Category: Journal

Amazing how easy it is to reconstruct a social network on a new platform starting with a few well chosen individuals as starting nodes.

Honestly, I wish I understood what Doctorow really means here:

Online, a lot of us have been unhappy with our social media platforms for a long time, but we hang in there, year after year, scandal after scandal, because as much as we hate the platform, we love the people who use the platform. We don’t leave because we don’t want to lose them. They don’t leave because they don’t want to lose us. It’s a hostage situation, and we’re all holding each other hostage. Collective action problems are hard problems.

_ – How to Leave Dying Social Media Platforms | by Cory Doctorow | Oct, 2022 | Medium

He’s right that we’re locked in because the information is available on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Not just friends, but services and news. I’d like to leave, but see no alternative.

Somehow, I think, he wants the services to open to outside syndication. Interoperate with a broad set of platforms. Doctorow broadcasts his work from multiple platforms, but I’m out here on what they call the indie web just writing. I stopped the Twitter and Instagram cross posts. It was a nuisance and just feeds their lock in.

We’ve seen social media platforms die or migrate away from their original audience. Flickr of course comes to mind. Odds are that we’ll just see a new platform emerge, like Instagram did to accommodate photographers who left Flickr for the new style of promotion. Now that Instagram has changed, I haven’t seen where these photographers are going. Not their own websites and to no other platform. It’s just become kind of moribund with fewer interesting photographs to see. Either that or Instagram has decided to fill my feed with posts that are more viral or financially lucrative.

Looking for answers, but see my only recourse as my own site and RSS feeds.

Leica Q2 Monochrom.

I really wish that tricks like tracking usage by putting the Screen Time widget on the iPhone Home Screen would really work. I find that seeing how much time I’ve wasted just depressing.

Better is to set a block of time with a clear creative or administrative purpose in mind. With the phone in another room.

One of the advantages of photography as an artistic practice that it requires engaging with the physical or social environment

It seems that reality consists of waves of probability distributions. While we measure a single value, the observations don’t collapse the wave into a classical single reality. I like the idea that we’re viewing just one possilble reality as we step through time.

The Q2 Monochrom on a rehab walk.

I’m 5 months out from my bike crash and C2 fracture followed by a cervical. Off the bike outdoors, so walking an hour a day became a habit to supplement my indoor bike trainer rides.

Sadly, I wanted to be unburdened by camera, so there a few captures from over the summer. Not sure where this is going, but I’m now looking for full frame subjects as a new project.

Must be getting rehabilitated. Made an image today.

Thanks to Patrick Rhone, I now know that the right WordPress theme will happily create blog posts with no title.

I cleared out some of the decorative clutter from the site

Watched my first cyclocross race. The Charm City Cross Race here in Baltimore’s Druid Hill Park. It was intermittently pouring down rain, so I stayed long enough to get the flavor and see the mud. Looks like fun, but I doubt it’s for me.