Thanks for the welcome, #@freemo Here's my #introduction .
I'm...
• a dad of a handful of kiddos, married, living in Colorado.
• a Christian in the Anglican tradition, and suppose I'm an unaffiliated conservatarian.
• a reader, working through the great novels as well as easier/fun books and nonfiction.
• a card and board game player and am happily teaching more to my kids as they get older.
• short on free time. I enjoy a philosophical pipe as I read and/or reflect, and occasionally get my guitar or bow/arrows out to learn new skills.
• a software developer... and have been for a very long time, now in the world of APIs and cloud development (CRM/SFDC).
More on my experience and thoughts on the web than seemed helpful to put into my #introduction
When reading Ready Player One I realized that my first programming was as a kid editing programs on a TRS-80 (or something similar). First among our friends to have a desktop at home where we'd dial into our local #BBS to play games, chat, and message with people from around the world, back when it didn't seem so creepy when you'd be asked "a/s/l" regularly.
Later with the Internet I wondered why companies were buying up and shutting down services like WBS and Geocities, and was sad that what we had left was corporately driven social media mega sites.
I've been doing software development for decades, professionally since my first year of undergrad where I studied #linguistics; but I think my real work is problem solving to make people's lives easier/better, software is just the tool I'm skilled with to do that.
I chose the QOTO instance because the rules seem open and free and friendly, the way the web should be... and because of the idea of helping bridge the gap and bring people of supposed opposite sides together to connect rather than be polarizing.
More on my experience and thoughts on the web than seemed helpful to put into my #introduction
@SecondJon Excellent post, I just visited your profile and liked very much the points you made.
We differ in political views, but agree that it's no reason for conflict and name calling. The division and polarization we observe spreading around in many countries will only make things more difficult.
I am also a BBS user, started up with local scene and Fidonet back in the early 90's.
Internet access was only for academic or large corporate sites. Most people had no idea it existed, never mind what it could be used for.
Glad you found Qoto, I think it's an excellent place too.
More on my experience and thoughts on the web than seemed helpful to put into my #introduction
@SecondJon Don't know if you have seen my post about this, but it's an excellent article and you might enjoy reading.
https://medium.com/matter/the-web-we-have-to-save-2eb1fe15a426
More on my experience and thoughts on the web than seemed helpful to put into my #introduction
@design_RG
Fantastic article that highlights a lot of reasons we need to save....or bring back that web. But how do we go about doing that?
I suppose for me, it's about personally avoiding the corporate web. I talk to friends about mastodon like I used to about my BBS. I get the same strange looks but occasionally someone is interested or knows someone who is connected.
I haven't publicly blogged in ages. Even my family blog, behind authentication, that I post to with family updates doesn't get any views from family because it's not posted within Facebook.
More on my experience and thoughts on the web than seemed helpful to put into my #introduction
@SecondJon Ah, I am glad you enjoyed the article too. I thought it was wonderful.
True that people are getting used to the no-effort, feed me, TV style stream of data scrolling on their screen.
Years ago I decided that a Forum was something that would benefit our local cycling club, which only communicated one-way, via a mailing list to the membership. Which also did not accept or publish letters to the editor, as I suggested, they were comfortable in controlling the channel and the message unopposed.
I found a free Forum hosting service, creted one and did not only the admin and moderation for it, but created a lot of content to attract the users.
Many of them had not used Forums before, not a problem if people are willing to put the effort to learn.
But they were already more or less into Facebook, and had trouble understanding things in the forum - organized into threads, by topic, placed in proper sub-forums, etc.
Result is it didn't catch on, and I gave up filling it up with new content and not getting replies, comments or participation.
I have thought of creating a blog for some time, love writing and it's a nice way to organize information that I am interested in. But the lack of comment or any user interaction in many blogs is disheartening. I feel sorry seeing that, how discouraging it must be for the author and publisher.
The fact these new instances and networks are available is wonderful, there are many new possibilities.
I am really excited and putting in long hours reading, posting, learning, sleep be damned. 😜