“This new deletion policy is terrible for preservation of archival media” that’s the point, bro. That’s explicitly the point, though they’ll never admit it. Major social media platforms straight up do not want archival media to be a thing – it disrupts their business model by existing, and it’s hard to monetise. In their perfect world, media more than 90 days old would vanish in a puff of smoke and be irrecoverably forgotten.

yeah this is part and parcel of turning everything into a service. no more buying things once now becomes no more paying for unlimited access.

Discord is officially blocked in Russia

anti-DPI programs can handle Discord here's Goodbye DPI w/ GUI here's ByeDPI, possibly nicest solution for Android other variants can be found here

regarding VPNs - Windscribe is still the real one, w/ non-standard protocols and special "hostile network" switch, one problem though - limited traffic, so you most likely have to juggle it w/ some noname VPN apps or proxy add-ons

note that it's illegal in Russia to talk about blocks circumvention, so if you don't live in Russia, please share this post, so your followers, who live there could see it and use it

BTW, anyone interested in joining Dreamwidth, I highly recommend following dw_maintenance and dw_news . These are very useful communities that can help keep you up-to-date with what's going on behind the scenes at Dreamwidth, and DW Maintenance is especially good to check if there's something wonky going on. Here's the latest post on maintenance, to give you an idea of how DW staff interacts with their user base.

If you want to keep track of the very nitty-gritty goings on of Dreamwidth coding and updates, check out changelog; if you want less in-depth detail than that, or aren't familiar with a lot of coding talk, but still want to keep up with everything that's going on, the Code Tours tag on dw_dev might be more to your interest.

Adding an important new community to check out! Just started recently, dw_advocacy is all about the different legal battles that Dreamwidth is fighting on behalf of privacy and against censorship. If you want to know more about what Dreamwidth stands for and how they're standing up for us as fans, that community and the post where it was announced are both great places to check out.

Dreamwidth is also currently welcoming Cohost refugees; if you're interested in learning more about getting started on Dreamwdth and the community there, there are a lot of resources in the comments of that same post, as well as over here.

BTW, anyone interested in joining Dreamwidth, I highly recommend following dw_maintenance and dw_news . These are very useful communities that can help keep you up-to-date with what's going on behind the scenes at Dreamwidth, and DW Maintenance is especially good to check if there's something wonky going on. Here's the latest post on maintenance, to give you an idea of how DW staff interacts with their user base.

If you want to keep track of the very nitty-gritty goings on of Dreamwidth coding and updates, check out changelog; if you want less in-depth detail than that, or aren't familiar with a lot of coding talk, but still want to keep up with everything that's going on, the Code Tours tag on dw_dev might be more to your interest.

This is a really good thread.

still astonished that there are people who really refer to Twitter as "x" now. Even in casual conversation. You don't need to do that.

"Biden administration officials have for years tried to persuade social media platforms to take down posts featuring misinformation about vaccines, the Covid-19 pandemic and the 2020 election, among other things. Many of those posts, the government has said, ran afoul of the platforms’ own stated policies."

I seriously recommend turning off anon right now if you’re Jewish. A lot of the most antisemitic people on this site are harassing Jewish people on anon. The majority of them are to cowardly to do so off anon. Not to mention if you do get a hate comment and choose to post it, your Jewish followers will know who to block so they don’t get harassed as well.

WAIT!

Before you hit send on that ask, reblog, or reply, remember to stop and PROOFREAD!

ONLY YOU CAN PREVENT YOURSELF FROM LOOKING LIKE A JACKASS ONLINE!

I love being old and out of touch. Someone just asked me what my views were some youtuber drama and I had to put my glasses back on to google them because I had never heard of them.

And let me tell you, I'm three tiktoks down the rabbit hole, and I'm still none the wiser.

This is what my parents must have felt when I started talking to them about MySpace.

Dreamwidth and privacy, Dreamwidth and apps

I got an ask about Dreamwidth that has since completely vanished from my inbox and my activity feed, but it had some important questions that I wanted to answer, so I'm going to try and address them anyway:

"How's Dreamwidth on privacy? Do they data mine?"

They only take as much information as they are legally obligated to and/or is needed to make the site actually function. You are the only one who gets to decide how much of that you share with the public, or how little.

Dreamwidth makes the money it needs to run the site entirely through its userbase. They do not sell our data and do not want to.

"Do they have a mobile app too?"

No, and they probably never will. I know this is a disappointment for a lot of Tumblr users, but it's one of the primary ways that Dreamwidth can ensure that it's free to use for all users, and that we can post as much NSFW stuff there as we want.

That said, the Dreamwidth team has done everything they can to make the site friendly to mobile browsing! IIRC there are even some layouts that are particularly friendly to mobile browsing. Install Firefox/Mozilla on your phone, or a clone of it you particularly like, and log in through that, and you should be able to use the site just as well as you could from a desktop computer.

Hey Twitter(/Reddit) alternative seekers

Okay, fandom. Everyone's all worked all the time about this or that new alternative to Twitter and how it's either awesome or it sucks. I'm here to tell you about an OLD alternative: Plurk.

(Note that this was originally formatted for Twitter so forgive the jank thread paragraphing)

Disclaimer: This information is specifically aimed at people who use Twitter for fandom purposes; it is not intended to cover the exhaustive list of things that people use Twitter for (professional networking, art/photography promotion world news, etc). It's friend-centric rather than follow-centric, at least as the existing site culture goes.

So what is Plurk? It's a threaded microblogging platform dating back to 2008 that has only ever seen extremely niche use in English-language use. (Its primary userbase is Chinese-speaking.) It has a purely chronological timeline and a lot of privacy features that you haven't seen since the LJ era (assuming you're old enough to remember that).

Plurk functions through an exclusively-chronological timeline on your homepage (desktop) or in the app. Algorithmically sourced content? We ain't got it! (There is a different page for viewing top content but you have to go there specifically.) Instead, your timeline shows your own content and the content of other plurkers you friend or follow, and the occasional ad (MUCH more occasional than Twitter).

Each top-level plurk can be replied to, and this creates a chain of replies that can be used for conversation. Unlike Twitter and Reddit, replies don't form branching threads; each plurk is only one stream of conversation. Plurks with unread replies will be lit up as unread; however, they can be "muted" to stop them from giving you notifications.

(Two small caveats: You cannot mute your own plurks, and there is actually a cap of around 200 muted plurks. Mutes will fall off from the oldest, so you'll sometimes see an ancient plurk pop back up on your timeline if someone comes back to it. You can just mute it again.)

Your plurk timeline has a global privacy control. If your timeline is set to private, only people you have friended can see what you say on there. If your timeline is public, then anyone who comes to you page can see what you've posted, AND logged-in users can share your post on their own timeline with the "replurk" function (works just like a normal retweet), as well as reply to it.

There is also an "anonymous" option, which anonymizes you and also the names of everyone who replies (it randomly generates names like "lemon354" and "libra262" for repliers to differentiate them). Anonymous plurks will stay within your timeline if your plurk is set to private, but can be replurked if it's public.

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE, because individual plurks can also be given specific privacy levels: -> Friends only (if your timeline is public but you don't want this one getting around) -> Private to "cliques," which are Twitter circles but you can have more than one -> Individual users (including those not on your friends list - this is plurk's equivalent of DMs)

Your own plurk homepage is also insanely customizable, if you want to break out the CSS or even just have a custom background. You can also alter your display name (though the character cap is VERY short), and your display name color, as well as the standard avatar change. Usernames cannot be changed as a free user, but can be changed by paid users (more on paid options in a second).

Plurk also has its own image hosting, and a pastebin-alike plaintext called Plurk Paste that has no character limit. (The character limit for top-level plurks is longer than Twitter's.)

It also has CUSTOM EMOTES in addition to its (somewhat wild) default selection. They're similar to Discord's customs, except that you can use GIFs from the get go; what's restricted is the number of slots you have as a free user. (And size is capped at 48x48 px.)

Plurk has ads, but they're mostly unobtrusive (and can be clocked entirely with ad blockers, but I didn't say that). Plurk keeps the lights on through a subscription model called Plurk Coin, which is very cheap (under $2.50 USD/month) and can be gifted to other users. Coin gives you a number of benefits including the "Except" privacy option, more username colors, response editing, and a bunch more custom emote slots.

Concerned about harassment? Plurk has one of the most robust blocking systems in social media that I've ever seen. You block someone, and they can't see you (even by going to your profile) and you can't see them. That's it, done. Full no-contact.

NSFW/18+ content is allowed. There's a specific flag for it when you first post a plurk. Plurk does expect you to use that tag when appropriate, but is otherwise very forgiving of NSFW content, at least in my experience. (Again, though, English plurk is a very small community ATM).

The thing to remember about Plurk is that it is very much a remnant of an older internet, from the days before algorithms. Like Tumblr, it's a social media where you won't see anything if you don't reach out to follow and friend people. It predates "going viral" as a goal of internet usage. The goal is to talk to people.

As an aside: Since I originally wrote this up, I've seen rumors about Japanese fanarts moving to plurk and even seen one or two mentions of it in the wild on my Twitter timeline as people talk about following those artists. Fantastic! If that's you, then I hope you find this slightly more in-depth guide to features helpful.

If this sounds up your alley, I've made a public plurk specifically for Twitter refugees to come meet people and get more information on how plurk works! You can find it here.

Twitter version: [link]

Please replurk to spread this information about!

I've seen a couple people saying they're jumping ship for [other big socmed] after the AI announcement here, but like. Guys. Friends. You do realize all the other sites have been silently working with big AI companies for a while now. Bluesky has not implemented any acknowledgement or protection, and the CEO worked with crypto for years. They're just not broadcasting it or giving you an option to help remove your work from automatic scraping. Cohost has implemented similar levels of prevention compared to Tumblr.

I greatly prefer the transparency and the tiny bit of protection, no matter how flimsy. Tumblr is pretty awful, but it's still better than everything else so far. Which sucks but until we burn down the plutocracy, this isn't gonna be escapable.

(Also, no Tumblr did not quietly sneak this in. They literally announced it before implementing.)

And my thoughts on the CEO being... himself.

Tumblr hasn't been transparent at all: they already sold your data, openAI already received them. The toggle only means that they won't send your data in the future, and they request openAI to stop using the data from you they already have (they are not obliged to comply). But the announcement had been worded in a way that makes it look not as bad.

Also, the protections Cohost and the rest have to avoid data scraping are in practice the same as Tumblr: the only thing Tumblr can do against data scraping is politely request to not do it, but if the scraping companies don't want to acknowledge the request (and they never do), they don't have any reason to do so, neither technical nor legal . Still, the staff announcement lets you think Tumblr is implementing an extra level of protection others don't have, when the only thing that actually does is letting you opt-out of them selling your private data in the future. Again, because you can't do anything to get it out of that first data sale.

So no, Tumblr is not being transparent here. It's being as sneaky as it could be.

circling back around to the issue of writers being expected to do all their own goddamn marketing via social media these days, because it completely nixes the possibility of writers being weird shut ins, off-putting eccentrics, or misanthropes. 80% of the literary canon was written by weird shut ins, off-putting eccentrics, and misanthropes. if you weed out everyone who’s the wrong kind of insane to maintain a twitter presence, who on earth is left

i heard a talk about this by a terrific mystery novelist, John Straley, titled “In Defense of Misanthropes in the Arts.”

I’ll never forget him sharing his candid fear that authors like him, authors who did not want to post on Facebook or Twitter, authors who wanted to be curmudgeonly and left alone, were being steadily squeezed out of the writing world as publishers foisted more and more promotional work directly onto authors. Not everyone is cut out for the spotlight. Not everyone wants to be their own hype man. Not everyone presents well in 280 characters, especially in a space they don’t even want to be present. The time suck, the scrutiny, the punishment for making a “mistake” -- all this extracurricular work is so different from actual writing.

Make room for weird reclusive shut-in eccentric misanthropic artists and writers. Don’t forget those voices are worth your attention, too.

what a fabulous time to switch from wordpress to ghost, which is way better anyways

idk how many of you remember this but a few years ago tumblr ran a universally panned ad campaign for (us american) pride month that went "the gayest place on the internet".

well someone planning that campaign dropped in to ask the queer automatticians for advice on that and universally me and the other trans people involved were like "don't do it. i am so serious. don't do it. people on tumblr won't understand that it wasn't automattic who instituted the porn ban, or they will, but they'll recognize that automattic hasn't done anything, hands tied or not, to reverse it. nobody will like this. it will be a disaster." and they thanked us for our thoughts and went ahead with it anyway and then had to do retrospectives about how badly it went and were like "we just didn't know" and [gestures] yeah [edit: i think the person who rbed saying it was queerest place on the internet was right, my brain is fried, sorry! and that's... even worse lmao]

i don't think "bluesky" or "cohost" or "pillowfort" exist i think y'all are just making up words, to me

yaaaaaay yippee!!!!! the world so beautiful and we're cohosting it together ^_^