❝ This moment isn’t about decentralization Notes

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Quoted: This moment isn’t about decentralization

The core need being expressed by millions of users isn’t “get me a decentralized protocol that nobody owns where I can have my choice of algorithms and apps”. It’s “get me a platform that works consistently, with less abuse”. Sometimes it’s also appended with, “where I can build a following for me / my brand / my employer and measure my progress.”

[…]

Many of us have been wanting decentralized social networking for a long time — I’ve been a part of these conversations for around twenty years. It’s tempting to feel like people finally get it. But that’s a trap and a mistake. As always, quite rightly, most people want something that works for them.

Reminder that Usenet has been around since the 80s and was a toxic hellhole even then. Decentralization isn’t the answer to social media problems, it’s just an implementation detail.

Or, as I keep on saying: The problem with Twitter isn’t that it’s centralized, but that it’s Twitter.

The cycle fluffy rambles

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For the last few months I’ve been feeling restless to be doing not-much throughout the day, so I’ve been actively looking for a job. No bites have been occurring. So instead I’ve been working hard on new projects, like the VRChat avatar stuff and also redesigning my website (which I’m close to being able to roll out, incidentally).

But then it turns out that doing work makes my chronic pain flare up again, and now I’m in agony again.

So, I guess I need to find something that makes me feel satisfied with my day (and ideally brings in some amount of income) without being something that my body just absolutely rejects. But what could that possibly be? The stuff I’m good at and the stuff I enjoy doing is stuff that physically hurts to do.

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Become critter! fluffy rambles

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So whatever happened to my VRChat avatar project?

Well, it went really well, so well that I decided to make it a purchasable base model. You can get it for as low as $25 (with a suggested minimum of $30). It also comes with extensive documentation about how to add more materials and I feel like my setup for material swapping is really well-designed and makes things much easier than I’ve seen on other avatars. So it’s probably worth buying just for that alone!

At some point I’ll probably start putting some VRChat documentation onto this site (including the material-swap guide and an explanation of how I set my system up since it’s pretty easy to apply to other avatars and makes life much, much easier). But I kind of want to do some site layout refreshing first. And I need to figure out which section of the site is best suited for it. So, quick poll, what makes the most sense?

Texturing guide Critter!

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So you’ve adopted and/or become a critter and want to fulfill the obligation of being as many colors and patterns and materials as you can imagine. You have made an excellent choice! Here is how I do that stuff, myself. There might be better ways of doing it (there’s definitely a lot of things which feel like they could be automated, at the very least). If you find any improvements to this semi-annoying process, please let me know!

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Monitoring my feed reader fluffy rambles

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Every time I get hyperfixated on a thing, I end up doing it at the expense of all else. Right now my hyperfocus is on working on making a sellable version of my VRChat avatar (which is almost ready!)

But I needed a break, so I checked my feed reader, and realized, oh wow, I haven’t checked my feed reader in a few days. Oops.

So anyway, I did what any good nerd would do, and gave myself some alerting and monitoring to track my feed stats.

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