Preachy

6FPS V5#6: June 12, 2023

chuqvr@gmail.com • @chuqvr@fosstodon.org • chuq.me
Glass • GoodReads • Photography

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Welcome to the new issue of 6FPS.

We’re in full spring mode; pretty much all of the birds we had around the place last year are here again, with the Black-Headed Grosbeaks and the Western Tanagers being the last arrivals. We’ve already seen three species with chicks: Dark-eyed Juncos, American Robins and Purple finches. We’ll probably end up documenting over 10 species with successful nesting here again this year.

It’s been an incredibly busy time here and at work, which continues to limit my time with the camera or writing for run. We’ve finished the landscaping work for now — probably do some more this fall — and I’m really happy with the results. And there are some things going on I can’t quite announce yet, but stay tuned, because the July newsletter should have some really interesting announcements in them.

And in case you were wondering why I love having moved up here, this is the view you get as you go past the mailboxes on the street and turn into our driveway.

Any questions?

The Bear is Back

When spring awakens the landscape, it also awakens the bears. And we have one again this year. I’ve had the feeders pulled down a couple of times but overall we have things under control; when a bear is hungry enough to do a daytime raid like this, I guess I have some sympathy. This one has shown less fear of humans than last year’s bear, so I’m being more careful with it, but we’ve stopped putting out the suet feeders, which are the big calorie hauls for it, and that seems to have discouraged him from raiding for a couple of weeks.

It could be worse. A neighbor a couple of miles away lost two beehives a week ago. In perspective, having to do a bit of repair work on a suet feeder isn’t a big thing.

We are still, of course, bringing feeders in at dusk to minimize the chance of a raid.

Allergies

I ended up cancelling my trip to Lake Crescent. I got his by really nasty allergies this year for some reason, bad enough I couldn’t sleep for the coughing, and so I consulted with one of the doctors about how best to handle them. The short answer was “Allegra” and “Robutussin DM”, to which I supplemented cough drops (for the record, the Halls Sugar Free drops don’t use the sugar alcohols that can act as a laxative, don’t taste terrible, and use Menthol, which has worked pretty well for me.

The pollens that have been driving me crazy seem to be Cedar and to a lesser extend Pine, and, well, guess who moved into a few acres of mostly woods of Pine, Cedar and their friends? But according to the doctor, it’s been a crazy bad year for many people. I’m through the worst of it and stopped the Allegra a couple of days ago as I write this, but boy, I normally haven’t had big problems with allergies, but this year, wow.

I lost a friend

I lost a co-worker and friend to his battle with cancer in the last month. I’ve been with Farsight/DomainTools for over five years now, and Robert has been fighting Pancreatic Cancer as long as I’ve worked with him. A really nice guy, a serious bike rider who regularly rode centuries, and who put a lot of effort into making himself available for research into the cancer as a way to help those who come after him, the cancer finally won out. I know he beat the odds — this cancer is nasty — but it’s still sad to realize he’s finally gone.

The thing I will take with me from my time with him was his attitude. He knew exactly what he was up against, fought it as best he could, but more than that, he never let it define him or his attitudes, and he continued to work to live the life he wanted to live, and not the one the cancer wanted to dictate to him. Up until close to the end, he succeeded.

Rest in peace, friend.

Free Prints to Subscribers

Anyone who’s interested in a free 8x10 print of one of my images si welcome to it. All you need to do is check out the images in one of the four portfolio galleries on my photography page, and then send me an email with the request, including the title of the image (or URL to the image), your name and a mailing address. My only requirement is that the email the request comes from must be a subscriber to 6FPS when I get the request. I will mail these out at no charge worldwide for any request I get during November, as quickly as I can make the prints and get them packaged up.

And with that, see you next issue!

What's New from Chuq?

Preachy

I realized it’s been a full year since Elon Musk bought Twitter, and it made me ponder how different the social media universe is than it was a year or two ago.

Shortly after Musk’s purchase and as he made his intentions clear — which are, basically, to gut Twitter and reshape it into a right-wing friendly platform — I abandoned it and made the move to Mastodon. Over time, two primary platforms have emerged to “replace” twitter, Mastodon and Bluesky. A third, Post, had some attention for a while, and I used it for a month or so, and then decided it had effectively zero added value so I dropped it from my daily places. Based on how often I hear anyone mention it at all, I’ll declare it dead and forgotten, like so many other social sites that have passed by in the night.

A week or so ago, I got an invite to Bluesky, but I haven’t activated yet (because, well, real life and not a huge motivation). I’m really curious about it and how it’ll compete with Mastodon for our attention.

John Gruber at Daring Fireball has written about the two platforms, and his take is that Bluesky is going to win the mainstream audience. It’s got corporate backing, it’s got the ability to do commercial scale, and it has an exec team with solid knowledge on building platforms of this type at scale.

Gruber and Ben Thompson on the Dithering podcast discussed this, and I think Gruber made a point I agree with completely: Mastodon was built for people who hated Twitter, and Bluesky is being built for people who liked it.

You can’t spend a minute looking at a Mastodon feed today, it seems, before you run into yet another nerd mansplaining just why federated systems are the One True Way to run social networks. I’ve seen this kind of almost-cult-like enthusiasm before: where the few, the proud and the nerdy spent many years and a lot of energy explaining to people just why Desktop for Linux was the one true way, and folks like me who simply “use” a windowing system like a Mac or on Windows just Don’t Get It.

This is an almost-guaranteed aspect of any platform or tool that was designed by nerds, and more or less for nerds: the nerds who use and promote it wnat to think all of us ought to want to be like nerds.

The fact is, most consumers won’t, and many can’t. I could pull out my nerd guide membership card and note that in my lifetime, I’ve done things like code assembly on many different chipsets (Sun Space, 68XXX, NS23XXX, 65XXX, heck, even on the CDC Cybers). I’ve debugged development systems in ovens, I’ve written device drivers, I’ve done DBA work on large scale MySQL systems. Not to mention coding hundreds of thousands of lines of code over a few decades.

But having said that, a number of years ago, I decided I wanted to USE my tools, not hack on them. And that has at times put me in conflict with the nerds, who have, over the years, explained to me why I should be buying these WIFI routers and loading in this open source OS for them instead of using the Eeros I use and love (because they just plain old work and I don’t have to think about them).

And it’s this mentality that is, I think, going to doom Mastodon to being the nerd-niche platform, the modern day IRC.

Because, my god, Mastodon is preachy. And Mastodon evangelists are incredibly preachy. Mastodon admins get into it, too, and I think I hear at least once a week about discussions and threats about defederation, where some admin threatens to block all content from another site: a perfectly valid form of platform policing in a federated platform, until it’s used for political purposes or by stupid people.

Which brings me back to my really nerdy days when I was heavily involved in hacking on USENET — which was, for you youngsters, another decentralized, federated platform hosted by many sites and administered by a bunch of admins all, in theory, sort of working towards a common cause of sharing information. Without getting into the gory details of what was really wonderful about USENET and what was absolutely broken about it, what I see about Mastodon today, and about how it’s being evangelized and administered, tells me it’s headed down the same path USENET did; as it scales to large size, the social policing breaks down, the signal-noise ratios go to hell, and it’s going to become a broken, unhappy place to be, except for those small groups that can build social niches within it and more or less hide from the larger chaos around them (hello, alt.callahans alumni).

So I’ve more or less decided that Mastodon is an okay place to be for now, but that it isn’t going to be the “winner” in the “replace Twitter” sweepstakes. I’m not convinced Bluesky is, either — but I want to spend some time with it and see what I think as a part of the platform before I put much opinion on them. But from my experience having lived with and built (and watch die) various social platforms over the years, Bluesky I think is more likely to be successful as a platform (which, I’ll note, is a different winning scenario than “replace twitter”) than Mastodon is.

The Mastodon evangelists aren’t the only issue I have with Mastodon. It honestly feels my feed some days is nothing BUT people with bullhorns explaining to me why their personal cause is the most important thing in the universe and that I HAVE TO AGREE WITH THEM. Many of these causes are ones that I actually agree with, but to be blunt, I’ve gotten so tired of listening to people tell me how important they are that I’ve been muting accounts and keywords just to try to quite them down a bit.

There was a bunch of that going on on twitter, to be fair, but for some reason, it just seems to be LOUDER on Mastodon, harder to ignore.

I’m trying to spend time on Mastodon and building my social circles there and just chat with people, but if it seems like I’m not contributing much onto Mastodon these days, that’s a big reason why. I just get tired of being told I’m wrong about, well, even those things I think I agree with folks on.

It may be nobody really “takes over” for Twitter. It may be this kind of social platform was a point in time, and not a future of interacting online. Time will tell. I think there’s a need for this kind of interaction platform, but even Twitter was increasingly not really that, and more and more I see people going and building niche communities on Discord (a really good idea, by the way); the question is how to help interested people find and integrate into those niche communities?

And right now, I still think platforms like Twitter, Mastodon, or Bluesky ought to be that recruitment channel, except I think both Twitter and Mastodon are showing that when they get overrun by the bullhorn people, the usefulness of the platform overall goes way down. And I don’t really know how to tone that kind of activity down to tolerable levels other than ongoing use of mutes and blocks…

For Your Consideration

Birds and Birding

Science and Technology

Interesting Stuff

Recommendations

This month let me recommend to you a video game: I’ve just started playing Diablo IV, which is just the kind of hack and slash RPG I like, and it is not disappointing. With the push to MMO type RPGs over single-user games, it’s harder to find something like this, where I can simply go in for an hour or two here or there and grind away without worrying about clans or guilds or partying up. I’m about 20 levels in, playing a sorceror, and I find the artwork to be amazingly good, the level design really nice, and it’s open world enough that I never feel like I’m strapped into a sled going down a set of railroad tracks through the story. It may be the most “this is what I like” RPG since Skyrim for me. And I expect it’ll be eating hours here and there for many months, just like Skyrim did.

About 6FPS

And with that, I'll see you in the next issue. I'd love feedback on this, what you like, what you want more of, what you want less of. And if you have something interesting you think I might want to talk about, please pass it along. Until then, take care, and have fun.

Chuq

6FPS (Six Frames Per Second) is a newsletter of interesting things and commentary from Chuq Von Rospach (chuqvr@gmail.com).

Coming out monthly on the 2nd Monday of the month, I will place in your inbox a few things I hope will inform and delight you. There is too much mediocre, forgettable stuff attacking your eyeballs every day you're online; this is my little way to help you cut through the noise to some interesting things you might otherwise not find.

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