Moving Mastodon Hosts

When I decided to setup a Mastodon server, I was expecting a small group of people to join with me. Unfortunately, that didn’t really happen. Now, it’s just me. I like having my own corner of the fediverse, but it gets a bit quiet.

At this point, I’d rather help pay for a community server than pay for a 1-person instance, so I am thinking of winding this one down and moving to more active pastures.

It’s kind of fun. I get look for a new instance that suits me which, in a social media context, is a bit of a new experience.

I will update my links once I make the move!

Content, Creation, Community, and Fear

In looking to to rekindle my passion for online work, I keep thinking about the practical nature of creative work in a modern context. At the moment, I have a nearly null readership. It is not completely null, but it is vanishingly small. This is not a surprise. I have been wholly inconsistent in posting, and the focus of the site has fluctuated wildly as I have struggled to make sense of where I want to go next.

The question I must ask, then, is, “By what metric am I measuring this site? What does success mean to me?”

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An Endless Mire of Critique and Complaint

I had a bit of an epiphany this week. I have been working on developing an approach for more consistent writing. As a part of that process, I’ve been reviewing my sites. As a result, I ended up pulling a couple of posts from Text and Hubris. The posts I pulled were just critiques of web sites or technologies. These posts didn’t really add anything. They were more my piling on. I pulled them because I don’t want to do that. I have talked about this before, but it is so easy to slip into a bad habit of critique and complaint in online spaces. That critique isn’t needed here. It isn’t what I want to talk about.

I feel a bit like Dante (the poet, not the Devil Hunter). Somewhere along the way, I got lost in a dark wood. The passion I had for things got caught up in a variety of echo chambers: a purgatory of sorts to keep the metaphor going. A parade of the damned filled with online posts and voices screaming at me to like this and not that. It got to me. I stopped writing for the most part. It also sapped a lot of the joy I had for the things I love. That I allowed that to happen, is so absolutely stupid.

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Affordances and Constraints

I like Hugo as a blogging engine. It works well for me, now that I have a non-dysfunctional editing workflow in place. However, one of Hugo’s strengths is also my weakness: there are often multiple ways to do something based on what I want the final result to be. This is great because it gives me options when I want to do something a little different. It’s not-so-great when I just want to fix a tiny typo, but realize one update didn’t fix it because I was trying to be “fancy.”

Dialogues between Imaginaries

Early imaginaries in Internet culture often reflected a sort of liberatory, quasi-libertarian, ideal. The idea that computers and the Internet could be used to empower individuals outside of a reliance on governments or corporations. We see this reflected in many of the early manifestos and rants against government engagement and involvement in these nascent spaces. These ideas reflect the severe disconnect between those engaged in this space in the 1980s and 1990s and the rest of the world.

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