Maybe it’s because I post more, maybe because I have followed more people recently, maybe because more people spend time away from twitter, maybe it’s the activitypub/mastodon integration: In any case I really enjoy my somewhat more active timeline recently.

MicroMonday

My MicroMonday this week goes to @Miraz who lives in New Zealand. I love the little slices of life we get when she posts a photo of her life and the nature that surrounds her. She is also helpful (see @custom), thoughtful and a great treasure to have in any micro.blog timeline.

At least I’m not going to sweat anytime soon.

Two hours of mindful chores while listening to podcasts. Almost enjoyable. A point to think about, though: It took me three full days of doing nothing before I felt I had the energy to clean, wash and organize things. Still… I’m very pleased with the result.

Blog

The more I read about how mastodon works, the happier I am that I ended up being so curious about the publishing options in iA Writer that I had to check out micro.blog about 1.5 years ago.

Don't get me wrong: It's great that people are checking out mastodon. It lets me follow them on micro.blog. But moderation and all the other social aspects of running a social network (even if it's "just" a timeline of blogs) are what's hard.

Many people that are leaving Twitter right now (or at least create a mastodon account on the side, for the time after Twitter finally implodes) end up on mastodon.social, the biggest mastodon instance there is. When I scrolled through their explore timeline I was surprised to find a post by fellow corgi lover and micro.blogger Hollie Butler (@hollie) that urged people to find a better instance, because mastodon.social has had a bad moderation for a long time.

In the replies to this post a user asked: Can I move my content over to a new (e.g. better moderated) instance? The answer is no. You can move the people you follow, but not your content, it seems.

With micro.blog this combination of problems doesn't really exist. On the one hand they have and enforce community guidelines that protect the community against hate speech, harassment and so on. Community manager Jean MacDonald (@jean) does an excellent job as far as I can tell. So there is no reason to move. Micro.blog is just a blog hoster with a social timeline component.

On the other hand exporting your data is easy enough, too. Even if there would be a reason at some point to move: I do own all my content and it's not useless content, because a micro.blog is just a blog and so the content I'd export are just blog posts.

The point is: At the moment micro.blog seems like the ideal place that is not twitter, but has moderation figured out (and still lets you connect to mastodon users). I feel like I'm in good hands with them. If you're willing to fiddle, you can connect your own blog for free, or you could pay them 5$ a month and have everything set up for you. Connect a domain and you really truly own your content, even in the case you feel the need to move away, since the permalinks point to your domain not micro.blog's (I'm not claiming the moving blog hosters is easy, but it's possible…).

SideProject

Working on my side project, watching other people play video games on my second display (youtube). It’s nice to have a free day tomorrow and enjoying a quiet night.

Very hazy day for me. Not a lot of momentum. I’m not doing nothing, but I surely am less effective today. I feel privileged that I’m able to go slower if needed, because I control enough of my work life.

Working from home as a programmer is amazing in that regard.

It’s new project time over here. The new project is going to be Scrum instead of Kanban. Don’t like that. But I also don’t like going to the gym.

MicroMonday

My MicroMonday rec for this week is @sod. As far as I can tell his favorite hobbies include: Helping people, being nice and having lots of knowledge around Hugo/micro.blog.

(And starting next week I’ll have to rec a little bit more diversely)

SideProject

Jeez, I have not had so much fun tinkering with a side project, ever, I think. Slowly but surely building and refactoring, the way I like, without sprint goals or other deadlines, being in charge. It’s just the best feeling. 👨‍💻