Good Morning Friends! While technically a vacation day for me, I guess I am here opting to write a blog post because I have had some thoughts kicking around in my head. It has been a bit of a wild ride since the first of this month for a lot of folks on the internet. If you have not been impacted then gratz… you are not terminally online. For the rest of us, however, there has been a bit of strife even for those who abandoned that site last year. Essentially a sequence of events has led to Twitter largely being unusable for the average user that has refused to pay for the $8 per month badge of shame. Firstly on June 30th, Twitter shut off access for anyone viewing the site without logging in first… which also killed access to any links that have been shortened with T.Co. Next came the above tweet which announced that all Twitter users would be dealing with “rate limits”.
What this means in practice is that simply by leaving your Twitter client or web browser running, you would begin to lose access to new tweets when your account on any platform had cached 600 messages. New accounts are restricted to 300 I am assuming so folks don’t simply create alt accounts to bypass the quota. The rumor is that this is all being brought on by the fact that Elon Musk yet again failed to pay one of his bills… this time for hosting in the Google Cloud. There has supposedly been a mad dash within Twitter to migrate elsewhere, and the impossible task was not completed in time… leading to the entire service being severely throttled instead of fessing up to this… it is being played as more of Elon’s crusade against bots and data scraping.
This is not the first time we have decreed that Twitter was burning. However, this is maybe the first time that it has truly adversely impacted the average user. 600 Tweets is not a lot given how spammy some users are, and given that promoted tweets and the things that the algorithm crams in your feed also count towards that number… most everyone ends up being rate limited before long. There is actually a weird sub-community that has sprung up around trying to speed-run the rate limit. The end result of this is that folks who never considered leaving… are not desperately seeking a solution. Essentially everyone seems to be looking for the next Twitter.
The latest greatest home seems to be Blue Sky. For those who are completely unaware of what this nonsense is, essentially Jack Dorsey of Twitter fame… has gone off and attempted to create his own corporate version of Mastodon that looks and feels like Twitter did circa 2008. The problem with Blue Sky is threefold… firstly it is very much a “minimum viable product” at the moment and is missing a bunch of features that one expects from a Twitter-Clone like some measure of private messaging. Secondly, they are using the Gmail model for growth, where every so often users are given one or two invites for them to ration out to their friends. Thirdly you are jumping from the arms of one corporation that had no clue how to make enough money to sustain its service to the arms of another company with seemingly no viable business plan.
At some point, it seemed that Blue Sky was universally declared the new Twitter, and folks desperately tried to get invites to the platform. This caused so much churn that by the afternoon of the first, Blue Sky had to completely turn off invites… even for pre-existing codes that had been sent out. There was a period of time when neither Twitter nor Blue Sky was loading at all. They have since turned back on the trickle of outstanding invites, but no new ones are being sent out. Essentially there is no room in the inn for new users, and the site is not ready for public launch. The folks who are there seem to like it, and I personally think it is a reasonable place to visit… but doesn’t really feel like home. The platform as a whole is missing so many features that it really does not make sense for them to attempt to rush into production. So as a result of just not being able to accept the masses, Blue Sky will in theory fail to be the new Twitter.
Now Meta is attempting to toss their hat into the ring with Threads. I am uncertain if this is the ActivityPub option that has caused so much drama recently within the Fediverse, or if this is something entirely different that they had been working on. Whatever the case this will give folks who are already bought into Instagram an option to make Twitter-like text-based posts on that platform. While I use Instagram occasionally I don’t really love it. Instagram is a site about beautiful people posting beautiful things about their beautiful lives. I am not a beautiful person, and I am also not extremely visually motivated when it comes to expressing myself. I write walls of text broken up by screenshots, and when I am not doing that… I write dumbassed quips. Instagram has never really felt like home, and I doubt adding Twitter posts to it will make it more embracing either.
Then there are the living dead… the locations that attempted to be Twitter or at least give an alternate landing spot that failed to gain any real traction. These include Spoutible shown above, Post, CoHost, and countless others trying to be the next new place for folks to talk with each other. All of these have their own communities but they are also extremely narrow in their scope and have lacked the mass adoption required to be the next Twitter. Spoutible seems to be a carbon copy version of Twitter, and others like CoHost are leaning more on the past social networks and creating an almost Live Journal-style experience. Then there are things like Tumblr that are still alive and kicking and apparently working on federating over ActivityPub.
Then there is the Fediverse, or as most folks seem to refer to it… Mastodon. This is more the Anti-Twitter than a Twitter replacement because it was created by folks looking for an alternative to social media as it existed at the time… and was forged in the fires of folks who abandoned Twitter for various sundry reasons. There are many articles out there that will tell you that the Twitter Migration failed and that Mastodon will not be the next Twitter… and I agree with them for the most part. I think the key to understanding this is the fact that the folks running most Fediverse servers would not consider replacing Twitter as a laudable goal. It sorta just wants to exist as its own thing, which is there if folks want to partake but also… fine if folks don’t.
While I have been dabbling with Mastodon, particularly since 2018, I truly made it my home late last year and made what I hope was my final migration to Gamepad.club a server that I help administrate. I chided Blue Sky for not really having a viable business model, but the truth is… the Fediverse isn’t really out to make money either. Most servers like ours run on a patronage system where folks donate time and money to help keep the site running. This doesn’t really work at scale, but I feel like the Fediverse works when it is a bunch of smaller communities rather than attempting to be a single flagship mono-site like Mastodon.social or even honestly Mstdn.social. Because the network is so distributed… the smaller servers felt almost no impact from the crush of new user sign-ups. While we had quite a few new faces show up over the weekend… the server remained happily trucking along without missing a beat.
While there are absolutely a bunch of different options out there who do want to be the next Twitter… I don’t really think any of them will succeed at that goal. Twitter is a thing that evolved over time as the lowest common denominator, the network that everyone simultaneously agreed was tolerable enough to maintain a presence on. That began to change when Elon Musk took over, and it is a landslide that can’t really be stopped now. However once that dam truly breaks… folks are going to spread out to ALL of the options that I mentioned and many more that I didn’t… and not a single one of them will become the new ubersite. Folks have way too many options and once you realize you don’t really need Twitter or its clout, you start to focus instead focus on what actually brings meaning to your personal experience.
I found my new home, and while I realize most people ended up turning their noses up at the Fediverse/Mastodon experience… I found a community there. I would say maybe 30% of the total #TwitterMigration stuck around, but those who did found communities and started adding to the tapestry that is what makes that place special. While I will probably dabble in lots of different networks as they evolve into specific niche cases, my home base is always going to be Gamepad. Sure it meant that I lost a lot of friends through the transition, but I made so many brand new friends… and it isn’t like my path probably won’t cross the folks I missed along the way. It is not like I am terribly hard to find when someone decides to pay me a visit years down the line.
There won’t be a new Twitter, because you just can’t even have back a specific moment in time. For me, the final straw was Elon’s antics. For others, it will be the rate-limiting that started this week. For yet more it will be the fact that they will be losing TweetDeck in roughly 30 days if they don’t pay the $8 per month ransom to keep access. Much like there was never another World of Warcraft, because no other game really captured the moment that crafted that game… there will never be another Twitter. There will be larger communities and smaller communities… but there will be no one place where everyone has to be. I know personally… I am looking to move away from as many corporate services as I can and begin hosting my own infrastructure where possible. This blog has been around for almost fifteen years at this point, and has migrated between multiple providers… and because I own it… I know it will keep existing as my landmark on the internet for as long as I need it.
I’ve gone so far as to host my own Linktree because I did not like being beholden to that service. Sure it took a modicum of effort for me to configure Link Stack on my web host, but once done I now have a permanent way to keep my various links up to date and give someone a simple link to find pretty much everything I do. At some point… I probably want to go down the path of migrating away from Gmail. It isn’t like Google is known for keeping things around for long… so I figure at some point in the not-so-distant future the axe will come for it as well. Moving away from Twitter was more of an evolution than I realized it would be. I want to own my place on the internet, or at least trust the people who run the resources I am consuming. However… this will not be something that everyone is even interested in doing and as a result, someone will need to keep maintaining the “AOL” for those users.
I think the volume of what is available on Twitter will likely land in three different places. There will be about a third of people who do eventually migrate over to the fediverse in one form or another, even if it is corporate variants like the ActivityPub federation that Tumblr is looking at. Then there will be folks who stay loyal to Blue Sky and keep betting on Jack to make things right again out of some sense of misplaced trust that he can build a new Twitter. There will be another third that land on whatever the Meta offering ends up looking like because they are already comfortable with Instagram or Facebook and just want a turnkey solution that asks absolutely nothing of them and could not give a fuck about what that might mean for their data in the long run. The monoculture of Twitter, if there ever was such a thing… will cease to exist. Elon has done irreparable harm, and all that is left is for folks to wake up and realize that particular party is over.
There will be no new Twitter because that era is over.
The post There is No New Twitter appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! This is going to be a bit of a personal blog post and less of a gaming one. One of my biggest joys over the last few weeks has been evening time with one of the outdoor feral cats that we call Greybie. He has started coming out into the backyard to hang out with us. My wife spends way more time in the backyard than I do, and generally speaking, pings me over messages to let me know when he arrives. I’ve been spending about an hour each night hanging out and loving on Greybie and it completely warms my heart that when I get out there and set down, he comes running across the yard to be by my side.
There is so much of me that wants to adopt him and take him inside, but I have deeply conflicted feelings. Firstly we have three indoor cats already, so we would have to get him tame enough to go to the vet first without freaking him out completely. We are not quite there yet. Secondly, he is a “notched” baby which means he is a community cat. He was purposefully caught, neutered, vaccinated, and then released back into the community. Our neighborhood in general seems to be a collection point for these cats and in theory… you are not supposed to adopt them. So instead we give them safe places to stay during the winter with a few cat shelters and then make sure they are getting food and water to supplement whatever they are catching. Greybie roams around quite a bit and honestly, I am not sure if he would enjoy being an indoor cat… so instead I just give him lots of attention when he wants it.
Right now we are going through a lot of construction… that unintentionally coalesced at the same time. The city is blacktopping our neighborhood, so we have dust being kicked up endlessly by heavy machinery that is sanding the surface of the streets in preparation for the asphalt to come through. Then in our backyard, we are finally dealing with our bedraggled decking. It was never really usefully located and involved having to skim the edge of the pool in order to get over to it. We are hopefully making things work a little more smoothly and it was more economical to have folks just rip out the current deck than to try and do careful surgery and fix the old one. So as a result we have this super awkward empty space in our yard, that will begin to be filled today as the team comes back to begin construction of the new deck.
The negative is that Tripod has disappeared once again. We saw her bound over the neighbor’s fence and into the greenbelt that exists between neighborhoods. This is not the first time that things have gotten “too noisy” for her and she has checked out for a while. It is our hope that once things have settled down a bit, she will return as she has for the last five years. In the meantime, I am continuing to put food and water out just in case she needs to come back for a quick visit before bouncing again. It hurts our hearts to have her gone from the backyard, but this was something that needed to happen with the deck and I am hopeful she will fall back into her normal order eventually. The biggest sadness though is that she and Greybie were slowly working towards getting along together. The above photo is probably the closest we have ever seen them together, and one of the closest times she has been near us as humans. That photo was taken from my chair so she was maybe four or five feet away. I’m hoping by the end of the week we have our new deck and our backyard at least can return to peaceful quiet.
On the gaming front, a new patch dropped for Honkai Star Rail and we get access to the Silver Wolf banner. I spent through my stockpile of pull currency and have not picked her up yet, but essentially I will be spending every bit of free currency to do so until this banner is over. Basically, I want access to her because she has the ability to create a vulnerability in one of your team members, making it a bit easier to push through encounters without changing up your team significantly. My guess is I would replace March with her in my current comp. The arcade graphics of her attacks are also pretty freaking cool.
I’m also still poking around at Diablo IV, namely working at knocking out Lilith Altars in the various zones and getting my renown up to at least rank 3 so I can finish getting the remaining skill points. After I do this I think there is probably a significant respec in my future. Right now I am using Upheaval which seems to be completely out of the current meta of “best barbarian builds”. So once I wrap up this project of finishing the Lilith Statues, I will likely spend time trying to decide what build I want to spec into, and then making sure I have the legendary aspects needed for that build unlocked in my codex of power. At the moment I am leaning towards Whirlwind because that traditionally is my favorite Barbarian build, however, I am going to wait a bit before deciding because they are still pretty actively balancing things. I know Upheaval hit some nerfs going into the previous open test, and it certainly feels weak at times so I am open to other options.
I hope Tripod is doing okay out there. She has left and returned so many times in the past that I feel pretty confident that she is going to be just fine and then eventually return to our home and take up residence again. That said… I still worry about her.
The post Goodbye Deck appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! Yes, I realize I have already shared a version of this photo of Greybie but there is no reason not to again. Look at how precious he is. This morning however he is mostly just a placeholder because I would never actually post a photo of my wife on my blog. For the entirety of our relationship we’ve celebrated two dates as anniversaries… the date when we became a couple, and then of course the date we got married. As of today, we’ve been together Twenty-Seven years, which is one heck of an achievement if I do say so myself. We’ve long passed the mark of being together “half of our lives” and are well into “majority” territory. Heck, I am just realizing as writing that… that we’ve been in our current home for half of our lives, so I guess we are pretty much the picture of stability at this point.
Lately, we have been spending quite a bit of our evenings in the backyard hanging out with our adopted feral children. I am not sure exactly when it started, but Greybie jumping the fence has pretty much become a nightly ritual. Usually, my wife sent me a message whenever he shows up and I make my way downstairs and then take up a seat in the chair where Tripod is resting near. I’m the human that feeds the feral cats so apparently that affords me some sway. Sunday night Greybie had set up camp over near the diving board quite away from my wife, because while sociable apparently he is not super affectionate with her. The moment I sat down in my chair, Greybie came bounding across the yard for some head scratches and I gotta say… it about caused my heart to burst from sheer joy.
So much is the ritual that we caught on the security camera that he was roaming around last night looking for us. normally speaking I feed around 5 pm but at that point, we had a real “gullywasher” of a storm blow in really fast… dump a ton of rain, and then blow out. So our normal ritual of hanging out in the backyard was put on hold for a bit, but apparently, some 40 minutes later the backyard was relatively dry again and Greybie was looking for us. We never really made it out there, but I did go out and feed around 8 pm last night and by that point, I got to see him on the front porch. Far as we can tell his permanent roost is about three houses down in our culdesac. Apparently, he heard me step out onto the front porch because the next thing I know there is a grey streak careening across the yards running towards me. He’s always seemed way more interested in attention than the food, and last night was no different.
Tripod on the other hand was waiting around on me this morning. She tends to mill around near my chair just before I get up and then is waiting on me under the table over on the patio when I come out to feed. You can’t really see it in the footage but Splotchie another area tomcat is laying on the brown patio storage box. Tripod always acts like she wants attention but I’ve never been able to get close enough to her to touch her. Since she and Greybie seem to be getting along fairly well, it is sort of my hope that maybe seeing us pet him every night will eventually make her curious enough to come over toward us. There was one night when she ran over behind me while I was sitting in the chair… but then she thought better of it and ran back under the table. There is no doubt that I am her human… but she just doesn’t really know how to engage in that whole thing yet. I mean she’s been with us for roughly five years now, and I am largely just happy she is safe.
In other news, last night my Dad texted me a photo of his babies. I’ve shown off pictures of Fang, the Tomcat that is from a litter of kittens that showed up at their house some years ago. Well apparently Fang brought home a young pair of cats… one male and one female… obviously from the same litter. We have no clue WHY, but it seems like he told them my Dad was a friendly human and that he would take care of them because suddenly Bonnie and Clyde as Dad named them, have become a fixture of his world. Bonnie was very clearly “with children” when they showed up, and she now pretty much lives in his shop. He goes out every night, and she comes into the shop when he is shutting up for the evening and makes sure she has food and water.
A few weeks back she had her litter of kittens and now they are apparently old enough to be roaming around freely. There is a fourth kitten that is apparently shy, but they definitely look healthy and happy. Bonnie is extremely friendly and just like Fang comes up to me for attention whenever I come to visit. I’m hoping she will be fine with me playing with her kittens as well. A few weeks back for Mother’s Day it seemed like she was trying to run interference in the shop to try and keep me from finding wherever she had hidden them. So she clearly has protective mom instincts going on.
As far as gaming goes… I pretty much spent all of the extended weekend mainlining Honkai Star Rail. I’m really enjoying this game and yesterday I released a video of me playing through the second Simulated World instance. There is a game still under NDA that was having an event last weekend, and while I had every intention of playing some of it… I really mostly just kept playing Honkai. Originally I was going to write about my weekend adventures, but I sort of pivoted into anniversary and cat land. I am certain no one will mind me filling their feed with cute cats instead.
I hope you all have a wonderful week ahead of you. I’m already ready for another weekend. Thankfully it is a short week for me, so we will see how fast I can get there.
The post Twenty-Seven Years appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! Last night I did not do a ton of gaming because around 7 pm I went outside… and largely stayed there until 9 pm. I got a message from my wife that Greybie had shown up in the backyard, and I wanted to get some lovins. Greybie is such a good boy, and once again I tried to coax him to hop up on my lap and failed miserably. He however wanted pretty much constant attention and would reach up anytime I stopped petting him. I had the original intention of going out and reading, but instead, I pretty much spent all of the two hours that I was out there… hanging out and spending time with Greybie. Our backyard is a bit of a peaceful oasis, and I’ve realized that I actually do like entertaining folks… just exclusively of the fur-bearing kind.
Tripod was a bit calmer last night and instead of pacing back and forth under the table, she hopped up in one of the chairs and watched us from a few feet away all night long. There was one moment where she slinked her way over behind me… then suddenly thought better of it and retreated back to her chair. I did not move to intercept because I wanted to make sure she had the confidence to be closer to us without fear of us trying to grab her or something. This is truly the long con when it comes to Tripod because she has been in our backyard going on five years or so, and it feels like short bursts of progress. She always seems happy when I come out to feed and lingers nearby… but never really gets within touching range.
As soon as we went inside for the night, she was over roaming around my chair to investigate the area. She spent a lot of time sniffing everything to get her bearings. She clearly recognizes me as her human, because when it is just my wife out in the yard she doesn’t get nearly as close as she does when I come out. I just don’t think she knows how to interact with me yet, or has the confidence to actually come over and get attention. She will stare intensely at Greybie when we are petting him and then will start rubbing up against the legs of chairs and such scratching her own head on them. My hope is that she will eventually put the two together and realize that humans do a really good job of being head-scratcher.
While I was going to the effort of posting videos on Catfriend Television, I decided to go ahead and post this video of a rather rotund raccoon visiting the front yard early this morning. I’ve seen as many as four at once, but more recently we’ve just had this one showing up every few nights. I’ve also posted about the possum that visits the backyard and very occasionally the front porch. I’ve yet to capture anything terribly unexpected, but apparently, my dad has four deer that roam around their house. When I went up there to take him to a doctor’s appointment on Wednesday, I had to stop while they crossed their driveway. He also has two new cats that showed up, which are rather friendly… Bonnie and Clyde. I’ve yet to get a good photo of Bonnie who has come to visit me each time I’ve been up there lately. She just had a litter of kittens, so I look forward to playing with some tiny fuzzballs at some point.
As far as gaming goes, I think I have wound down Path of Exile for a bit and started picking back up Last Epoch. There is a big patch that is set to land next week, so I am getting back in the swing of things and preparing for that. There is also a new content update for Guild Wars 2 that is about to release next week as well, so I am sure I will be spending some time exploring that as well. I made an attempt at Maven and failed miserably and called it “good enough” for the Crucible League, and will likely just buy a carry next League so I can have the advantage of four void stones. Eater of Worlds and Searing Exarch are so easy to get to… but The Elder and Maven are such a colossal pain in the ass to even get to the fight… let alone defeat them. I don’t really enjoy bossing, but I want the ability to get base T16 maps for everything… so I will likely just spend the currency to get someone to carry me to victory going forward and get it over with.
I hope you all have a great weekend. It is raining like crazy here so I expect it to be a very indoors weekend for us. I’m hoping that I get some more time hanging out with the outdoor cats however.
The post Greybie is Pure appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
