notes from /dev/null - social media

Leaving Instagram

2025-01-22T14:58:00-08:00

Events of late have gotten me to reconsider (again!) my usage of social media, in particular what I give to it. If you follow me on Instagram, I've routinely posted photos of my goings about town there. Henceforth I’m only posting those moments here on this blog and sharing them on Mastodon (@kickingvegas.sfba.social) and Bluesky (@kickingvegas.bsky.social). If you follow me on Instagram, I invite you to do likewise on either my Mastodon or Bluesky account. I will be severely curtailing my usage of Meta platforms from now on.

For readers who use RSS, I invite you to subscribe to the main feed of this blog. Readers interested in only certain topics can find feeds for specific tags I’ve put on blog posts. Two such feeds are for Photo (my slice of life photos) and Emacs (posts I’ve made about my Emacs journey)

Readers looking for my rationale in doing this are invited to do a deep reading of “History in the making: Whistleblowers and big tech” by Mar Hicks. The article captures many of the events that inform my thinking on social media today.

Finally, if you are new to my website, welcome! This website talks a lot about computers but not exclusively so. Hopefully you will find something of interest.

Going back to feeds

2023-06-13T23:20:00-07:00

With the turmoil going on at Reddit starting from their stance on 3^rd party mobile clients, I'm taking this as an opportunity to shed even more of my social media consumption. On all my devices I have logged out of Reddit and deleted their mobile clients and browser bookmarks too.

For me, one of the larger conveniences of aggregating sites like Reddit was the one-stop shopping for interesting posts/articles on the web. But leaving editorial to the madness of crowds (as it's been for the past decade or so) has definitely shown its limitations. Going back to reading from syndication feeds (aka RSS/ATOM) and forcing the curation back on me seems like the right thing to do. Maybe I'll change my mind later, but I've no interest in joining some federated clone of Reddit to replace it.

With my newfound embrace of feeds from all over the web, I figured it was time to revamp this blog's feeds as well.

Go to the following page, Feed & Tags, to get the feed link for all posts from this blog, as well as separate feeds per metadata tag used by each blog post. The Feed & Tags link is at the bottom of every page on this blog as well.

Looking forward to seeing how well this works over time. Will return to this topic at the end of 2023.

Find me on Mastodon

2022-11-18T14:35:00-08:00

With reports from multiple sources on the on-going Twitter implosion, seems like a good time as any to announce my presence on Mastodon: @kickingvegas@sfba.social. See you there!

Taking a break from Twitter

2022-11-04T13:41:00-07:00

Welp, too much noise on Twitter. Logged out of there from all my devices and deleted my mobile app installs today. TBD if I'll ever be back, which is a shame because amid all the noise, some of the best internet moments I've ever had have been on there.

All the more reason I'm going to try post here more often. If you're interested in following, please bookmark this site or even better, add this site's RSS to your favorite newsreader.