Trying out the new posting page + Internet Feelings

[mistressofmuses]

I'm grateful that they posted a reminder about the posting page and the inbox... I'm much happier getting a chance to choose to use it and learn it rather than suddenly having it be my only choice!

This may also be my chance to finally learn to use markdown, which I know is simpler in a lot of ways than html (simpler to read, when making a long entry or formatting writing, as opposed to the mess of html tags.) It'd be easier for me to read my own posts as I write (or fix) them, but I've just been so loath to figure out the basics, heh.

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Playing around with the new post creator feels vaguely appropriate, I guess, because today is Big Feels About The Internet Day.

I told olivermoss earlier, but... I miss the good internet. (Yeah, yeah, nothing was ever all good, all the time, but still.)

Over the last couple days, there's been news of multiple sites/divisions of sites that have been shuttered entirely or might as well have been: Omegle, Jezebel, and The Escapist. Pretty old sites, maybe past their prime and all, but still... spaces that have been around a long time, and now aren't.

Then yesterday there was the leaked bit of info on tumblr, later confirmed, that they're planning to reassign the majority of the team there to other projects, as tumblr basically leaves active development. (Now, could that be a good thing in some ways? Sure. Maybe it'll put an end to the new "features" that no one seems to like, it likely means the site will stop chasing UI designs from other websites, and perhaps it'll just focus on the base features that tumblr has instead of trying to foist new ones onto the users.) But it's also the sort of thing that could be the start of a more precipitous decline than the one that it's already arguably been experiencing.

It's also fair that it's a bit of a running joke that tumblr's userbase cries about the inevitable end of tumblr every few months, and the last big panic really wasn't that long ago. This isn't "this place is shutting down immediately!" but it IS still a reminder that it's a temporary space. Maybe it'll be on the slow slide of suck for years yet... maybe something critical goes wrong, and it's deemed too expensive to fix for something that sounds like it's being shifted into the "legacy product" category.

[For me personally, this is a month after the game I've played for a decade now also left active development, with a similar warning that there will be no bug fixes, there will be no updates, this is now running itself, and as soon as it stops supporting itself, it will go away entirely.]

The-site-formerly-known-as-Twitter is still doing its best to limbo under every previous low bar. Reddit has all of its VC-caused issues. Insta and FB and the rest of the "Meta" product batch are a scourge. Tiktok is just the worst.

Pillowfort seemed like one of the places most interested in courting members of a tumblr exodus, but it just announced that its in dire financial straits, and it seems quite possible that it doesn't have much of a long-term way forward. I don't have much room to complain, since I've never used my account, but had it in the back of my mind as a possible place to land.

Bluesky has gotten mixed reviews as far as I've seen, and I don't care for the "walled garden" aspect. Cohort had a lot of valid problems pointed out about it, and then faded from my awareness, so I have no idea if its improved. I'm fully willing to admit that I just don't "get" Mastodon/fediverse stuff, and I've been turned off from it by a lot of the people who ARE into it. Discord seems to be the current "real" home of fandom, but it has a similar "walled garden" problem, where it's hard to find the right spaces and hard to know what the right spaces are when you can't see them. I also dislike how ephemeral a lot of stuff there is.

This time I did see at least some conversation between some creators I follow on tumblr talking about how they should decide on where they'd like to go and build community. Having a chance to do it in advance, such as it is, is a good thing. It mirrors a bit how many of them ended up on tumblr in the first place, back when LiveJournal took a nosedive. Now, these are the sorts of creators I am not personal friends with or anything, but they are the types of people I'm primarily interested in using social media to follow. I enjoy what they make, and I enjoy the kind of things they make; mostly queer art and fiction, mostly queer creators, that sort of thing. That's the sort of group I'd actually be interested in following to a space, should they reach a consensus. (Which is most of how I ended up on tumblr; it was where the cool kids from LJ were going.) Buuuut, it also still depends what site it is. I mean, twitter was THE place to follow creators for years, and it still didn't get me to use it.

Dreamwidth has been mentioned a few times as a potential alternative. I would always love for there to be more activity here, because I too am nostalgic for a lot of the LJ days. Not everything about them, but it was the first place I connected with fandom in a more social way (rather than individual sites, or just reading fic.) I don't know if the sorts of small creators that are looking for their next landing place will choose DW, because they ARE in part looking for audience, and DW lacks that critical mass. Yet I think having active creators here (in addition to the ones we already have!) would help tip it that direction for at least that segment of tumblr.

I don't know. This has gotten long, and I've done nothing else with my night, so it's probably time to cut it off.

No revelations or anything, but just... yeah, having some feelings about places going away, and the internet feeling smaller and smaller.

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In other news, my manager has been sick all week. She'd completely lost her voice yesterday, and today it was only slightly better, but she was coughing quite a lot. (It was also her birthday! Fun!) But she hasn't wanted to stay home, so she's been in the office all week. And today my throat has started to feel a little scratchy and hot, and now a bit swollen... Fuck.

I can't even really say she got me sick, since yesterday was the first day I was around her, and that'd be a sonic-fast infection-to-symptom timespan. It's more likely that we both caught it sometime last week or I got it over the weekend. We've had drivers out sick, we've had sick students, etc. Tis the season.

But uuuuugh.