Well the microblogging world has been through some turbulent times in the last couple of months.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
First we had Space Karen buying the Twitter for $44bn, only to see it lose half of that value in record time. Then he said he was pro free speech and started letting racists, fascists, and other nutcases who had been banned back on to the site. Then he banned people who were reporting on his wealth and his movements because he didn’t mean he was in favour of that kind of free speech. Then he fired the majority of his technical staff and all of the staff who had been employed to look after values and legal things and slowly the wheels started falling off the Twitter like it was some kind of global parody of an information technology-based clown car. Then Space Karen started pushing adverts down the throats of Twitter users (which, in a way, is really fair because the site doesn’t run on fresh air and he’s got interest payments to make on that $44bn that he borrowed but which the site is no longer worth and he also needs some money to pay the day to day bills). Then he restricted the ability of users to see tweets which included those same adverts so huh. Something else happened but I’ve forgotten what it was, give me a moment and I’ll remember it soon. Oh yeah, I’ve remembered. It’s reported that he’s not been paying bills on time for things like hosting and offices which is really sad. I’m sure he’ll get around to that sometime. Oh yeah, another thing. There’s the verified user checkmark screwup where actual people who had been given verified user checkmarks under the old ownership had those verified user checkmarks revoked. And then it was announced that anyone *anyone!* could just buy a verified user checkmark and pretend they were whoever they thought it would be really cool to be today. So US drug corp Eli Lilley announced that insulin would be free from now on and their share price plummeted but insulin users in the US thought that was a really good thing to do. Except it wasn’t Eli Lilley, it was some hokey clown who bought a verified user checkmark. I’m sure there’s more but that’ll do for now. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then the guy who invented the Twitter (and who made $44bn out of it) launched BlueSky which is a kind of… well, a kind of Twitter really. It’s in Beta right now and operating on an invitation only basis while they get the bugs out of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then Zuckerberg started his own kind of Twitter called Threads (except it’s not available in the EU because it doesn’t comply with EU GDPR. I’m sure they’ll get around to fixing that. Maybe).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the meantime, chuntering along quietly in the background are a bunch of other microblogging services, the most prominent of which is Mastodon which seems to be just ticking along very nicely thank you, and not harvesting or selling anyone’s data (which is more than can be said for *any* of the other microblogging services above).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It occurred to me the other day that the way forward from all this chaos and pandemonium would probably be to step away from microblogging and go over to actual blogging. Several new blogging platforms have become quite big lately. Substack is probably the biggest of the new kids. One of my former fellow bloggers has just moved in over there. There is a free version of Substack, but the bells and whistles version costs money to read. The weird thing is it operates like a kind of RSS-based blogging platform with a mailer for new content notification.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Gosh. If only people had thought of using this kind of technology on a free-to-use basis?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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