busybee fluffy rambles

So, there’s an issue with Isso which will require a bit of refactoring/feature work on Isso, which I’d might as well try to do since I can’t be the only one who needs to decouple their thread IDs from their URLs.

Anyway, this’ll probably mean that I’ll have to redo the comment import at some point, so don’t get too attached to anything you’ve posted so far.

Update: Rather than doing the right thing for now I’ve opted to just use the shortlink as the identifier. This means that future site migrations will be more painful, and also I need to do some more work to migrate in the old comments from older entries, but I guess the idea of a single universal migration path is a bit silly anyway.

So, Disqus has served me pretty well for quickly embedding comments into my website, but there are a few pretty big downsides to it:

• No support for private/hidden threads
• No way to disable random discovery of hidden threads, by design
• They’re trying to make the whole Internet into their own forum rather than providing “just” a comment system (not that anyone even uses it the way they intend)
• Their UX keeps getting more and more cumbersome and annoying

I’m going to look into alternative comment systems, ideally ones I can self-host. Isso looks promising, if a bit sparse. So does Schnack. (I’m going to try Isso first because its setup/requirements are far less onerous.)

Anyway, thanks Passerine for bringing the privacy leak issue to my attention. I figured there was probably something like that lurking in the shadows, but I didn’t think it was quite so close to the surface…

I forgot to mention it here, but I’m going to be in Madison, WI for Song Fight! Live this weekend! I’ll be performing my set sometime Friday night, and will also (probably) be playing drums for one or two other acts throughout the weekend, and (hopefully) debuting a new song (yet to be written, as I do not yet know the title) on Saturday!

Anyway if you’re in or near Madison and can make it to The Rigby and want to watch me flail in front of a crowd, now’s your chance.

(We’ll also try to have a live stream although right now there’s some logistics to work out on that front, so no guarantees.)

Anyway I’ll also be in Madison until Tuesday and don’t currently have plans for Sunday or Monday, so if I know anyone in the area it’d be fun to meet up and do something I guess? I mean, assuming I don’t get murdered for my anti-Trump song.

So, my Mastodon instance of choice is having notification/sending/receiving issues again, and rather than doing what I usually do in this circumstance (temporarily switch back to mastodon.social or see what other instances I’ve been on are still around – spoiler: very few of them) I decided to just go without instant-update social networking for most of the day.

But then I still needed that little dopamine rush, and so I decided to try Twitter again (at least, more than my usual “post some stuff and maybe check my notifications” tendencies), and friends, let me tell you… Twitter is awful.

I’d forgotten just how much of a hellhole of advertising, “engagement”-optimizing, outrage-inducing chatter it is.

On the plus side, a lot of people seem to really enjoy the anti-ads I’ve been running for a few weeks (for $1 a day). I think I’ll expand that out into other subject areas.

But what’s even better is just getting unaddicted to commercial social media. Yikes.

Today I discovered, quite by accident, that Safari will happily 😀 italicize emoji. 😆 😆 😆

I wonder if it’ll also boldface 😙 it…

Although strikeout 💔 wouldn’t surprise me at all.

Edit: It doesn’t seem to happen on every browser. Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like on Safari on macOS 10.13:

Over on IndieWeb Chat, Kevin Marks linked to this wonderful essay about social media that is absolutely worth reading, and examines a part of the “personal social networking” thing I’ve been on a kick about lately but didn’t quite have the words for.

For me, a big part of the problem with social media as it stands today is that everything’s about fast, immediate, in-the-moment dissemination of Hot Takes and viral propagation and so on, and that’s a design that so many of the other indie-focused social networks are trying to replicate. I’m not much a fan of microblogging or protocols which exist to make it the norm (which is why I’m still not particularly interested in supporting ActivityPub natively in Publ!) and I like being able to take some time to expand on my thoughts and not have to chunk things up into 280-to-500-character chunks and worry about fixing my spelling and grammar and phrasing right then and there.

I like being able to sit on things for a few days, and add addendums without it being a whole new post, and I like having feedback come slowly and measured. Yes, I get quick replies and a variety of favorites-like reactions via Webmention and other things, and I do appreciate that in this little nichey corner of the web this is a way that people can interact with me, but I’m not really writing for an audience so much as writing for me and my friends, and hoping that the things I write also maybe resonate with folks who happen to read it.

I still use Twitter and Tumblr and Mastodon quite a lot (much more than I’d like, really) but that’s not how I prefer to interact with folks. I don’t even try to read everything that people post there, and I have no idea how anyone can think of timeline-oriented streams-of-updates services as a place where you’re going to be able to. I just occasionally glance at them to see what’s going on and maybe interact with others in the moment, and spend much more time wondering why the hell I even bother trying to communicate in that way beyond “it’s how everyone else communicates today.”

My big concern about my blogging habits here is that I’m mostly talking about the platform itself. Blogging about blogging is so dreary. Hopefully soon the new-toy shininess will wear off and I’ll get back to using this as a means of talking to my friends about other stuff. I certainly have a lot of other stuff coming down the pike, at least. Hopefully some of it turns out well.

I guess it’s mostly just that what I have to write about is what I’m working on, and this is (mostly) what I’m working on. If I were working on other things they’d be getting posted to other parts of my site.

Not-unrelatedly, I really want to get back into making comics.

I finally have private posts working in Publ. This is just a test; in particular this post should only appear to people who are not logged in, and should disappear as soon as they do.

Think of it as the sound of one hand yapping.