I am gradually picking up many of the connections I previously had, just because someone ends up boosting posts by one of them, here and there. As a result, my timeline is growing more interesting by the day.
My strategy of interacting very little, posting only sparingly, keeping my follows off-record and, in my bio, discouraging people from following, seems to be working quite well 🙂
I get that Mastohost (which is hosting my new instance) is a poor model for the Fediverse: too much concentration of instances on a single server. Personal instances, such as on Mastohost, is still much better than for everyone to join a few big instances, which then eventually go down, just as the mastodon.technology instance is about to do. The owner/developer of Mastohost has committed not to hosting more than 25% of all Mastodon instances. I think a better plan would be consider not the the total number of instances, but the total number of users. A quarter of all instances already sounds like a large amount, but if those instances are large, it could translate to the majority of users on the Fediverse. It’s also true that lowering the bar (of technical know-how and expense) is what will get more people to run their own instances, which is what the Fediverse needs. Whereas the administrators of large instances can be expected to have greater technical know-how.
The first preference should be to get individuals to run personal instances from home. But the second preference should be to encourage the creation of many small instances. A way to achieve that could be the model of small co-ops renting space on green VPSs. There would be sharing of ownership, administration, costs and maintenance, together with restriction to a handful of users. That way, there is not too great a concentration of instances on one server, and if an administrator quits, the instance can still continue.
Video
We download and stream a lot of video content, but personally I can never watch more than a couple of movies or TV shows per week. Beyond than that just feels like overload. Even if I’m bored I won’t watch more any more. I read, surf the web, listen to podcasts or listen to music. So I haven’t watched anything new in the last few days. I tried watching “The Worst Person in the World”, but it didn’t hold my interest. I watched the latest episode in “The House of Dragon”. But without great enthusiasm.
Music
I am still really enjoying SoundCloud. In Israel/Palestine it isn’t possible to pay for a SoundCloud subscription, which means that much of the mainstream content isn’t available, but, on the other hand, I noticed while in Portugal and Spain that it wasn’t possible to listen to my usual content without taking out a paid subsciption. So this works very well for me, because I practically never listen to mainstream western music, and I’m amazed by the almost infinite supply of free content. I would never be able to discover so much wonderful music without a service like SoundCloud. It’s like entering a secret world with musicians that few people have ever heard of.
Currently listening to the station of Kinan Azmeh, a Syrian musician. Beautiful tracks from musicians from the Middle East and around the world.
Books
I’m reading Ville Triste by Patrick Modiano. I’m reading in French on the Kobo. It’s helpful to be able to click on an unknown word and get the translation. Modiano’s books are fairly short, which also suits me, as I’m a slow reader (even in English). I love Modiano’s prose and the atmosphere that he is able to establish. This book departs a little from the kind of story that he usually tells, but the familiar elements are there. Did he deserve his Nobel? Sure, why not.
Links of the day
The stories that most interested me were:
The revelation of Liz Truss’s influences though I haven’t been able to verify the facts of that story.
Greenwashing a police state: the truth behind Egypt’s Cop27 masquerade
Although the venue is much less important than the success of the meeting.
Pesticide use around world almost doubles since 1990, report finds
It isn’t a pretty picture. Not getting better. The EU is not living up to its commitments to limit dangerous pesticides either.
Saudi Arabia sentences US citizen to 16 years over tweets critical of regime
When you take an average modern nation-state, which is already embarassed and touchy about the exposure of its dirty laundry (see under Assange) and you add to that an autocratic leader who, either for political expediency or due to severe psychological issues, is wary of the least opposition, you get a mixture that guarantees that virtually every citizen lives in fear of criticizing the regime, or maybe even thinking bad thoughts about it.