Almost A Month of Mastodon: Thumbs Up!

April 28, 2024 ~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

On April 1st I joined Mastodon, eschewing centralized social media networks because I felt like an experiment rather than a participant.

My experience so far has been great. I have some followers, not a lot, and I follow about twice as many as I follow (a good metric, I think). I interact with smart people, some who know more than me, some who know less, but everyone’s pretty polite.

It’s a sharp contrast to the other social networks I’ve been on – it actually reminds me of the good old days of the BBS systems, almost as if a few of us would form a party and go play D&D.

Sure, you have some annoying people now and then, but that’s life.

Centralized Social Networks: Blech.

Being away from the centralized social networks has given me perspective. In hindsight, this is what I saw:

Algorithms seemed to have washed the nutrients from my news feeds, instead pushing polarizing posts and spammy sales messages into my eyeballs. It was like a roundabout of billboards that I couldn’t get off – and what I did add to the networks was either not seen or interacted with.

On Facebook, with 1,250 connections, all of them felt distant, removed – not the flesh and blood people that I met, or the intellectually interesting that I had found. My newsfeed was repulsive.

“Hate Israel! Hate Hamas! Hate Russia! Hate Ukraine! Hate Republicans! Hate Democrats! Hate this one! Hate that one! Buy this! Buy that! Buy THIS AND THAT!”

Man, that’s tiresome. Hate takes a lot of energy and usually requires the suspension of the intellect in and an over-exuberance of negative emotion. I’m just not over-exuberant. To me it all looked like a litter box – and made me come to the understanding that walled gardens become litterbox prisons.

LinkedIn is pretty much a human caterpillar of professional brown-nosing. Everyone’s so worried about what a potential employer might think that they won’t rock the boat. They just want to be seen in a positive light, and so that network has become a beacon of bullshit as everyone’s interviewing and it’s a competition to be the most politically correct while maintaining some facade of professionalism all the time. It’s like being at an interview that never ends. It’s terrible, and oh- by the way – people always want to sell you stuff there too. Nobody cares what you can do, really, and the headhunters are more just about collecting skulls to make their bones. And Microsoft (LinkedIn) is constantly asking you to upgrade your subscription so that it can find you a job you’ll likely be unhappy with – otherwise they wouldn’t make money when you go back on bended knee.

At least in psychiatric wards, they give you drugs so you don’t have to experience the other inmates, and in that regard that’s what I believe social media networks largely do.

Twitter? Never really cared about it because I foresaw the trusted sources issue a year before the company even formed. People got into it for various reasons with no exit strategy, as most of us did with social media networks. TikTok I never got into, I don’t even have an account – it’s bad enough I was handing my likes and habits to Big Tech in the U.S., which because of FISA is a grey area of government – why on Earth would I want to hand more information to another government?

Meanwhile, On Mastodon…

I started off by following hashtags I’m interested in, and interacting with other people. 99% of it has been really good, thoughtful, and sometimes challenging in good ways – new perspectives to explore, new trains of thought to consider, new… well, new! Yet that was just the first week, and like a car, you really don’t know how well things are working until you lose the new car smell.

There’s an intellectual freedom I found there that was lost on other social media networks – the Fediverse has it’s own wonkiness, and there are criticisms of Mastodon by longer time users that I don’t understand yet. That’s fine. Most of the issues I see with people on Mastodon is that they want the same confirmation biases fed that they had fed on centralized social networks.

One person wrote today of the centralized networks, “where friends are frictionless and things are predictable.” That sounds a lot like an echo chamber to me, an algorithmic ant mill. I don’t like watching NASCAR because it’s a boring track, I never would have wanted to drive in NASCAR because it’s a boring track, so doing the intellectual and emotional equivalent seems less than ideal for me.

I interact as I wish – politely, even with people I disagree with, and I have yet to block anyone for being douchebags. All in all, it feels a lot like I want a social network to be.

A few people are worried about ‘reach’ – one person posted that they wanted Dan Gillmore to have as many followers on Twitter, which when I looked was 10,000 or more than he has on Mastodon, and he’s talked about ‘reach’ – but it’s really engagement that’s the way to measure things in social media, and even with that engagement, it’s about the quality of engagement.

Also of interest – I’ve found more quality blogs to follow on WordPress.com on the Fediverse than I have on WordPress.com in unit time.

All in all, I feel that I’ve spent my time better on the Fediverse through Mastodon than any other social network. You’re not swimming against algorithmic flotsam and jetsam.

I’ll be on Mastodon. Links are on both of my sites at the top. If you pop in, say hi, and enjoy the interesting people with the understanding that you don’t have to agree with people – just like in real life – but you can have conversations, sometimes hard ones, respectfully – rather than dodging them in the echo chambers.

Kill The Social Networks.

April 2, 2024 ~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

There was a time when blogs were a big deal. We had our own network of blogs, we had a website called Technorati that ranked them and where we could see who was writing about stuff we were interested in.

The early blogs I found really great. We had people discussing all manner of things, with ‘pingbacks’ between blogs allowing for the crosslinking so even though you didn’t comment on their website, there was a link to the author referred to. WordPress.com does that, and to an extent it still happens in open source blogs, though a few things happened that changed the way things worked.

For example, at the same time, to make their sites more popular, crosslinking was done, and sometimes it was done to such an extent by people who had more marketing than thought that the search engines smacked it down in their search engine results. Search Engine results were important, so that was done more carefully. It was all very cliquish, and in some ways very elitist. Though I knew and even worked with some of the more famous bloggers, they weren’t interested in the content created. They were interested in their own audience, as well they should have been.

For all of the flaws, it wasn’t a bad system. It was decentralized, and the only real limit on content you could find was your ability to find it. Search engines cashed in a bit more because search engines were used a lot more. Nowadays, people are fed pulped fictions with some interesting stuff every now and then.

Social networks showed up and threw everything out the window. When you have centralized networks, you have the centralized ability to shadow ban people on the network, and once it hits critical mass, it becomes arbitrary, with the owner of the network enforcing their own version of what is right or wrong without even a conversation. Facebook does it, Twitter does it, Instagram does it… so the only path to not being shadow banned for something real or imagined is to simply leave the network.

But it doesn’t really end there. Now everyone is training an AI on user data, and no one has control over what user data they train on and how it is used. Chandra Steele writes a bit about how it feels like it’s the end of the shared Internet:

“…This is why the Tumblr and WordPress news [about selling information to AI companies] seems like a heavy blow to a shared internet. It’s taken away the possibility to return to the purer place we came from. PCMag Security Analyst Kim Key reached out to Automattic, which owns both platforms, and the company did not confirm or deny the rumors, though it did direct her to a statement that seems to indicate that if the deal goes through, users will be able to opt out from having their work included in AI training…”
“WordPress Wants to Turn My Old Blog Into an AI Zombie, and It Breaks My Heart“, Chandra Steele, PCMag.com, February 29th, 2024

It’s not the end of the shared Internet at all. Some of us don’t write on PCMag.com, and there are plenty of other options that exist. WordPress.com was just a later website built with open source technology, but before that we had GreyMatter, etc. She mentions 2009 for her blog – I was blogging since 1999. A lot happened in those 10 years.

These technologies still exist. If we want control of our content, we should move off of platforms where we cannot. I’m considering this myself in the context of WordPress.com. I only got here because I was tired of the trouble of maintaining my own sites, but during the time I have used WordPress.com, website hosting has improved to include managed open source content management systems, the open source content management systems themselves have become more easy to maintain and more powerful…

If you feel boxed in, get out of the box. I’m considering options myself since I feel my own trust was betrayed by WordPress.com, and they haven’t really discussed with us what is going on since that bombshell was dropped.

What we need to remember is that we always have options. The only way to effect change is to actually change ourselves. Don’t like a network? Get off it. No one will die.

If you write good content, they’ll find you.

Billionaires Donate to SCEB

April 1, 2024 ~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment

In a strange turn of events, billionaires have decided to donate billions of dollars to the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus through stock options of their company so that they all can avoid taxation and to re-invigorate the ever-failing philanthropic system. This was done at a Philanthropy Reveal Party on April Fool’s Day.

Of course, the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus had to make some concessions for this to happen. They will both be driven by self-driving vehicles, and they will exclusively communicate through social networks. To this end, they will have the user name ‘SCEB’, for ‘Santa Claus & Easter Bunny’, while their full names will have the Easter Bunny preceding it in a personal agreement.

Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, after the release of their sex tape earlier today¹, did a mutual press release about their social networks and interactions with SCEB, stating that children wishing to communicate with SCEB must be paying members of their networks. Bezos has also created a SCEB affiliate store so that the purchases that SCEB makes to fulfill orders allows them to mitigate pricing, while Amazon takes a minimum 30% administrative fee.

The bad news hidden in this is that all of their former employees are now competing for your jobs. Expect assorted creatures on LinkedIn. SCEB’s press release stated that they would be giving recommendations for all their former employees and would not gift the children of employers who do not hire their former employees.

An Associated Press journalist was banned for asking how a bunny can lay eggs, and Reuters was physically thrown out of the building for questioning whether the coal Santa Claus distributes was clean. The Washington Post was the only group left in the building by the end of the Philanthropy Reveal Party.

Various religious figures weighed in about the Philanthropy Reveal Party. The Pope said something in Latin, Buddhists around the world said that they had nothing to say but showed up to not say it. Muslims were busy with Ramadan, and did not show up, but Benjamin Netanyahu, democratically elected to a State that self-identifies as Jewish, applauded the endeavor and said cryptically that ‘settlers are standing by for naysayers property’.

Joe Biden and Donald Trump were in the audience and almost stole the show when Joe sniffed Donald’s hair while Donald ‘grabbed him by the…’ and shouted, “BIGLY!” A sex tape is expected to drop sometime before the Presidential Elections.

Of course this is an April Fool’s Day post, if you haven’t figured that out yet.

They decided they would be lovers instead of fighters. ↩︎

Facebook Algorithms Run Amok.

July 19, 2022 ~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 4 Comments

I’ve used Facebook since I worked with a fashionable DC Drupal shop whose CEO at the time thought it was the best thing since… well, in his mind, Drupal. He had all of us join even though we were way too busy to be goofing off on social media.

Later on, I began using Facebook to connect with people I had not been in contact with for a while. Later, I would try to use it to share stuff I was writing, though I had friends who were very good at liking things I wrote but were not quite compelled to use the share button. Maybe my writing sucked. Maybe my friends didn’t understand social media. I’m leaning toward the latter given I did get good conversations, but people didn’t understand sharing.

Time progressed, and people stopped seeing less of each other on timelines. Algorithms, “we think you want to see”, etc – which all but took what I thought was interesting away from Facebook. It got worse, so I tried that ‘paid advertising’, and for the most part, it doesn’t make sense spending money on Facebook either unless you’re willing to really go big. In essence, you’re paying them to undo the stuff that shares what you post on your timeline. Quite a racket, really, but that’s Facebook.

Lately, since I’ve been supporting Ukraine on social media, Facebook has taken a new twist – restricting my account over what were clear parodies. I tweeted about it a few times, the account restrictions went away a few times, and then I tried uploading the Hitler movie excerpt with subtitles that made fun of Putin. You know. That one video that was quite popular for a while.

This got my account restricted again, for something that was clear parody. Facebook lacks a sense of parody. In chatting with a few other people, the problem is pretty consistent. Facebook is not for humor. I’m not even sure humans work there. You can’t speak with a human on a network of humans about issues you have. It’s insane.

So Facebook, which was once interesting, is just a place where I glance in now and again as I use other social media. Sure, there’s a RealityFragments page on Facebook, but I think that’s a matter of time as well since I’m being punished for having a sense of humor.

I mean, we all can’t be Mark Zuckerberg.

Incidentally, always hold on to picture of animals taking a poo. They come in handy.

Evolving The Reality Fragments FB Page

August 16, 2018 ~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment

As I mentioned earlier, there’s this Reality Fragments Facebook page that was started really because Facebook asked me about it. It evolved into a place where I would share my writing from here, KnowProSE.com (more tech/DIY/OpEd), TechNewsTT (T&T centric OpEd), and wherever else I scribble an expansion from the void of NULL.

Here’s the thing: I don’t really know what I’m doing with it, so it has it’s own life. A strange one at that. And I don’t really care too much since I’m focusing on writing these days.

It’s a work in progress that has already taught me a lot. For example, despite having at least twice as many posts, KnowProSE.com articles tend to get more traffic because of the material. Let’s face it, what I write on RealityFragments isn’t for everyone – it’s not nearly as focused.

And strangely, the Facebook page has allowed me a certain amount of freedom. A certain anonymity, and it certainly has gotten more shares than my own network has had. I seem to attract people who don’t like sharing, which is fodder for another post in the future.

So far, after stepping back after more focused writing for about a week:

(1) For KnowProSE.com and TechNewsTT (the OpEds), my general rule of thumb is, “If it’s not being written about and it bugs me, I should write something about it.”

(2) For life, the universe and everything posts, I write them here on RealityFragments.

(3) As I write more, I actually share less often.

The last one – because people may think I only write what I post on one site or the other – is about the writing I do offline, unpublished so far. This is because I’m seriously focusing on my writing.

So, if you’re interested in this grand experiment that’s doomed to eventually becoming NULL in the great expanse of the Internet, go ahead and hop over to Facebook and like the Reality Fragments page. Or don’t, and only follow the relevant sites.

Or don’t, take your dog for a walk and think about something much more important that you’ve been putting off for days. Yes, everyone knows.

I promise you that it’s not going to be on any particular topic, a rare thing these days.

Undistraction.

April 6, 2018 ~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

It’s been 24 hours since I walked away from Facebook – and there are a myriad of reasons for that, but the one I’ll write about now is distraction. With roughly 1,200 connections – ‘friends’, in what Facebook has branded such connections – it got to be too much.

One of the problems with social networking platforms is that, as a business model, they cater content and advertising based on what you have done or liked or interacted with. It’s in their financial interest, and their bedrock of advertising forms a fatal flaw in the experience that most users don’t know enough to understand, and probably don’t want to understand in an age where social connection is as diluted or strong as the algorithms behind it.

I’m a big fan of strong connections. Of thoughtful discourse. Of wide and broad knowledge shared by people with depth and breadth in a world that doesn’t reward broad experience and only specialization. When one reads things, for example, that Richard Feynman said or wrote, you encounter an original mind, specialized in Physics, who spent time thinking beyond his specialty and into the realms of how what he was specialized in affected other things – and vice versa. In essence, he was connected to the world and whether conscious or not, it was a choice. I just read that he spent the latter years in his life working with Hillis on some great stuff, too. Interesting man, Mr. Feynman.

In finding myself creating thoughtful comments on thoughtless posts and comments, trying to maintain a level of interaction, I found all too often that the lowest common denominator wasn’t static but dynamic – where someone who was thoughtful would be momentarily thoughtless without looking back. And then I wondered if I was as guilty. There’s a want to be right, of course – no one wants to be wrong. And yet, there are many right ways to look at the same thing and it’s the intersections of those ‘right way of looking at things that has a sweet spot. The sweet spots are not constant, they too move.

‘Right’ is built on a foundation of sand, and I found Facebook was a bunch of people trying to create sand castles on a foundation with sand while others, for no good reason, might come over and kick their castle. It’s like what happened when children stopped being raised by televisions and instead by networks that they could interact with – where they could easily hide what they shared with others from brick and mortar society.

How unappealing.

And yet blogs remain, where people can be thoughtful or thoughtless – but blogs err on the side of thoughtful, in my experience, when compared to social networks.

Now I’ll have more time to write. “Oh no!”, some social media ‘expert’ might say, “no one will see your content!”. Well, shucks, it’s not like people saw it when I posted it on Facebook anyway – and those who liked it did not see fit to share it, even when cracked across the skull with blunt words.

Facebook is pretty fucking useless to me. Why spend time on it?

Facebook Page?

March 21, 2018 ~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment

Once upon a time not so long ago I began RealityFragments.com – an answer to my more personal writing in a time when I was chained to technology on KnowProSE.com, when I wanted a clear space to publish my less technical side and explore it. And allow others to, to allow myself to see who was interested in what I had to write otherwise.

It’s a bit over a year now. And out of the blue last week, Facebook asked me if I was the ‘owner’ of RealityFragments.com and allowed me to be in charge of the RealityFragments Facebook page.

I paused. It had happened because my profile mentions the site – it is, after all, something I do – but this isn’t a business. It’s not a news source in any true sense of the word. I’m not looking for writing gigs. Truth be told, I’ve been procrastinating successfully with regard to writing a book by kicking around book ideas for the last 3 weeks. So. Why do I need a Facebook page for it?

I don’t. But I took it because of the key issue on the Internet, on social media: Someone else might. And it has become part of a brand. Maybe even marketing of my brand for whatever purpose that has yet to be decided. So it sits there, this page, and I have no idea what to really do with it.

Facebook seems intent on me adding a button to it. I found it enough to simply upload some images for the page after I claimed it. And then a few people liked it.

So. A Facebook page for the site – something that maybe a decade ago would have been something people immediately did so that they could somehow do something that other people thought was cool. Now, it seems so pedestrian.

This is the first blog entry I’ll share there. And it’s not designed to do anything cool, but instead explain why it exists, and why I’m not too impressed… and why I don’t think others should be. Yet it has potential for non-Wordpress.com users to discuss and comment on things if they choose to. Invariably, someone will call me a liberal or conservative, someone will use Hitler in a conversation, and people will either disagree or agree with what I have written.

I suppose they can start here.

Birthday Media

June 5, 2017 ~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment

At one point, I thought that social media was worthwhile in that I could tell people, “Happy Birthday” at the appropriate time, which I had been unable to do before because I simply don’t remember people’s birthdays – something that some see as a personality flaw. They made me think it was a personality flaw by badgering me about it – particularly the women in my life who, oddly enough, always hated getting older.

You’d think that women would therefore not want to celebrate birthdays, but that is largely not true in my personal dalliances with the female of the species. We’ll get back to that.

So here I was, thinking all these social media services actually were doing me a favor, covering a personality flaw – largely so people wouldn’t think I don’t have this personality flaw, that I cared enough to stick calendar dates in a rolodex in my head for people I care about. And it became easier and easier – to the point where Facebook offers me to post on someone’s page something witty like, “Happy Birthday”, or something wittier that I might come up with in the time it takes me to read and react. I think I’ve written some atrocious things that way, but everyone seems happy enough.

This all came to a head today because LinkedIn offers me to ‘like’ someone’s birthday. How cheap is that? All I have to do is click ‘Like’, and presto magico, I have conveyed that I care that you were born a certain amount of years ago.

Yay.

So here’s the truth. While I am no longer someone who subscribes to religion, I had the misfortune of being born into a Jehovah’s Witness sort of background – I had no choice. And while not having that choice, we didn’t celebrate birthdays. Why? Well, as I recall the rhetoric, “Jesus Christ didn’t celebrate his birthdays!”. Thus the same rhetoric for Christmas.

I’m not sure that celebrating them should be a sin in any religion, really, but hey, whatever makes you happy… I’m also not into a few other things being a sin, either. But let’s pretend for a moment that Jesus didn’t celebrate birthdays, even if it’s not true and there were omissions in the Bible (there weren’t potty breaks either, as I recall, so pooping could be a sin.) This leads us down a path where a calendar was set up BECAUSE the big J.C. was born, and a count was begun known as A.D. – anything beforehand, B.C. But that’s not accurate either if J.C. were born on Dec 25th, because then that would be the end and beginning of the year… and… that’s open to dispute too.

In other words, the reasoning behind not celebrating birthdays that I was presented with simply doesn’t make sense. Of course, they celebrate the death of Christ as well, as well as his resurrection. Absolutely nothing about his visit from the Tooth Fairy, or about a bunny hanging out, or elves… so let’s not go there because we may end up in a Mordor trying to get a ring into a volcano.

I eventually did have birthday parties, when people got together and acted like I was special one day out of the year. Just one. And I thought they sucked – not because people showed that they cared on that day, but because of the surrounding 364.25 days where I wasn’t.

So after all of that, here’s the thing. The only birthday I really cared about was when I was 21. I think the 23rd my auto insurance went down slightly in the U.S. – or was it 28? – and then the only way the auto insurance went down is by getting married. Clearly that wasn’t enough of an inducement for me…

And now, here I am, in my 40s, and I don’t care about my birthday. Sometimes I’m not even sure how old I am and have to do math – fortunately, we count 13th birthdays unlike how we count 13th floors in buildings, so the math isn’t tricky at all – and at a moment’s notice, I can figure out how old I am.

And I don’t care about how old anyone around me really is either. It’s not like it tells you how long you have to live – it doesn’t – but like Bayesian probability, it lets you know that the more years you live the more likely you are to die within the coming year. Think on that a moment.

So what are birthdays really about? About making people feel special, like you care. Like they matter to you on a deep level. How wonky is that? And this is why I think women seem so agreeable to birthdays despite the landmark of growing older.

Here’s my thing. If I’m not there for you for the rest of the year – if I don’t treat you like you’re special for the rest of the year – is this sort of like accepting your deity of choice, and begging forgiveness for all those times you masturbated, before you die? Try that last one without the Oxford comma. New dimensions to death.

So, no. I’ve stopped clicking ‘Like’, and I’ve stopped posting atrocious things when forced to treat people like real human beings on what are allegedly joyous occasions.

The truth about me – as ugly as it may seem – is that I don’t care about your birthday. I don’t care about Valentine’s Day, for that matter, or Anniversary dates, and so on. I just don’t. Relationships are fluid.

If I like you, I at least try to be nice to you throughout the year.

If I don’t, I don’t.

And that’s that. So, I won’t apologize for not liking your birthday, or posting something on your Facebook wall, or tweeting something, or sending you nude pictures of me, or dressing in a clown costume, or whatever else, on your birthday.

Truth be told, you won’t even see me at your funeral.

Even if I show up.

RealityFragments.com

Personal scribblings of Taran.

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Evolving The Reality Fragments FB Page

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