Before 2006 we talked about social networks. it’s only with Twitter, Facebook and Instagram that the idea of social media emerged. With it came a golden age of online communities where Facebook was for Uni students to keep in contact with each other, Twitter was to microblog about project progress and more, and instagram was a place to share images taken during the daily commute to work, sporting ativities and more.
Yesterday Facebook, discguised as meta, and Meta, disguised as Instagram launched Threads. Threads is meant to be a twitter competitor. The paradox is that Facebook has always been a twitter competitor, and this has become more evident with every iteration of both social networks. It is paradoxical that Facebook would need threads, to compete with Twitter.
Not Available in Europe Threads, at the time of writing this blog post is not available in Europe because it requires data, which brings it in breach of GDPR rules.
Over a period of a few days I have turned my WordPress blog into a fediverse instance. The process took some trial and error. In the end it was quit easy and there are three steps.
Step One: Have a WordPress Instance The first step is to have a WordPress blog/CMS. You can start with an existing website, that you are willing to have on the fediverse, or you can install the WordPress CMS in another director and use that as a dedicated Fediverse CMS.
With Hugo you can generate entire websites within milliseconds if they’re small and seconds if they’re large. Within a very short amount of time thousands of pages are generated. If you went through and checked each page then this could take hours, or even weeks, depending on the size of the site. To save time Hugo does have a command to check for html in Markdown in seconds. The next step is to see the title of the markdown pages with an issue and fix them individually.
Since 2006 I have been using Twitter every single day for several hours a day, reading up to ten thousand posts per day. Every time it failed I would know about it. Weeks ago I decided to stop using Twitter, so when it fails I read about it in articles. I am happy that I took a break from Twitter because if I was still thinking of it as a serious tool, I would feel heart break every time it failed.
Two days ago I watched Nanook of the North, a documentary about an Inuit man and his family. This isn’t a documentary in the conventional sense. This documentary dates back to 1922 when the Documentary film was a brand new genre. This is one of the first documentaries, if not the first. I read about it for years, until, when I was watching Northern Exposure I did a search and came across the documentary on Filmin.
Years ago we heard that Facebook was a silo. What was meant by this term is that FaceBook would pull content into its social network and behave like a portal, without allowing people to leave. It encouraged people to see the World Wide Web as Facebook and nothing else. For a while it worked.
Zynga and The Death of Conversation When FB was young, and vibrant it was a network of friends having a chat, until Zynga came along.
One of the pleasures we would enjoy many years ago was to browse YouTube, and eventually find something worth watching. This was possible for one key reason. There were no ads being loaded that would block us for thirty seconds or more. Today I read that YouTube test threatens to block viewers if they continue using ad blockers. YouTube video surfing and channel surfing are the same thing. You hop from channel to channel, or from video to video, until you find something to watch.
Transitioning from WordPress to Hugo Transitioning from WordPress to Hugo is tempting because I don’t need an entire CMS for what I’m doing. What I need is a centralised system that checks for tags, titles and the theme, and updates the navigation as I add new pages. You don’t need a CMS for that.
The Good Old Days If you go through the meta data for many of my static pages you will see that they were created with dreamweaver, frontpage 2000 and other solutions.
For a few days I have been watching a few documentary series on Netflix. Big Timber is one of them. Usually I like nature that is untouched. I like to see trees that are standing tall and proud, not on their sides, ready to be chopped up into wood for housing.
It is because I like to see living trees that I started watching the series, and then gave up.