Social Media

When we decided to get back into doing Living History again after all these years, it seems like almost every organization from the huge regional ones to the company-level units no longer bother with their own web sites or even email listservs anymore – they’re all on Facebook!

Why host on Facebook?

No expense and trouble with having their own domain name (dot com, dot org, dot whatever).
No need for running your own server
No big fuss over page designs and links
A place to host files, pictures, videos, stories, news, and events.

But at what cost?

Ads. Lots and lots of ads.
Loss of rights to your own content.
Loss of privacy for you and your visitors.
Getting inexplicably restricted for whatever “community standards” Facebook chooses.

Why lock yourself, your organization, and your site visitors into a single vendor who insists that all your visitors create an account on their platform to access it or contribute to it? Why ask your “customers,” members, and contributors to give up their privacy and intellectual property rights in order to participate? That’s not only unethical, it’s downright stupid. You give up so much and depend for everything on someone else’ terms of service! Remember how Amazon destroyed so many businesses who depended on their servers when Amazon decided those companies weren’t “woke” enough? It wasn’t that long ago, y’know.

Obviously hosting your own domain on your own server is the best solution as far as retaining your rights and respecting your users’ and contributors’ privacy and dignity. A small number of the reenacting groups I found do this, at least partially. But most just rely on Facebook in the same way Parler relied on Amazon. Not very smart.

There are perfectly sane and sensible alternatives to Facebook for cry’n out loud! 

How about any one of the platforms offered in the Fediverse? These are all free (as in beer), but also free (as in freedom!) Rights respected, privacy preserved, open-source software-driven, maintained by volunteers who may solicit donations to defray their expenses. Anyone can host their own, the software is free if you want to run your own instance of one or more of the federated – or distributed – networks: Mastodon (microblogging, like Twitter), for example, or Friendica (very busy social network with a steep learning curve), or the simple, intuitive Diaspora network – the oldest and probably still the largest of the macro-blogging social networks (like facebook, only easier).

Centralized networks like MeWe do what Facebook and some others do, but again – you’re locked into a single vendor and hosted on a single megaserver and you don’t retain control of your own data.

In my next post, I’ll describe the one federated network that is in my opinion the easiest to learn and to use. Here’s a hint: diaspora*

Why Not Devuan?

So in my last posting I wrote about replacing Linux Lite with antiX, addressing the “political Linux” concerns and my apparent hypocrisy in choosing antiX.

The expected question I never got, surprisingly, was why don’t you just use Devuan instead of antiX?

It’s a good question even though no one ever asked me. On the interwebz the question is asked once in a while among those who favor the non-systemd distros. And the usual answer is that Devuan is much better. Plus the default desktop in Devuan is Xfce, my most favoritest and the bestest, most wonderfulest and awesomeful desktop environment in the history of ever. In antiX the desktop is a choice among window managers that doesn’t even include the best of them, which in my opinion is Openbox.

My answer is that I want to the supercool tools found in antiX and MX-Linux, to include the USB-formatter, ISO-maker and other wicked-kewl tools.

If there’s a way to get those on Devuan instead of using antiX, I’ll sure as heck do so. Do I just add MX-Linux repositories to Devuan or what? Remember I suffer from moderate-to-severe technophobia, so don’t make the answer (hopefully in a comment) all complicated and technical.

Thanks!

PCLinuxOS Forum: Not for Conservatives or Kids

From this post on Diaspora, a rant from a former PCLinuxOS user and fan:

#PCLinuxOS has really pissed me off

I figured the messed-up fonts would get fixed in a future update but after 3 months, same unsolvable issue. So what, I could live with that. But then…

In the Forum’s “Sandbox” section, only visible to forum members who are logged in, there was a thread about #Rush #Limbaugh, filled with hateful, nasty crap celebrating his death and berating his life and his followers. I stood up for Rush, said I was a fan, and that they should at least wait until he assumed room temperature before attacking his memory. Two other forum members agreed. But Tex, the lead developer, among others, resorted to an insulting barrage of hate against Rush, and I logged out, never to return.

I don’t care whether your #Linux distro is left or right politically, but when you use the distro’s official forum to launch a tirade of cruel and venomous hostility toward a public figure for his or her #political views, then you’re just an asshole and you’ve made the distro political as well. I would link to the thread, but the “Sandbox” (kind of a chatty, off-topic subforum) is not visible except to forum members who are logged in.

Once you make an #operating-system political, you’ve crossed a line I can’t abide. Time for a new distro, just because I won’t pollute my #computer with crap from a hostile #Leftist asshole who has made his distro political by posting such vitriol in the official forums.

Looking for a new systemd-free Linux distro. And no, not antix either because of this. I’ll revisit #SalixOS I guess.

“His vile ass is dead.” This from the main developer. Y’know, once you post political crap in the official forums of the distro, you have politicized the distro. A few members spoke up in defense of me and of Rush, but there’s two more pages of hostility that I won’t publish here. The thread is not visible to anyone not logged into the forums, which is probably a good thing. But it’s enough for me to know that the guy I sent money to to support his work is a bitter, hostile Leftist. No more donations to a hateful serpent like that, and because he has politicized the distro, I’m looking for another. Gotta be systemd-free, and rock-stable. Revisiting SalixOS today.

Linux Mint learned a lesson after “the Great Linux Mint Political Train Wreck” that Tex should have learned. But perhaps someday he will. In the meantime, I think the Xfce version, although far more bloated than I would prefer, has been fun and easy to use. Next best thing to Xubuntu, but free of systemd which I really want.

Thanks for the backup, Knot2Smart and Old-Polack. Goodbye.

Principled Action

Dear Readers,

I found an old Gmail account I haven’t used in a while, signed in, and deleted it. Screw you, Google. I deleted Facebook and moved to Diaspora. I’m also toying with MeWe, but probably not for long since it’s centralized and even deleted a friend’s whole group because they disagreed. I also dumped Microsoft Windows®, since I have no wish to contribute to Bill Gates’ bullcrap, in favor of Linux.
Now it’s Mozilla to delete, because of this. New default setting to filter out content the new dictators don’t like. So it’s Brave browser instead of Firefox, and Evolution instead of Thunderbird. I gave Geary a shot, but when I clicked on Preferences in Geary the app would crash (at least on my current Linux distro). My Internet provider, AT&T, owns CNN Fake News. So I’m working on changing my ISP as well.
My own family thinks I’m “paranoid,” but I’d be hypocritical not to put my convictions into action. They agree that Big Tech is a big, evil problem, but they’ll go ahead and continue giving big tech control over their Internet use, social media, and privacy. No, I’m not paranoid, I’m principled and doing what principle demands.

So, those of you have read my previous post about Diaspora are probably wondering what in hell I’m doing going back there again! Well… Here’s the thing:

It’s decentralized. Meaning it’s not under the control of one single person. If one server (“pod,” in Diaspora’s lingo) goes rogue, I can jump to another or for that matter, run my own!

I’ve found ways to clean up the crap and make Diaspora what I want it to be. It takes some time to do that, but I think it’s worth the trouble. Ask me how in the comments if you’d like to try it. And,

MeWe is such a bewildering, cluttered mess by comparison. Diaspora’s user interface is intuitive and simple, in spite of the learning curve which I think is comparable to Fakebook’s. While “Groups” are a thing on MeWe, I’m able to create my own groups on Diaspora, kinda sorta, by dedicating an Aspect (category) to share exclusively with.

Call me paranoid or a conspiracy type if you want, but one thing you can’t call me is a hypocrite. I’m acting on my beliefs, not just whining about what’s wrong with the rest of the world.