Dave The Web Guy

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Thanks for the Push, Elon

07/09/2023

The broken or maybe deliberately dismantled embed feature of Twitter has really thrown me into a digital tizzy. That feature allowed me to keep at least some component of my website here updated at a far more frequent rate with all forms of media. Text, images, and video. I actually paid for Twitter because when you consider the latter two components, images and video, for purposes of instant publishing right from your phone, Twitter was a hosting bargain.

My first instinct was to wait out Twitter's issue (which I can now safely affirm what everyone else has been saying around me, seems to have a name called Elon Musk). But then in short order I found myself seeing the break as an opportunity to finally move my reliance and focus on any commercial conversation or content platform, and "perfect" my activities on my personal self-managed websites and blogs.

As I mentioned in a previous post, in doing so I seem to have stumbled into a growing community of people who feel the same way and are, in my interpretation, giving up the "reach" of commercial platform services in favor of a more vertical presence involving their own hardware and software, or at least managed services that they directly control.

For example, I signed up with a managed Mastodon instance hoster for my own Mastodon instance. Mastodon has a method for embedding (look in the right column of my blog), so that I can once again instantly publish media or the short quips I think need to be included at my website seamlessly as a matter of pure congruity.

But then again, I also worked on my Battle Blog code (Battle Blog being the official product name of the self-written engine you are reading this from now) so that I could in fact, albeit in a very controlled way that I would not have to deal with if I used, say, Instagram or Twitter again, immediately post media directly from my phone whenever from wherever.

That new capability sort of competes in function to having the Mastodon feed since it might not be clear why if I have an "instant publish solution" built right into the blog engine itself now, that I need Mastodon or even the old Twitter embed.

That might be a valid reason to dump Mastodon as fast as I signed up for it, but we'll see if there's anything to it before I do. I think that beyond the embedding feature, producing and having record of your content out there in the Fediverse is important too.

To wrap up this record of thought, I want to call attention to the restoration of Dave's List of Blogs Done Right, which is an effort to list all the commercial-free active blogs I happen to encounter or have my attention called to. If you like casually perusing content without fear of sensory intrusion (ads, pop-ups, etc.), this directory will keep you busy with a cup of coffee for awhile.

By Dave for Personal Blog.