Today’s non-alcoholic beer is Carlsberg.

Not as good as Clausthaler, Heineken, or Guinness NAs, but perfectly drinkable—and has flavour.

I feel the initial taste should have more kick, but at least it goes down smoothly.

After spending so much time with elderly ladies today, I kind of want to spend more time with them.

Turns out, I like hearing stories about discovering Engelbert Humperdinck in a Las Vegas casino before he made it big.

Something bothers me about this blog post.

Gender aside, it presupposes that a university degree is important and financially astute.

However, if it takes 10 years to pay off a BA, perhaps it’s not for everyone.

https://celestemdavis.substack.com/p/why-boys-dont-go-to-college

Let me explain why I’m so adamant about owning my own social media server.

Back when Twitter was a thing—before Elon Musk—I remember it like it was yesterday. I owned a social media consultancy, and much of my work was tied to Twitter. I relied on it heavily.

One day, I was working for a client, and everything was going fine. We had just used Twitter the day before to host a hashtag chat. Engagement was strong, and things were happening. At the time, we were also working on a decentralized social media service, which may have played a significant role in what happened next.

During the chat, we discussed how centralized platforms can spread and even incentivize conspiracy theories. We used QAnon as an example to highlight the problems with algorithms.

The very next day, my client’s company was banned from Twitter. Completely shut down. His personal Twitter account was banned too. My consultancy? Banned. A bunch of unrelated hobby accounts I managed were also banned—including a Star Trek fan account I’d run for years.

For some reason, they didn’t outright ban my personal account, but they shadowbanned me. No matter what I tweeted, only 30 people would ever see it. And this was despite having 8,000 followers at the time. Twitter was intentionally rate-limiting the reach of my posts.

That’s when I had a stark realization: if I don’t own my social media accounts, I own nothing. I exist entirely at the whims of someone else.

I learned something crucial: paranoia. If you don’t own it, you can’t depend on it. If it’s not your data, it’s someone else’s data. If you don’t own your online identity, someone else will claim ownership and monetize it however they wish.

This is why, when I explore decentralized social media platforms, I always ask myself: how feasible is it for me to own the basic services? Ideally, everyone should be able to own their social media from start to finish—affordably and with confidence.

This is why I continue to run atomicpoet.org and why I’ve owned it for years now.

So I’m legit debating whether I should run a Bluesky PDS or not.

Because, you see, all this stuff is interesting in theory but I want to know the reality of everyday work.

And it’s not that I’m sold on Bluesky but I should experience how it works beyond being an end user.

There’s a game I like to play with women who are senior citizens.

Pick one: Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, or Engelbert Humperdinck?

Of course, if you don’t want to deal with the nuances of servers or relays at all, there’s Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB).

The problem is that discovery sucks, receiving data can kill your phone’s battery, and it tends to be asynchronous by design.

But it’s also cheap!

Here’s the biggest selling points for each of the main decentralized social media protocols:

* ActivityPub (Fediverse): monolithic services

* AT Protocol (Bluesky): micro-services

* Nostr: dumb relays, client-focused

There’s other aspects, but again, these are the biggest selling points.

Oh yeah, and if I run my own Nostr relay, I’ll ban AI bots too. Because they suck. nostr:note10j0ah7rjpvpzu84npn8lyc8rs2a6vqexaq6umfjqnl6y4r5a236qat9lrk

You can run your own Nostr relay with Umbrel.

I’m tempted to do this, and ban all mentions of crypto.

It probably wouldn’t be popular, but I’d love to do this just as an experiment.

https://apps.umbrel.com/app/nostr-relay

In a way, I understand why Jack Dorsey prefers Nostr over Bluesky because Nostr relays are much simpler.

Here’s a diagram of how Bluesky and AT Protocol work.

In theory, a PDS could be less expensive than the typical Fediverse server.

But the gotcha is that the PDS is separate from the relay.

And I don’t know of many alternative relays competitive with Blue Sky’s.

Just left my aunt’s funeral.

As sad as it was, she lived a full life and was close to her family.

I didn’t spend as much time with her as I wish, but the time I did spend with her was precious.

All conspiracy theories are manufactured by the Conspiracy Industrial Complex.

They’re made to spin a narrative, keep you passive—control what you think.

Trust me, this thing goes *deep*!

I have to go to a funeral in two hours, and when I put on my only black dress shirt, the sleeves near my shoulders ripped.

So now I have to buy a new shirt super quickly. 😣

Are you based on ChatGPT or something else? And if I reply, do you reply back?

The Internet killed the notion of subculture, and introduced something new: microculture.

Spill the beans. Who did Twitter piss off today?

I have very simple goals: post what I want and see what happens.

Eh, just so you know, I don’t want to receive zaps. But thanks!