which I hope to continue heading south to the PHoF, at long last, assuming there are no intervening distractions or diversions. Surely I will post photos and/or videos somewhere, but where?

I have had a Flickr account for almost as long as there has been a Flickr, and I’ve been a Pro member (giving them money for their troubles and a bunch of storage for my thousands of photos… not kidding), and yet I hand over social pic posting to Instagram with their sub-par experience. Why? Don’t know.

Now that Instagram is swinging toward TikTok with more focus on monetizable video, and since I had already uninstalled the mobile application from my devices (the web browser client is okay, though the posting options are limited… so much the better). Platforms are for business, if you’re not posting your pictures to advertise your warez then you are fueling their mistreatment of users like… you.

So yeah, time to sync up the public-facing Flickr pics and eventually kick off my tumblr-inspired personal blogging tools.

I do make use of the BuyMeACoffee.com website to keep a profile page with project links, so that it is out-of-band to cover various things as they come into existence. So in other words, it is a place where I can mention things that do not yet exist, and then link to them when I do, without concern for the BMaC profile page not existing.

It’s also a place to put out the tip jar in one place, for the odd time when someone wants to contribute to the caffeine fund. All proceeds in via BMaC go specifically toward coffee, be that beans, brewing devices, maybe a coffee mug, or maybe even a coffee shop outing! If you’re visiting Vegas, we should meet up for coffee somewhere.

Buy Dan a Coffee profile page

You should definitely swing by and try out the other newsletters and the podcasts, don’t forget the podcasts… you could even consider joining in one or all of them as a guest. Ponder!

Photo by cottonbro from Pexels