Olives @olives@qoto.org

It's fascinating how "non toxic" can be co-opted by what are essentially narcissists.

Email addresses are a form of PII which people casually collect all the time, even though they often don't really need to. I'd like to do things differently here.

I don't really want to be collecting lots of PII either.

Email subscriptions are one possible option but it would take a fair bit more complexity, particularly to reduce the probability of a mail provider deciding to just toss the thing in spam. Would readers regularly check emails?

I'd like to have a fairly simple way for someone to subscribe to it (let's hope this doesn't mean federating it, lol).

One of the problems I always ran into when trying to keep up with a few blogs was having to check in on it every day or every week. I prefer to just have the updates flow in as they're made. I figure that others would be similar.

One option might be something like RSS (I'm curious how many folks use things like RSS readers, this is usually a feature which is in demand when someone is building sites). Are there other things which someone might also want?

I'm thinking that if I'm going to target a wider audience (other than just a few developers), then I might have to do something more than just bare minimum theming (even if there is a minimalistic appeal to it).

Then again, quite a few more mainstream themes have been moving towards minimalism these days.

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.