gru:Bz
Average millennial living life on the edge (of the Midwest). Probably too immature for Micro.blog but I like it here.
Notes
Indie web escapism
Back in 2016 I didn’t have this community. I had Twitter and I think Tumblr? And definitely Facebook.
Facebook is already a shitshow. People fighting and ending lifetime friendships, a few Trump supporters being schooled on what tariffs actually are even though it’s a little too late now.
I’m glad I have a nice place to go and escape the noise and general insanity of the impending fascist regime, even if I am coming here to bitch about it.
I don’t know most of you very well but I’m glad we’re all here.
USPol: Election woes
Take two: giving Kagi another shot
We need each other
People, I mean.
I’ve always considered myself a bit of a loner. Definitely an introvert; I love hanging out with friends but I love coming home and decompressing while watching some TV or spinning a few records even more. My nights of staying at the bar until 2am and passing out at a buddy’s house are long behind me.
Recurring Strangers
Mini rant about Meta, staying in touch
It’s annoying that Facebook is the only way for anyone to get in touch with extended family or old friends. Idk of any other platform where literally everyone has an account.
I log into the mobile web version every few weeks and it notifies me of new messages but then it makes me install Messenger to even see who it was. Then I catch up, uninstall it and reinstall it in another month or so.
I wish there was a less shitty platform for staying in touch. Or at least some kind of open protocol that can talk to stuff like Messenger but isn’t tied to any single huge mega corporation.
Warm take on federated social media
The stuff you’ve already heard a million times
Mastodon is a decentralized social network, meaning anyone can download it and run their own instance. Each instance can federate with each other, so it still feels like one massive social network. The benefit is that there’s no single point of failure, but that’s only relative to the entire Fediverse. People recommend joining the smallest instances or running your own because it’s better for decentralization - and it is. If you’re on a server with 15 other people and it gets wiped off the face of the internet for whatever reason, only you and 14 other people are affected. If Twitter goes down, everyone with an account is affected.
Putting yourself out there: on self doubt, persistence
What makes WP Engine different from Bluehost?
This might sound dumb but I don’t get the difference between something like WP Engine and other hosts that specialize in Wordpress, like Bluehost which literally refers to itself as a Wordpress Hosting Platform and Dreamhost, both of which are recommended by Automattic?
I get that they have “WP” in their name; that makes sense for being easily mistakable for an official part of Wordpress, but the revision history thing just doesn’t seem like it’s as big a deal as Mullenweg is making it out to be. I know he criticized them for not contributing enough to Wordpress.org development but isn’t that kind of arbitrary? Like what is enough?
I do think being owned by a private equity firm is a little greasy for a company that offers hosting for open source software but Bluehost is owned by one too.
Is it just a matter of how big they are? Is it just a personal thing between two rich guys? I feel like it’s probably that.
What's valuable to you?
I was just reading this Reddit thread about a blogging platform that launched a few years ago. It's grown into a successful space with a thriving community by now, but the comments were kind of cracking me up.
The #1 thing people were focused on back then was how to monetize it.
There's no built-in advertising options and it's really not even set up to run something like Google ads. SEO, maximizing engagement and clicks are not baked in. It's simply a place where indie bloggers can go to share their stories and hang out with other bloggers.
Why even come out if you're bi or pan?
Seasonal euphoria
Progress in the middle of nowhere, Ohio
I just re-watched this old video of someone driving around filming my hometown with a camcorder in the 80's. It's unbelievable how much it's changed even since the first time I watched it a decade ago.
I want to record my own.
Intel and a few other big tech companies are setting up shop about 15 miles down the road and they project 1,000,000+ people moving to central Ohio in the next few years. We're one of those towns just outside of the city and they're already expanding highways and announcing plans to build a big downtown area. Things are about to drastically change.
Imagine recording a tape of this little town no one's ever heard of, saving it for 30 years and finally pulling it out of an old broken down box in the basement so you can upload it to YouTube. Time goes by so fast, next thing you know we'll blink and it'll be 2050. I'll scroll through miles of photos and videos in my iCloud drive, find the one I recorded 2024 and marvel at how different things were back then.
The saddest advice I've ever gotten
Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom
The Bravery of Being Out of Range
Reading about the invasion of Lebanon today immediately made me hear Roger Waters' The Bravery of Being Out of Range in the back of my mind:
Hey bartender - over here! Two more shots and two more beers. Sir, turn up the TV sound, the war has started on the ground! Just love those laser-guided bombs, they’re really great at righting wrongs. You hit the target and win the game, from bars 3,000 miles away
The whole record Amused to Death paints a perfect picture of the Western world constantly fueling the war machine while we’re all amusing ourselves to death from the safety of our homes. And that was in ‘92; now we have a whole computer in our pocket so we can tune out from reality whenever we want, or maybe tune in to some war every now and again to see which team has scored the most points so far.
I broke up with my weed dealer
Okay I'm finally using Bear
A rant about Facebook
My experience on Vanilla OS so far
A lot of people assume Linux users are all hackers or at least have some background in programming. I do not. I’m part of the other demographic - the people who grew up poor and started using it to revive obsolete hardware.
I know enough shell scripting and other terminal stuff to (usually) get by if I break something, but I’m too dumb to use a distro like NixOS. I actually prefer using the commandline to add and remove programs and do little system maintenance things but I’ve never built my own version of Linux or even compiled anything.