I had a "enjoy it while it lasts" mentality when it came to BlueSky. The tipping point finally came for Twitter, and a mass exodus occurred in their favor. The rest of my streamer friends were finally on a platform I kinda-sorta paid attention to. But I didn’t hold my breath.

Sure enough, the nail on the coffin was swift: within days of new users enjoying the new-to-them platform, Jesse Singal, known P.O.S., is not only welcomed on Bluesky– but has ties to Kiwifarms.

(If you have no idea how that’s bad news [I’m envious at your ignorance, but also, where have you been?]: KF is notorious for being a forum full of people that love to doxx, stalk, SWAT, and generally spend way too much of their time obsessing over people they don’t like. They’re most known for harassing transgender individuals.)

And…

People are still being declared overreacting about this?

But what’s been really getting me, is that people are staying anyway. I’m annoyed similarly that it took people this long to GTFO Twitter.

Now, I should hold nuance for those that feel like they don’t have anywhere else to go[1] (Anti-Blackness is global, and permeates the Internet) and for some people, it’s literally their business. And not everyone can just up and delete their account, I guess, or have time/energy/knowhow to just say "fuck it" and roll their own. Or, like, whoever. Whatever.

But…

We gotta do better, y’all.

I’ve come across so many others that articulated way better than I could about how I was feeling about this.

It’s the main idea of why the whole aspect of the "Indie Web," Web 2.0, The-Web-I-Grew-Up-On, has been my Roman Empire for the past year.

There’s alternatives, but unless it’s VC-backed no one really cares. It’s toxic to so many marginalized groups, but that’s where the community is. It harms the most vulnerable and the man behind the wheel is a fucking weasel, but that’s where all your followers are.

Who brings the community?

Who gets sacrificed the instant it’s no longer profitable to exploit their work?

Who suffers because people think Tolerance is still a good idea? (It’s not!)

It’s very likely that I’m salty because, well, I feel this boils down to yet again that trans people just aren’t important as comfort media and convenience. Cis folks wouldn’t stop clutching their Harry Potter books and that fucking game to show the bare minimum of solidarity, so I can’t say I’m surprised.

And yet, this still stings.

It’s not about connections and empathy anymore. It’s all about the numbers, and I’m an unimportant one.

So, like, whatthefuckever. Stay there if you want.

It’s business as usual.

Carla, a transgender woman, shrugging and rolling her eyes. She says, "You do whatever you want. I'm used to being everybody's acceptable losses." This is toward her cisgender Resident Assistant who did not stick up for her during a bigoted interaction with another dorm member.
Source: Dumbing of Age

[1] What? You thought I was going to recommend Mastodon? …Well, maybe, but with huge honking caveats and a narrow list of the instances and apps that I recommend. And let’s face it, we absolutely dropped the ball when Twitter first started fucking up (more). So, probably not.

We’ll need to carve out what next to do.

A magazine ad for Lunar Silver Star Story, announcing that it will cease being sold on January 01 2000 after listing postive attributes. I have edited it to what I think my titles were on FB (annoying, unhinged, easily irritable), before declaring that my final title I'll earn on Jan 01 2025: not on fucking facebook. The smaller text is just a rant about the ToS, how AI sucks, my other sites.

I don’t bring attention to it, but I do have a Facebook account. But by the end of this year, that will be in the past tense.

I’m finally deleting the damn thing.

It had been on thin ice for me for years. I’ve been on much more fun sites, and I’ve been really getting into the whole "Old Web" pre Capitalist Hell we’re in now. And also. Let me count the ways…

  • accessibility nightmare
  • bad vibes

…well, that’s about it. "Bad vibes" has its own sublist of things that make up for it, like

  • ""community standards"" that leave actual hate speech up
  • algo nightmare
  • ads
  • is totally evil

But I stayed. Why? Because that’s where most of my friends are. And that’s where the local communities put their events and groups. It’s the only place where I can reach certain family members via Messenger.

And that is finally, finally not enough anymore.

Like WordPress, but worse, FB decided to do more in feeding the LLM slop machine and really come down on how they treat creators and their work. By swiping it to use it however they see fit.

I’ve made my flouncy posts and reached out to people to trade contact info. I’m holding out until Dec 31st, New Year’s Eve, before I cut my losses and delete the account.

I have over 200 friends. I’m blessed to have several handfuls of people that I love and adore and admire– and we have rapport in other places besides Facebook, including offline. I’m lucky to have support networks that meet up for trail, game nights, and social things.

I’m going to miss the groups I’m in.

And the reels my partners and I send back and forth to annoy each other.

And the memes, and silly groups where we all just shitpost (respectfully).

And the groups I have been in for yeeeaaaars that had been there for me when I needed them. There is a ghost of a ghost of a remake of one that I’ve been in for over a decade and we’ve kiki history, babes.

But it’s time to move on, because I have to do better than fucking Facebook.

If I miss things, oh well. I’m on mailing lists, bookmarked websites, and frequent my haunts.

If the one group I’ve been trying to revive ends up tanking because I’m no longer on FB to pester people about it (I’ll be on other platforms, including an old-school forum)… well, can’t say I didn’t try.

(BTW, tangent, communities etc– please have your web presence be somewhere else besides Facebook. At the very least have different options. Instagram does not fucking count. And neither does Twitter.)

And for those that never reached out… I don’t think I’ll be missed. And if I am, hopefully we’ve people and hobbies in common that we’ll eventually cross paths again. Otherwise… yo. You had time to make me a priority, and by New Year’s Day you’ll be out of it.

So, that is all.

What better New Years Resolution, right?

As the WordPress environment is set aflame by one guy throwing a tantrum and lawyers sending each other strongly worded leaflets, I’m just sitting here glad that I made the switch to ClassicPress months ago. And, not for the first time, I noticed a trend in my social media restructuring: when it isn’t FOSS or decentalised, the sites I’m now most active on is a fork or reconstruction of what I grew up with.

While NekoWeb is admittedly a stretch (free hosting never went out of style), I have listed it because of how nostalgic it has made me. It’s what I keep repeating: the Old Web and how people used to build and decorate their online spaces. However, two services are forked from earlier concepts of their modern-day counterparts:

  • 2018: WordPress 5.0 introduced the Block system
  • Dreamwidth forked from LJ as early as 2009

And SpaceHey is basically resurrected MySpace from the early 2000s or so… I was never on that platform proper pre-botched migration (it got better). It’s been interesting to see how it was, right now… and not as a kid, but an adult that does their own taxes and everything. I would’ve loved MySpace, especially for the hack to inject CSS. And I’m liking it now as an alternative to Facebook.

This man knows not of how this information has affected me

But he knows the color of the car I just drove away in

“Flinch,” by Alanis Morissette


Triggers and C-PTSD are a motherfucker. I’m not sure if I’m using the correct terminology, so let me just paint the scene. At any rate, my reaction was as visceral as those song lyrics.


You’re mindlessly scrolling on your social media of choice, when you come across a thread. It seems like a cool idea, an outing or event, and you’re actually free that weekend. So you scroll.


And you see a familiar name. It takes a moment, but you remember.


And you want to throw up.


Because this name is no longer a friend of yours; you stopped speaking to each other after a heated argument. A major one, you can say; that was no pineapple-belongs-on-pizza debate.


I remember that morning.


I tried to explain how wrong it was to post and share the murder of a Black person, even if it was for a supposedly noble cause, because institutionalized racism even affects how our deaths are portrayed in the media a mere trauma porn– no dignity, all spectacle. It is about Impact, not Intent. But she doubled down, screaming about so-called justice. She did not listen. She ignored nuance. And somehow my concern translated to “you want those cops to get away with murder.”


It has happened before. And I have a feeling it will keep happening. Because to those so worried about justice, the end will always justify the means– and if that means my pain is a stepping stone to a slap on the wrist for a cop, then so be it. “Justice is served! Sorry about your mental health, though. Have you tried thinking about the bigger picture?”


I’m tired of that racist shit, the same conversations.


And I’m tired of this coming from people who I thought I could rely on.


I cried that morning. “Why are people like this!?” I wailed on my girlfriend’s shoulder.


I’m tired of my pain not mattering, and it hurts.


I saw her name, and it came flooding back.


So what did I do?


Before logging off for awhile for a nice bubble bath, I let a few people in that thread know. Some understood, others opened dialogue with me and respected boundaries when I ran out of spoons.


Only one said she “understood” my point of view but didn’t see it that way, and hoped that I didn’t hate her for “partying with this person once a year.” I said I didn’t. And it wasn’t a lie. But I thought, if you’re willing to overlook such gross thought patterns for a giant bonfire and booze, how long will it take before you reveal something heinous of your own? Would you have my back if The Pattern asserts itself? Could I cry on your shoulder?


I didn’t know.


Since it’s been proven time and time again that I’m just unimportant collateral damage to the culture at large, I have to find my own ways to protect myself. On the outside it’s callous, unforgiving, with ghosting tendencies, and kinda mean. But for the people that have been burned like this one too many times– for those on the margins who would rather not risk their safety for the possibility of friendship– they get it.


And with my adult life punctuated by moments like this… is it any wonder why I just wouldn’t bother? It’s not a difficult choice when you frame it like that, and I’m saddened that it has to be this way. Sad, and resigned.


It sucks.


I didn’t stick around long enough to find out if she knew that the company you keep could be a yellow or red flag for most people, and to be honest, I didn’t explain either.


At the end of the day I didn’t hate her. I just couldn’t trust her.


So I lost her number.

I’ve talked about the so-called growing pains of moving to Mastodon, and everyone’s talked to death about the egomaniac now at the Twitter wheel. So let’s talk about Reddit.


A decade or so ago, I used Digg when Digg was good. I liked keeping in touch with the news and other interests, and occasionally contributing to a discussion with a comment. But then they shot themself in the foot and drove most of its users to Reddit, self included, and it fell into punch line and cautionary tale. And now, Reddit is getting greedy. “Digg-ing its own grave,” a lot of people are saying, because we’ve seen this before.


On top of wanting more ads in front of your eyeballs and nuking NSFW outside of their official app/site, they’ve jacked up the API pricing so much that it’ll effectively kill the 3rd party apps and tools some users depend on. In protest people have been leaving for other platforms, scheduling blackouts, and dragging Reddit in the media. They’ve done some boneheaded moves before, but that API brouhaha appears to be the last straw for a lot of people– self included. History really is repeating itself.


The changes take effect on July 1st, but then I thought– why wait? So I deleted the app.




I’ve taken this opportunity to step back and reconsider how I’ve been consuming media.


I realized how guilty I was of using Reddit as a portal for all my news, entertainment, and mindless doomscrolling (especially the latter). Like many others I used third party apps and uBlock Origin to make it usable. And it was… a timesink. A good one, if only in the sense that it was something to read when I was too lazy to do other things. “Good” in other aspects is highly debatable. In my case, I certainly wasn’t contributing positively to most threads; when I wasn’t lurking it was to say something pithy or to insult a jackass. Whether that was due to Reddit’s changing atmosphere or my growing jerkassness, that remains to be seen. (Probably both, to be honest). Good timesink or no, I could have been reading literally anything else instead of threads upon threads of whatever.


So I went further. Next on the chopping block was Pocket. While it was great for squirreling away articles and stories, I just haven’t used it in years– things now are pinned, “Read Later” in my RSS readers, clipped to Evernotes. (And speaking of that, I switched from Evernote to Joplin for more functionality in my free tier account.) My final switch was from Feedly to Feeder (dot co); I didn’t need that AI stuff and I really hated how basic the functionality of pulling RSS data from most websites was behind a paywall. To differentiate, I don’t mean the custom build choose-elements-to-pull kind– Feeder has that paywalled too. But Feeder has a much better time just pulling what I need, with the exception of the really weirdly-formatted sites.




But what about a Reddit replacement? Weirdly enough, I like reading and commenting on things! And sometimes, I even like reading and commenting on what other people have to say! You know, as long as it isn’t a toxic cesspool of scum and villainy and whatnot. I lasted about two days before I caved and looked into some alternatives. So I went back: to Digg, Fark, Slashdot, and Tildes. Those were just thrown into an RSS folder since I had no interest in creating accounts there.


But where was I going to get that sweet, sweet community commenting commotion? I appear to have landed on Kbin since, why not continue my Fediverse trend? It is currently slow with all the growth, but the user interface is nice. I’m finding my footing. I like it. For now.




So, how am I feeling?


Loads better. I feel more deliberate in my media consumption, not just scrolling for the sake of it. And it feels… nostalgic. It has a lot of the vibe of what I remembered the Internet to be. Of forums with all sorts of people in it, specifically. A part of me will always be searching for that magical time where everyone made their own weird lil websites on the Internet, sometimes coming together in communities for shooting the shit and camaraderie. No data mining or rampant capitalism. No bending over backwards to either appease or circumvent the Ad Infestations.


In other words, The Old Web (and this Thread: “What do you miss the most about the old Internet?”). For the younguns, you can also check out NeoCities and mmm.page for more of That Feeling. That is the gist of all I want to say about it.


So, I don’t think I’ll be returning to Reddit. But we’ll see where I end up afterwards.

Two weeks ago, I had to leave an online space.


It was an oasis-in-a-desert type of online space. If you’re in a marginalized group, you know exactly the space I am talking about: the kind where it’s a safe haven, a group to contrast the harshness of the rest of the platform. No microaggressions (hopefully), calling in (as opposed to calling out) where it’s warranted (and the concerns actually heard), but most importantly: you get to be yourself.


In this instance, I was able to be Black without worrying about the white gaze; I could be unfiltered without creative code words to talk about my experiences.


Then the cishets ruined my chill. As usual.




As tempted as I am to relay in excruciating detail, I’ll hold my tongue on the specifics. Because honestly, I’ve done this song and dance too many times to not collapse it into one narrative. But one thing stood out to me about all this, is that this space tried.


They specifically noted in their guidelines that anti-queer sentiment was not tolerated. And yet, a post by a trans woman turned ugly real fast when a cisgender heterosexual man commented the usual transphobic notion that trans women might try to trick him into sleeping with them.


And the only people calling him out (and in my case, cussing him out) were other transgender people. The mods stepped in late into the game after the heavy lifting was already done. And after we used the dedicated venting space to, well, vent about this incident, the mods suggested we become mods ourselves.


Months later and that suggestion still bothers me. Because, holy shit, instead of taking out the fucking trash you gotta make your minority in a minority do your dirty work? You couldn’t do your own due diligence, as a mod and self-proclaimed ally, to clean up the mess your peers have made?




Listen.


I’m all for education. I’m all for people getting called out or in. I’m all for spaces that allow growth from being told bluntly or sweetly that you’re wrong, and this is why, and you should stop doing that.


But it’d be nice to let the rest of us know about it, first.


Because if I knew my membership dues were tolerating willful ignorance and sealioning under the guise of Educating Them, I would not have bothered joining.


Because if I knew this space was just going to be a sea of unchecked bigotry that I would have to wade through constantly because the moderators don’t care about the safety and well-being of all of their members, I would have scrolled past.


Because (and this has to be in threes), if you’re so committed to not throwing anyone out of the group, even if they have repeatedly spouted harmful rhetoric, even if they have repeatedly made the space unsafe for some members, then I would have told you to fuck off.




I am a fierce defender of the spaces I call mine.


While I do agree with spaces that are a little forgiving for people that don’t know better (or simply didn’t know), my tolerance tends to be lower than most for two reasons. Both have me occasionally clash with how some spaces are ran:


  • I’ve dealt with too much damn trolling to tolerate that bullshit I’m more aware of common bad faith arguments and derailment techniques… and therefore have no patience for them, and
  • I’m a subscriber to Good is Not Nice. My interpretation is this: I won’t sugar coat my language, and I will certainly cuss your ass out if I get mad enough.


And for my spaces, I run them differently: there is room to grow but the safety of my members is paramount. And if a member is constantly making others unsafe or otherwise jeopardizes their well-being, well. They’ll just have to learn elsewhere.


It crystalizes into my first rule: No one’s safety is worth anyone else’s lessons.


And if a space appears to not adhere to this, I just leave. I fight too many battles as it is. Some, alone, and I don’t want to add another where the tide may be against me.




The last comment I replied to was somesuch bullshit about trans women. At this point he was a broken record of willful ignorance. I’ve lost track of my comments, and how many people have tried talking to him. And there were more like him that wouldn’t be thrown off the island, so to speak.


So I said, simply, “shut up.”


And I left the group.