Digital Crossroads

Blogging or not? A game caught my attention. A personal letter to Zuck. I like poems. Pixelfed, Pixelfed, Pixelfed! Apple is clever about Severance. I bought a keyboard. And so much more.

When I put an image in the margin of a post I often pause and think about what I want to convey with the image as it relates to the writing that it's next to. In the previous piece the idea was interop. I tried to think of what images I've used in the past, then I thought why don't I just look. I sw...

The Slop Society Meta hasn’t “made a right-wing turn.” It’s been an active arm of the right wing media for nearly a decade, actively empowering noxious demagogues like Alex Jones, allowing him to evade bans and build massive private online groups on the platform to disseminate content. A report from...

On the road to picking up the blog pace, I was tagged by Brian Bennett, and I will preface with the same thing about some dread of doing a blog version of a mail chain letter. But I follow Brian’s blog (old school style) and hey, what better blog topic is there? Why did you […]

I was catching up with some tech news earlier today and I saw the news that Instagram now allows videos up to 3 minutes long. The news is not particularly relevant to me considering I don’t use IG nor particularly interesting because, frankly, who gives a shit. The thing I found the most interesting...

One of my favorite activities is reading blog posts every night on my iPad before I go to sleep. I've got a feed built that contains nothing but different writers I've discovered on the IndieWeb. Here are a few to check out. Subscribe to their feeds and follow them on social media. Beardy Guy Musing...

In the last week we've seen the emergence of the true Meta — and the true Mark Zuckerberg — as the company ended its fact-checking program, claiming that (and I quote) "fact checkers have been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've

The Palisades fire in Los Angeles. Fernando Astasio Avila/Shutterstock As the world has watched the Los Angeles wildfires, seeing the loss and destruction that accompanies environmental disaster, some influencers have seen opportunity. Selfie-seekers have been spotted using the wildfires as a backdr...

What’s going on, Internet? The Blog Question Challenge has been an exciting meta blog challenge that’s been doing the rounds the past couple weeks. As far as I can tell it started over on Ava’s blog as the Bear Blog Question Challenge but has evolved as everyone outside of the Bear Blog and across t...

Sara and Reilly and Jo and now Tracy did them. I enjoyed these questions, and reading those and other fellow bloggers’ answers. They all have things in common, and all have things that are very specifically them. My turn. 1. Why did you make the blog in the first place? In the late 90s I...

I’m now on Bluesky and TheStoryGraph. Bluesky is the new Twitter with everyone seemingly moving there but not really. I want to migrate out of Twitter for some reasons: Two of these do not apply to Bluesky. My user is dzver.bsky.social. I’m not fully committed to the migration but I added Bluesky to...

The app’s greatest innovation will live forever.

The Free Our Feeds project launched a few days, prompted in part by changes to fact checking and content moderation policies across Meta properties, including Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. The goal of Free Our Feeds seems admirable, to prevent one person/entity having full control of a social me...

they said on yet another social media platform Source: The internet is now five websites – Manu Seriously. The least these armchair commenters could do it go create an account on one of the million other websites still out there, building the Internet as it grows. A better step would be to make thei...

It is not the best — or most certain — of times in social and search. Newsrooms have seen steep declines in traffic from Facebook and Twitter as platforms build higher walls to keep users in-app by deprioritizing news and external links. Search has remained “remarkably consistent” even as social has...

a look back at my 2024 explorations of the Fediverse and a preview of what is to come in 2025

Everand is an online audiobook and e-book subscription service by the company Scribd. They have just released their State of Reading Report. There were several key findings: Half of the respondents report reading more this year, with stress relief and relaxation cited as key drivers. While 14% of re...

Speaking of social media and feeds, a new site launched that’s honestly one of the more surreal things I’ve ever seen: Bluesky is an opportunity to shake up the status quo. They have built scaffolding for a new kind of social web. One where we all have more say, choice and control. But it will take ...

Sebastian Vogelsang, the Berlin-based developer of Skeets, an alternative to Bluesky’s official client, is working on a new photo-sharing app called Flashes that is built on the same codebase as Skeets. As reported by Sarah Perez at TechCrunch: When launched, Flashes could tap into growing consumer ...

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images Like the wildfire conditions in Los Angeles County, my For You page on TikTok turned overnight. I woke up last week to a phone screen filled with ravenous flames and video after video of razed homes, businesses, and other structures. Influencers broke f...