I follow a few aggregated RSS feeds that list posts from personal blogs. I've seen a number of posts about “No Kings” and others supporting the protests that happened across America, but I haven't seen anyone talk about something like this. I've even waited a week before sharing this, but nothing. Even the mainstream media is turning a blind eye.
Here's a video about two Hispanic men, flying the American flag, in America, getting attacked and harassed by protesters flying a different country's flag. How is this not news worthy? How is this not blog worthy? How is this acceptable behavior in American soil?
Things are blowing up between the founders of Micro.blog and omg.lol. Can't say I ever expected something like this to happen to the IndieWeb community, but it has. I'm a bit shocked.
A plea to write.as and other small blogging platforms: stay out of this mess please.
I'm reminded of this post I wrote a year ago. Be careful what you say on the internet folks. You never know who's going to be coming after you. I'm going to go offline now.
Who asked for all these AI bots, apps, APIs, etc... to be developed in the first place? All I can see from my side are:
College graduates are in trouble of landing jobs, because entry-level stuff they are supposed to work on, can now be offloaded to AIs.
Senior level employees on the other hand, are now expected to learn how to use AI, so that they can offload menial tasks to an AI, and work on other stuff. So instead of decreasing the amount of work they have, it actually makes management think they now have more time to work on something else, thereby increasing their workload.
AIs that feed off large datasets are vulnerable to bad data getting into the system.
In a similar vein, there is also the chance that people's PII data or other sensitive data can make it into an AI's dataset.
This age of requiring tolerance for everyone's beliefs is confusing to me. If I'm supposed to tolerate someone else's beliefs, aren't you also supposed to tolerate mine? You know, that part where we say “agree to disagree” and go on our merry way?
But clearly that is not what is happening online nowadays. I say that because as soon as somebody shares their beliefs, if those beliefs happen to be in conflict with what the internet mob believes, then it won't be long before that somebody gets cancelled.
It doesn't really matter whether you are on the left, or right or even in the middle. You say something the folks on the internet don't agree with, you're done. It's an ugly phase to be in, this modern society of ours. Like we cannot even have a difference of opinion.
Everyone is expected to exhibit tolerance for everyone else's beliefs, but hold on, that only applies if those beliefs are acceptable to a group of people who wield the power online.
I have noticed that when I share about Digital Minimalism or avoiding social media for a bit, I hardly get any likes or comments. But when I post photos of my kids, or devices, or products, or even hobbies, or just status updates, I get a noticeable amount of likes and comments. It's like people would rather be distracted than focused. That is the kind of content that they want to see popping up on their feeds; content that distracts them.
The next question to ask then, is why do they want to be distracted all the time?
Might be an unpopular take, but I think cancel culture is a threat to democracy. If a lot of people are afraid of speaking out what's on their mind, because they're worried about getting cancelled, what kind of society do we live in then?
The irony here is that cancel culture came out of internet culture through the use of social media. And wasn't social media supposed to give everyone a voice? With cancel culture being waged online, the only people who have a voice are those on the far right and far left of the political spectrum. What about everyone else in the middle? We have no voice because we're too worried about getting cancelled.
YouTube keeps suggesting certain types of videos to me. They are mostly titled similarly, like “What happens when you do 30 push-ups every day?” Or “I did 100 push-ups a day for 30 days, here's what happened”, etc...
It makes me wonder, what if I do that too?
Well, I'll tell you what will happen.
If you're a regular Joe like me, maybe living a bit of a sedentary lifestyle, you know what I'm talking about, people with a desk job, people who spend time binging on Netflix or YouTube, or people who play too much video games, or people who lose track of time doom scrolling on their phones, people who aren't exactly great examples of what fit and healthy looks like, I'll tell you what will happen... you'll end up with repetitive strain injury.
Stay away from videos like that.
If you're not a healthy person now, but you want to be, start out slow. Pick an exercise that you are interested in, do it for 5 reps, then see how you feel after. If you feel like you could do more next time, then do a little more later in the day, or the next day. The point is, you need to build up your body to be able to handle multiple reps of a certain exercise. You cannot just go all in and force yourself to do 30 push-ups a day just to see what will happen. I'm telling you from experience, you'll get repetitive strain injury. Take it slow and build up from there.
We live in a world where the focus is on “me, me, me”. How is this affecting me? How am I going to benefit from this? But because of that mentality, we start looking down on other people. Especially if what they want is different from what we want. I'm wondering if we should be focusing less on ourselves and more on what we can do to help others?
It doesn't matter if that network is on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Mastodon, Reddit, online forums, etc... If the people who are important to you are not in it, then you'll find that it is not as good as you expect it to be.
This is easy to test too. Just join a social network/platform that is supposedly really good, but make sure it is a network where your important people are not in it. Use it for some time and you'll come to see, it's missing something. That something are your friends and family members who are not part of the network.
So to me, it doesn't matter if people can come up with a better version of Facebook or Twitter or whatever. What matters is if you can convince the important people in my life to to join your new social network/platform. Because at the end of the day, a social network is only as good as the people in it.