Because I am not as clever as Cory Doctorow, I just frittered away 15 minutes setting up my domain to be verified as my Blue Sky handle: https://bsky.app/profile/philipbrewer.net
I post almost nothing there—basically, just links back to my blog here—but you can go find me there with the other cool kids who are not as clever as Cory Doctorow.
Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) writing for the economics journal “Duh!”:
I will never again devote my energies to building up an audience on a platform whose management can sever my relationship to that audience at will.
I use micro.blog to send out my newsletter. I’m generally pretty happy with its newsletter system, but it does have a serious mis-feature: There’s a very narrow window for editing the newsletter between when it generates it, and when when it sends it out.
The main thing I want to edit is the front text that goes at the top of the email, ahead of the blog posts that I’ve identified as ones that should go into the newsletter. As near as I can tell, there’s no way to create that text until micro.blog gives me the draft newsletter. By default (the way I had it set up until a few minutes ago), there is then only 30 minutes before the newsletter goes out.
That might be fine, except in practice it turns out that the alert arrives after I’ve left on my main morning dog walk, and then the newsletter goes out before I get back.
As a stop-gap I’ve increased that gap to 3 hours (the largest gap the system allows, it would appear). That’s not perfect—I’d like to be able to write the front-matter anytime in the month before the newsletter goes out, and then edit it repeatedly over the month. But it’s good enough that at least I won’t keep missing it just because my dog gets to luxuriate in a long morning walk every day.
This guy has an app for bulk unsubscribing (and text in Section 230 that perhaps protects it).
Personally, I’d like the opposite of what this app is described as doing: I want a plugin to purge my feed of everything except posts by people I follow. (All the rest of that stuff is “objectionable material” as far as I’m concerned.) That would make Facebook usable again, maybe.
… focused on a part of Section 230 that spells out protection for blocking objectionable material online.
Source: NYT
I’m finally sending out my newsletter! An “issue zero” just went out, but starting next month you’ll be getting actual newsletters. My first cut at a title is “Sword fighting, writing, and a dog,” because that’s what I seem to be spending my time on these days. (I’ll try to get more writing stuff in than I have been just lately.)
If you’re interested, subscribe here: https://philipbrewer.micro.blog/subscribe/
“… the largest part of the active author community has settled at Blue Sky where they are once again suckling on the teat of venture capital.”
Steven D. Brewer https://stevendbrewer.com/social-media-as-an-author/
Instagram would have me believe that I have 30 followers there who want to follow me on Threads.
I assume this means that 30 people who follow me on Instagram have Threads accounts.
If you want to follow me, follow me either on this site’s RSS feed or else on on my Mastodon account: @philipbrewer@wandering.shop. (Or, if you’re the appropriate rare breed, follow me as https://micro.blog/philipbrewer.)
In 2007, when I left Motorola, I was kind of reserving LinkedIn as a potential job-hunting site. In my brain I was already retired, but I hadn’t completely abandoned the possibility I might want another job, so I kept most of my random silliness off LinkedIn, just in case.
That hasn’t made any sense for at least a decade, but it has taken until now for me to get organized to fix it.
If you don’t want to read about my writing, sword fighting, dog walking, random sunrise photos, etc., feel free to use whatever tools LinkedIn provides to filter such stuff, or just stop following me. I’ll take no offense.
It’s just a rumor (I don’t have have first-hand information), but I hear that if you create a Threads account and then delete it, Facebook deletes your Instagram account as well.
Which, you know, is probably a good thing, but probably not what most people had in mind.
Although this post is extremely topical, and will make no sense after a very short time, I thought I’d mention that for a couple of weeks now I’ve limited myself to reading zero tweets per day.
