cih's recent activity

  1. Comment on Image hosts of choice? in ~tech

    cih
    Link
    I use some.pics. It's not free (it's part of omg.lol's web apps).

    I use some.pics. It's not free (it's part of omg.lol's web apps).

    3 votes

  2. Comment on Why the internet is getting worse, an interview with Cory Doctorow in ~tech

    cih
    Link Parent
    I've been there before. I deleted my Facebook and Twitter in 2018, many contacts were lost. It took 3 years for me to reconnect with many people. And that reconnection occured on Instagram. It's...

    I've been there before. I deleted my Facebook and Twitter in 2018, many contacts were lost. It took 3 years for me to reconnect with many people. And that reconnection occured on Instagram. It's not just friends, professional contacts, etc. You can't move thousands of followers somewhere else, they are all locked in. It took me years to accumulate that many people; they are important because they amplify my work. I also did copywriting with a focus on digital marketing for a decade in another life, so I'm not a stranger to all of this.

    3 votes

  3. Comment on Why the internet is getting worse, an interview with Cory Doctorow in ~tech

    cih
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    I'm a photographer. Everyone is on it: other photographers, photo editors, curators, gallery owners, collectors... I do have emails of most people but also many magazines and newspapers still make...

    I'm a photographer. Everyone is on it: other photographers, photo editors, curators, gallery owners, collectors... I do have emails of most people but also many magazines and newspapers still make initial contact on it. It's basically the inbox of my industry.

    15 votes

  4. Comment on Why the internet is getting worse, an interview with Cory Doctorow in ~tech

    cih
    Link
    It was a good read, thank you. But I think I'm having enshittification fatigue. Everything is going even worse and there is no way for me to stop it. As someone who depends on Instagram both...

    It was a good read, thank you. But I think I'm having enshittification fatigue. Everything is going even worse and there is no way for me to stop it. As someone who depends on Instagram both professionally and socially (I'm serious, there is no way out of it for me), all of this leaves me helpless and frustrated.

    30 votes

  5. The social web is in a transition period

    ~tech Ask
    Have you been visiting just too many different social media platforms lately, checking them out to see what the deal is? Well, same here. It feels like I've been a guest every night in different...

    Have you been visiting just too many different social media platforms lately, checking them out to see what the deal is? Well, same here. It feels like I've been a guest every night in different houses for the past month and I must say: I am exhausted.

    But it's not over, far from it.

    And I'm here to give you a heads up: we've witnessed platforms dying in the past, I'm guessing most of us have been a part of some sort of digital exodus before but I have a feeling that this one is going to be more painful.

    Mainly because we've created so much data over the years and the majority of it got collected by centralised platforms. There are very few ways to take it with us and move elsewhere, it's all locked in.

    Backing up your data now would also be a good idea, before some CEO comes with up the plan that it should be a paid feature.

    I just want to say that this is all to be expected because the social web is in a transition period, and that golden bookmark doesn't exist yet. However, I think there are some contenders for it. What I want to ask is: where will you go next?

    I've got some ideas, feel free to add your preference if I'm missing anything.

    • Threads: Meta's Twitter clone that will be out some time this summer. It will be a federated (ActivityPub-enabled) platform.
    • Bluesky: Jack Dorsey-backed Twitter clone. This one is also federated but it uses AT Protocol.
    • Mastodon: The Twitter clone. It's got a fairly large userbase now, with lots of instances to choose from.
    • Blog: Maybe it's not a bad idea to set up shop on a platform like Micro.blog (which is ActivityPub-enabled and has got community features built-in) and lead a quiet digital life.
    • Threadiverse: Reddit-alikes.
    39 votes

  6. Comment on I gave Lemmy, Kbin, and Beehaw a chance. I think I'll be sticking with Tildes. in ~tech

    cih
    (edited )
    Link
    Honestly? It's a mess. reddit has turned into a black hole and it will take time for the internet to recover. Those who were able to escape its pull, have now found themselves in the vast space of...

    Honestly? It's a mess. reddit has turned into a black hole and it will take time for the internet to recover.

    Those who were able to escape its pull, have now found themselves in the vast space of nothingness. The threadiverse (meaning, all of these federated and threaded link aggregators) is still in its infancy, and I find it to be rather painful to browse these websites for now. There is simply too much noise. The communities, unsurprisingly, are not there yet.

    I had been a reddit user more than a decade under different usernames, I deleted my last account right before the AMA after poisoning my past contributions with paragraphs of lorem ipsum. I had exactly 20 subreddits in which I participated. I put their RSS feeds into Feedbin and that's how I've been following them for the past week. Not ideal but at least there are no ads.

    That said, I've always felt like a lurker on reddit, I really don't know why. My real internet home is MetaFilter, I've been a member of it for close to 15 years. I find Tildes to be more like MeFi than reddit, both in terms of culture and pace. It's slower and this is a wonderful thing. I hope more people will realise that we don't actually need centralised information highways.

    19 votes