I’ve always viewed myself as something of a good writer over the years. It’s up for debate whether that is objectively true, though! One of my favourite pastimes is to actively embrace new writing tools in the hopes that they will help elevate my writing, whether it be through embracing the use of Markdown syntax or just providing a smooth publishing platform for my writing pieces. I’ve played around with Blogger, WordPress, Ghost, Hugo, Jekyll and Octopress, among many others, and most recently I decided to give WriteFreely a try.
This is just a quick post to give some brief thoughts on my experience using Mastodon and Pleroma. Hopefully, anyone who stumbles on this and is a Twitter user might learn something new and move over to one of these federated platforms.
With 2021 slowly going by, I’ve tried to keep myself busy by experimenting with new things. And one of those experiments has been with the fediverse. This meant that I’d need to try my hand at self-hosting on a VPS, something I’m not proficient in at all.
2020 has made me realize that I have a book hoarding problem. My shelves are groaning under the weight of accumulated books and pages and words of literature. And no matter how much I dedicate myself to reading, the pile never seems to get any smaller.
It’s been a while since I last managed to get out a video and podcast as part of our Miskatonic Alumni Association side-project, but your patience is rewarded as today sees the release of the latest video discussion.
Recently, on Mastodon someone posted a link to a blog post by Aaron Parecki that dealt with how he left Facebook. Taken into consideration along with the recent WhatsApp privacy debacle, I thought that 2021 was the perfect time for me to finally make the break from Facebook and its services. In this post, I want to go through the why and the how of my exodus from Facebook and the services it owns.
I don’t buy much music these days, hardly anyone does it seems. But I’ve always made an exception for Tool. From the day I bought their album, Lateralus, I’ve never missed a release. Their packaging and design have always been top-notch. Their latest release, 2019’s Fear Inoculum, carried on that tradition of excellence with a multimedia experience on a small screen that was built into the CD packaging that would play a video to accompany the album’s tracks.
Despite having been stuck at home during the past year with COVID-19 restrictions in place, my gaming backlog stayed on pause. Simply because my gaming PC and PS4 are 12000 km away from me, which makes them quite hard to use! But as time passed on, I needed something to occupy my free time and help me to keep a sane mind. Enter, the Nintendo Switch.
Back when I was living in South Africa I was an avid user of twitter. The idea of short form messages and being able to follow friends and sites without all the cruft of Facebook was appealing. Twitter at that stage was also still very much in its infancy and wasn’t the hive of bots and politics that it is today. So I closed my account years ago and didn’t miss it at all. The along came Mastodon, an open source and federated alternative to Twitter. And I was hooked.
With more time on my hands due to being between jobs and having to stay at home due to lockdown restrictions in my country, it’s been a good time for me to shift focus to some of my other interests that I’ve sorely neglected. And one of my passions that I’ve sorely neglected until now has been my writing.