I know we all hate on Space Karen, but Jack is probably the second worst person on the site because like Elon, he's built up a pseudointellectual mystique and people legitimately think he's a Smart and Interesting Person. He's not. He's a mediocre rich guy who thinks walking an hour every day and meditating in silence makes him better than you.

It makes me tired, how much navel gazing went on at Twitter about how to moderate and who to moderate. Most of it seemed to stem from Jack wanting to be philosophical about shit he didn't need to get that deep about, and then it got inherited down the line by a bunch of business types.

Harassment is harassment is harassment and if people are having mental breaks when they use their site, something is deeply wrong with the protocol. You fucking fix it.

And on that note, I'm signing off for a few days. Social engineering is hard, but with as much talent and wealth as Twitter had -- well, it's sad to see what it's become.

while i'm sad to see #reddit circling the toilet, it only reminded me of how urgent it is that we finally ditch centralized social media. reddit itself isn't the problem - it's a symptom of a much more generalized problem we've had since FB became a thing in the late 00's.

i've spent the past week re-purposing, patching, porting, and expanding a great piece of software based on the same #nntp protocol that #usenet uses, for creating discussion groups. i'm calling it "tomo" (友 - 'friend') bbs.

some time soon folks can spin up their own tomo shards, create discussion groups in a similar manner to reddit, decide whether they want to keep the group restricted to their shard, or share the group with other tomo shards in a public network of discussion groups called tomonet. completely decentralized private or public discussions without supercorporation bs.

best of all, since it is based on plain 'ol usenet-like nntp, you can read and post to discussion groups from a 1977 VAX mainframe, a 1984 IBM PCjr at 2400 baud, an Apple Newton, or a brand new phone.

i can't wait to bust out forté free agent for windows 3.11 and get posting this weekend. 😎

We are launching KBIN fully managed service

Hey dear community, we just launched today our fully managed hosting service of KBIN... #kbinMeta

https://elest.io/open-source/kbin

This is amazing. Rick Astley has taken it on himself to start covering The Smiths songs because Morrissey is such an unholy piece of shit, and not only is it not bad it's good and also wholesome.

This is great because Morrissey let a lot of people down. And Rick Astley, well, he would never . . .

https://www.pajiba.com/celebrities_are_better_than_you/rick-astley-is-out-here-purging-the-evil-spirit-of-morrisey.php

A little bit of Thursday joy

A busker is filmed in the street playing an accoustic version of Smalltown Boy by Bronski Beat. Half way through the song he is accompanied by a man who is walking by with his dog

The passerby is the original singer and writer of the song, Jimmy Somerville. The busker doesn't realise who it is until they finish the song

Something I love about this is Jimmy slips into the backing vocals, letting the busker lead. Lovely guy that he is ♥️

https://youtu.be/Y_DWWE3cjgg