Olives @olives@qoto.org

One proposal someone gave me was to have a very simple blog with a very minimalistic theme. Would you prefer that? Or something more complex?

While I figure out what to do about blogs (this is going to take a bit of research and experimenting), I'm also taking a few steps towards supplementing the science post.

I've seen questions like... Is there an #anime instance? The answer is generally... No.

Users tend to be spread across a large number of instances and they might have a similar interest.

I looked into one instance which *marketed* itself as one and as ironically "non toxic" ("urusai"), and I saw high school bully type posts from *the admin* attacking large swathes of the community and sowing discord.

At other times, there would be a few other users from this community engaging in *concern trolling* on tags. This instance tends to be buds ("our sister instance") with the instance ("sakurajima"), less overtly trollish but if you dig into it, you can still find it, and I tend to lump them in together.

When someone claims that Bluesky is permissive (their definition appears to be that they don't censor the word "cisgender"), or that they will adopt federation, the only thing I can say is that I will believe it when I see it.

The instance known as hachyderm is also known to shield Facebook shills (who even work for a Facebook executive by the name of Stamos) who are quite literally just there to denigrate the fediverse and stir up trouble.

They don't merely host them. They shield them.

hachyderm feels like an attempt by a British company to colonize the fediverse (and one of their initiatives where they try to put themselves in a position of control further points to that).

I generally don't comment on these because I'm not that interested in internet drama and all that hubbub but I figured it might be worth knowing about them.

Even with the fediverse, there are a few instances to be cautious of.

One is hachyderm which is run by a British company. It's an instance which engages in petty drama and I would caution someone against using it. It has a veneer of professionalism which might make it appealing to a few.

Another one is universeodon which appears to have been bought out (or something) by a British admin. Petty drama, petty admin drama. Once again, I would caution someone against using it.

.world appears to be a petty censorship instance.

.art is run by a British admin. It is notorious for drama.

There are probably more, but these are ones which immediately come to mind, and they are also ones which someone might overlook as being bad.

The bigger issue that people complain about is that Bluesky moderation can be trigger happy.

https://9to5mac.com/2024/10/25/bluesky-paid-subscription/ People see this as kind of the smoking gun but it isn't surprising that a platform would want some way to make money.

Maybe, for privacy, I could add an option to read my blog via a .onion or something.

Maybe, host in the U.S. It's a nice central location between Asia and Europe, I don't know how good the infrastructure between Asia and Europe is. Also, it's cheap.

Maybe, both, if it goes well, upgrade to a TLD.

Am I going to bother to buy a TLD or will I just cheap out for the experiment.

It's not surprising that someone decided to shutdown what appears to be their bot gimmick / toy instance.

It appears to have started off as someone's simple C wrapper for rendering webpages and ended up being used for a lot more by a lot more people. This is why so many functions look like they have been plucked right out of C.

PHP is short for Personal Home Page. This acronym came off as a bit weak though, so they ended up saying that it means PHP Hypertext Preprocessor later on.

Also, from what I remember, PHP is an ultra specialized programming language which is only good for rendering simple web pages. Once you start adding additional functionality, it doesn't stack up very well.

There are quite a few potential blogging options, so I might play around with a few to figure out what might fit better.

I'm not going to use Wordpress. I'm honestly tired of Wordpress.

I don't really want to be troubleshooting (or writing extensions for) 20 year old PHP legacy code. I'd like to play with something which uses a more modern stack than that.

Even for something hosted, after the parent company bought Tumblr for a low price, they've been doing a poor job of moderation, still being censorious. Plus, I'd like to play with something more modern and fresh, it doesn't have to be something hot off the press, but not the same thing from twenty years ago.