Yes, I am aware that I still have these automatically post through some bot thing on a Twitter account that I used to actively be on, but I got off of posting personally on that almost two years back now. I have to admit that any time I would use crawling timelines has been put to better use, even if I was doing nothing instead, because at least it means I’m not putting aimless stress on myself from constantly remembering everything wrong in the world.
Long story short, for anyone who’s anti-crypto and especially anti-NFT in particular and is still on Twitter, they might be looking at an alternative microblog thingy unless they plan to remain to spite the enthusiasts, given the blue bird of hell’s new official stance on embracing at least the latter of those things, all probably just looking for more of that sweet shareholder money from people who don’t know what a computer is aside from that thing the secretary uses. I decided to further my own website instead of signing up for another social media. I do hear of Mastodon being an alternative, and apparently it’s decentralized in some way, but not in the way that crypto claims to be while one of its major services goes down and keeps people from looking at links that cost a billion moon rocks or so. Still not sure how they do it, but I wasn’t planning to drop one microblog just to wind up in another. I just wanted out, period.
While having no experience with Mastodon means I can’t exactly help with that, I could at least provide some encouragement to stake a bit of virtual property in the form of a personal website, and depending on the host, either for free, free with ads, or at a cost potentially lower than even holding a virtual land stake in Second Life, which still exists and still isn’t doing anything crypto, so their virtual land is way cheaper than any of those crypto land sellers. Depending on the approach, one might not even need to know any HTML or JavaScript or CSS or whatever it is websites are made with today. Templates and programs can help with that. I’ve just had long experience in messing with code so I just tend to want to do most things myself, and having that option is great, contrasted to a mass market of social media adhering to strict templates that change at the whims of the suits, where one might only be able to change a couple images and a color if they’re lucky.
Funny thing about customization, for the above mentioned Twitter NFT thing, that’s apparently a premium feature, because Twitter just has that now I guess. Clearly the target market here is willing to blow funds on random things so they’re just capitalizing on that. Another paywalled feature on that thing is to change app colors and the displayed icon. Yes, change the color and icon of an app, the theme of which is only visible to the specific user, with a paid thing. Wow, that site sure is stupid. As a bonus, they don’t even get an ad-free experience. And naturally right click save still works on the site, on the rare occasion that someone would actually want to save a copy of a pricey image since those have often been seen as unappealing even without the crypto attachment, and even if Twitter thinks they can disable it, there’s no doubt a way around it. A nice feature of websites in general being effectively built in an open format by default since the start.
Back in the old web mindset, in terms of communication, a static website might not be suited for that. However, it’s also nice to have a public email posted somewhere on that site just in case someone wants to send something over, like a long-form message. Keeping in mind that the public email should be separate from any other emails used for important accounts ideally. In the modern age, there’s usually Discord or something like it to form chat servers and whatnot, since AOL is practically nearly offline at this point, just being some stopgap news spam thing and maybe an email inbox that’s a vestigial property of some larger corporation. Kinda like Yahoo has been after acquiring then eliminating GeoCities long ago, which also for some reason took longer to do in Japan.
Maybe having a personal site isn’t for some people, and I can understand, though I’m pretty biased in favor of it from personal wish fulfillment from childhood I guess. I grew up in the wake of the dot-com bubble when everyone wanted a website and I just found a way to do it that wasn’t just being a kid messing around in a Word document. Being tired of social media timelines in general as well as increasingly dumb UI decisions from templated blog hosts just pushed that forward. I still feel justified in my personal decisions in leaving in favor of wanting a website of my own, however it’s hosted. Yet I still like meeting nice people. And if someone reading this is a nice person who wants to make a website, I’m open to helping with that.