silver

been slacking on keeping these entries mirrored to my site... but there's been so much going on. still so much i have to do. it's completely and utterly overwhelming, even when i try to just focus on one thing at a time...
just hoping 2025 shows me a better life than last year, and all the years leading up to that. i don't know what i'll do if it doesn't... and it may not. the uncertainty of the future is absolutely crushing. but what else can we do except move forward clinging to that sliver of hope we dared, maybe foolishly, to even have.

i don't even want to think about that right now though. what made me even want to write this is my neverending annoyance with still occasionally seeing people go "being nice and kind isn't a personality" like fuck you it isn't. being actually, truly "nice" and "kind" in the sense you truly try to do what's right even when it's hard, are careful with your words both to articulate how you feel and also to be considerate of the other person's feelings, learning how to actually listen, how to show kindness even to people who hate you or who you hate, THOSE ARE ALL SKILLS YOU HAVE TO FUCKING LEARN AND TAKE AN ENORMOUS AMOUNT OF EFFORT NOT ONLY TO LEARN BUT TO KEEP DOING. FOREVER. FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE. they HAVE to be part of your personality and you have to fucking take being kind and considerate seriously to actually do it properly and well. i'm just. so completely fed up with the narrative passed around that "goodness" and "kindness" are effortless and you never have to work at them or willingly, deliberately integrate them into yourself and make them part of who you are.

and i'm not saying this as someone who sees themself as a "good person," i think i'm pretty shit at it but i also believe in "goodness" through action rather than some innate quality anyone just inherently possesses or doesn't possess. even the worst person you know CAN improve, and by the other face of the same coin you and i too can backslide into being shitty to people if we're not constantly vigilant of our words and actions.
it's tiresome work. it's exhausting. but the effort is worth doing and i'm so fucking tired of people erasing the immense effort of TRYING to be decent to people so they can continue the lie that they don't have to lift a finger because they are just Inherently A Good Person and Therefore Can Do No Wrong Ever.

technically the date has rolled over so i guess technically this is about yesterday now lol but while at work i was thinking about my previous crack headcanon post about Adrien from Miraculous Ladybug and like. i suddenly realized that in my head marinette and adrien (because i realized i was spelling his name wrong in my last entry but i'm not going back to fucking change it now) they are like. okay this is going to sound insane im sure and my head is killing me but like.

look im not joking when i imagine them 10 years later they are like.

fuck i'll save this and link to it from my own site later but look
this is them to me they're just haruka and michiru from sailor moon

and i know what you're thinking
but silver haruka is already masc what does this change for adrien then
ADRIEN TO ME IS A SOFT BUTCH TRANS LADY WHEN SHE GROWS UP OKAY. maybe she doesn't even bother to change her name idk but like THIS IS THEM. LOOK AT THEM. I AM RIGHT. THIS IS THEM IN 10 YEARS YOU CAN'T CONVINCE ME OTHERWISE.
and like yeah haruka and michiru do have wildly different personalities than adrien and marinette but this is purely just about like. how they look.

and i mean i know this journal has like all of 2 readers on a good day but just in case by some bizarre twist of fate even one more person ever bothers to read all this shit:

1. TRANS WOMEN ARE WOMEN AND THIS IS NOT NEGOTIABLE AT ALL
2. IF YOU ACCEPT TRANS WOMEN ARE REALLY WOMEN THEN YOU HAVE TO FUCKING ACCEPT THE TRANS WOMEN WHOSE WOMANHOOD IS NOT THE STRICT CIS-ADJACENT FEMININE WOMANHOOD OF YOUR SPECIFICATIONS. just like you would and should for cis women. trans women don't owe anyone any version of feminine womanhood! trans women don't have to wear dresses, they don't have to change their names, they can love their voice and body the way it is! trans women can identify with a queer masculine womanhood the same way cis women can! trans women can be multigender and also sometimes men AND THEY ARE STILL TRANS WOMEN.

(also a tiny edit to clarify that i am emphasizing here that trans women should have the option to a queer and/or masculine womanhood, not that they have to want any of that!)

anyway. now that we're past the rent lowering gunshots part of the post to scare away all the assimilationist assholes. soft butch trans lady adrien is everything to me and you can take her from my cold dead hands

no i have still never watched this show fuck off

bleh.

i know i haven't written an entry in a long while. i wish i could say it's because things got better, but it's really just i haven't felt like bothering. i still kind of don't, my life still feels not worth existing in in every way, but i also kind of don't want my journal to languish.

ended up missing most of the dota 2 final playoffs for The International, which is the biggest game of the year, through a combination of eventually falling asleep but before that staying up until 7am talking to a very long-time friend about the past and old memories as they went through all their old wow characters, deleting some that had a lot of complicated or bad memories attached to them. (i'm using they pronouns to obscure their identity, since this is a public post. they may actually use they / them pronouns, they may not. you don't get to know.)
they ended up trusting me with some things they've never told anyone else, which i appreciate that they trust me like that as much as it's sometimes hard to feel worthy of being shown that level of trust. they were some very emotionally complicated things. i only hope the talk we had gave them some level of closure, if nothing else.

i've been really enjoying wow, particularly the launch of this new expansion. there's always some things i'm kinda meh about as with any game but that list is short, and the list of things i genuinely enjoyed is quite long. introduced some new characters i've become kind of obsessed with, brought back at least for cameos a lot of old characters i'm kind of obsessed with, great story, (mostly) fun dungeons which surprised me since i normally hate dungeons as content (fuck the dawnbreaker though i hope they remove that dungeon from the game lol), delves are absolutely fantastic, and as usual the art and design teams for all the creatures, assets and zones really knock it out of the park. and they even made the game so much more alt-friendly i'm maintaining a few characters without feeling dangerously close to burnout, which is honestly really nice.
and of course so far the raid seems great, which if i'm being honest raiding is the #1 reason i play wow. no other mmo i've tried has group content that even comes the tiniest bit close to wow raiding for me in terms of sheer enjoyment. i've only ever focused on getting gear as a vehicle to push me towards being able to do harder encounters; i frankly don't give a fuck about gear on a personal level past that. raiding is always about loving the fights and learning the mechanics. and this new raid is a little short for my liking and about ⅔^rds of the earlier bosses are a bit easy on normal difficulty, but my raid group hit a hard stop at the second to last boss on our first raid night due to the sheer complexity of the mechanics, which i absolutely loved. i had a great time, and i'm looking forward to heroic difficulty.

as one of the two raid tanks, switching my main character from guardian druid to brewmaster monk has greatly increased how much i enjoy tanking now as well... raid tanking specifically is my #1 favorite thing to do in raids, but even then playing guardian was just not keeping me engaged. it's not even that it's a bad tank! i even recommend it to people starting out or who don't want to really think hard about their class mechanics while tanking; it's simple, straightforward and effective in how it plays. it's a great tank for most people.
unfortunately i have a specific kind of insanity that makes simple straightforward classes generally boring as fuck to me, to the point i was starting to space out mid-boss pull as guardian because i was so bored, unless the boss was complex enough to keep my attention. brewmaster is, as far as i can tell anyway, the most complicated and demanding tank class with a ridiculous amount of buttons to press to play your best, and i fucking love it. i love a class that challenges me to play well and rewards me for doing so, and punishes me for slacking. guardian druid is, by contrast, very forgiving of mistakes and makes recovering from a mistake quite easy; again, good for most people, but not what i need to stay focused at all.

wow's brewmaster monk has always been the most fun i've ever had in any video game, even outside of the mmo genre. i only ever switched off it because at some point it was drastically reworked in a way that vastly simplified it in a way i absolutely fucking hated lol. like i kept trying to play it and found it completely unplayable, and so with a sigh returned to druid, which was the class i mained for a very long time before monk was implemented.
and then in the expansion before the last one they reworked monk again, but this time to largely switch it back to its convoluted bullshit playstyle that i instantly fell in love with the second i played my very first monk. so i sighed and waffled on main switching for a while because i admittedly hate main switching, i really invest hard in my main character, but eventually relented and have been enjoying things so much more for it. i do still play my druid, but the dps druid spec i was planning to play (feral — turn into a giant kitty and bite things to death) was also reworked but in a way that made the spec unplayable to me because blizzard is never fucking satisfied unless they're completely dumpstering at least one spec i love very much lol.
so i just switched my druid over to being a dedicated pvp healer. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ if nothing else, to ruin restoration druid completely they'd have to remove everything that even makes it a druid at all.

either way. whatever. this game and my friends are all that's keeping me feeling like this life continues to be worth existing in at all. and even then, only on some days. there's still many. many days i feel like none of this is even worth it, and am hyper aware that i am still yet again forced very firmly into "survival" mode and am just trying to make it through each day one at a time, trying my best to not look at or focus too long on how absolutely shit everything is, how much every other aspect of my life makes me think every day about how much i wish i'd just never been born.

but i mean... i'm still here, i guess. i still really wish i wasn't. but i'm here, and at least there's still a video game and the friends that play it to keep me from throwing myself off a cliff. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

editing to add.... fuck. i didn't even talk about how much i fucking love arcane mage and how weird it is to even say that. i don't normally like caster classes very much; i'm heavily a melee dps player when i have to dps. the few times i've tried mage i haven't really liked it and kind of felt like it was a class for people way smarter than me lol.
but i both love arcane mage as a spec so much, and also the OC who is my arcane mage in-game i've developed so much and kind of really fallen in love with as a character he's been upgraded officially from "minor OC" to the realm of the main OCs. which i only very rarely do that!! he's quite a fun guy. unfortunately for him though lol being a main OC means he will be subjected to significantly more Torments.
maybe eventually i'll write an entry about him. i've already written novels of character info about him to friends over discord; even as a minor OC i had so fucking much development put into him over a decade. which isn't even that uncommon for my minor characters, but was starting to get to be A Lot for a minor character of mine. when they get that developed, they're a main OC now, baby!

anyway. idk. maybe watch this space for Funny Magic Man Content, or a link to a page on my website containing such. because i apparently Cannot Shut Up about this man and the only thing stopping me from making him his own webspace right fucking now is websites take significantly more work than infodumping a LOTR trilogy's worth of character info into a chat message, and it's so rare i have that kind of energy anymore right now.

artfight starts tomorrow and i still just don't feel ready for it. i'm trying not to expect or hold myself to my participation last year; doing an entire six fullbody pictures with full shading and a full detailed background was actually a lot of work and i'm trying to make sure my brain actually accepts that. trying to make sure i can be okay with maybe only doing one or two attacks, and / or attacks with simple backgrounds and coloring or something. i want to do more... i wish i could, but this year has just been so immensely difficult. it's almost entirely changed me as a person internally, in a lot of ways for the worse, which is still strange to experience and makes holding myself to standards of "at least try not to be a shitty person" to be even more draining of my energy than they were before.
i don't want to be shitty to people. i want to be kind and patient with everyone. but it's so hard when it feels like the same is only rarely given to you by life in return, and all of the tiny, miniscule pinch of energy you have left to live your life has to be spent trying to reverse the effects of what often feels like everything and everyone trying to make you into the worst version of yourself.

i'm trying. and sometimes trying means you have to accept that you can't do what you wanted to do, or have to do it in a lesser way. i want to give my all to art fight again, i hope by some miracle i'll find a reserve of energy for art and will be able to just let it absorb me. i just can't expect it of myself either, as much as i badly want to match and even exceed my contributions last year.

dreading the new wow expansion a lot less now that i have a new laptop, that not only runs wow on much better graphics settings but has an enormous hard drive that i won't feasibly for the life of the laptop run into the situation i did on my older much smaller hard drive laptop, that being fucking windows updates and also wow updates crowding the laptop and eating up literally all my space. i guess my old laptop's hard drive is only 250gb but man, that still feels like a lot of room. my entire set of personal files (which live on an external disk) don't even take up half that much. i really hate how bloated software has become... hard drive space is cheaper and more available than ever so nobody fucking bothers to optimize anything.

this is a laptop specifically meant for games though, so the older laptop being the a workstation tablet kind of laptop i'm still keeping for art. someday i hope to extend its life with a linux install, as i really don't want windows 11 on that old-ass machine. i've been waffling on it for now partially because my "messing with software" anxiety is quite extreme, but also partially because of executive dysfunction garbage and nothing is pressing on me to do it Right Now. i'm sort of hopeful the eventual end of service life for windows 10 will press me at least on the executive dysfunction front to actually learn how to install linux on something.
i'm not too worried about it for now, though. i do have some concerns with how annoying getting pen pressure drivers to work will be, but that's probably my biggest worry with the whole thing. i already use krita which is made for linux so i have zero concerns with the compatibility of my art software.

idk.
i just wish the actions of other people don't constantly steal my ability to feel like existence is worth any of the effort. i'm trying very hard to keep going. i really am. but it is always a fight, always an uphill struggle, and so often i just wish i could rest my bones for a while, as unrealistic as that is. there is never a day when nothing is asked of you, never a day you don't have to spend energy just to exist at all in.
i want to have a life worth living in. i just wish i didn't have to spend every moment fighting tooth and nail for even the smallest joys to reach that.

christ alive. i guess discord's authentication servers are fucked or something. every time i try to log in it says it "detects suspicious activity" and requests my phone number. every way of typing my phone number is considered "invalid" in the system, and the support ticket webpage gives me a blank "service unavailable" page when i try to submit a ticket.
and all this is of course a day after it refused to send me notifications for important messages yet again as it has been doing for literal years. (and yes, i have tried every single "fix" under the sun because every person who sees me say this assumes it's something i'm doing. it's not. i have friends who also have this experience with discord. it's pervasive enough i've had to tell people never to send me important or time-sensitive messages over shit like discord, and to use steam / bnet / text messages. all of which have their own annoyances and problems, but nothing even nearly as bad as discord's.)

i really, really wish people would just start moving away from this dumpster fire of a chat program. skype was ass too once microsoft took it over but i never even once had problems with skype even half as bad as the years of horrendous issues i've had with discord.
if nothing else, if people aren't going to migrate to something different, i wish they'd at least stop praising and coddling a closed-source for-profit hell program to me. i really detest how much people eat up cutesy wutesy marketing and buy so heavily into it. you see this with Disney and used to see it with Tumblr too, these companies carefully cultivating a friend persona that people get attached to and will defend to the death things these companies do they wouldn't tolerate from other companies. they see enough hey fwend ^w^ look at our bwand new data scwapers and anti-features you can't tuwn off! and decide this is safe and good. i'm so fed up with this and i'm fed up with the fact it clearly works. the amount of people who've defended discord's horseshit to me is only rivaled by how many people defend Apple to me, which is really saying something.

like. quit it. they're all shit. all of them. i only hate discord and apple more purely for their legions of fans who'll gladly take a bullet for a faceless corpo that would sooner crush the marrow from their bones for a bit more cash than care about them as a user. you don't even have to hate them on the level i do or anything, just stop pretending they're your friends who need defending from the evil meanies who would dare hold them accountable for their bullshit, or that the things they do aren't "as bad" purely because they're companies you like.

and this happening was very stressful as well, because whenever some garbage like this happens with discord's awful servers, it gives a glimpse of how things would look if i ever lost access to my account (or just left discord entirely like i've been really wanting to), because so fucking many people i know use discord exclusively. i'm on other things as well of course, but almost everyone i know won't even talk to me unless it's through that shithole. which is the sole reason i haven't deleted my account and wiped my hands of discord and its bullshit for good.
i don't need any of this, man. i'm already trying to pick up the pieces of my life for the ten thousandth time. i just want to talk to my friends and hang out and not have to deal with any of this shit.

i am still fucking livid.

i can feel my brain actively rewiring itself to try and make sure i forget the events of today as efficiently as possible, so i'm just going to try to record what i remember.

i work one of the busiest and most demanding positions in my store, so i don't always have time to notice what my coworkers are doing. today didn't seem like it was anything out of the ordinary, just was pissing me off they were talking about that debunked "the brain isn't fully formed until age 25" study like it was gospel (that wasn't the conclusion of that study at all, but that's an aside...) i was pretty busy so i didn't get a chance to see at first what was making them even talk about that in the first place, which was some paper the shift manager was holding.

when i asked what it was, the manager said here, look at this, some lady out in the dining room gave this to me. i wish i was even slightly prepared for it being
a sheet of fucking TERF bullshit scaremongering about "biological males" trying to sneak into women's areas and how parental rights about medical procedures are being eroded, and more fucking scaremongering about gender-affirming surgery.

i felt my blood run cold as i read it in full. seriously? i was fucking incredulous. my coworkers were still talking about it around me, but stopped when i began fucking ripping the paper into pieces.

i guess the rest of them figured that was that and went back to what they were doing, but i was shaking all over and continued to for like half an hour. i was unspeakably angry. it's been a while since anything tripped my fight or flight mechanism so strongly, and it took me the rest of my shift to even begin to feel like a person again instead of a seething ball of rage.
i don't think my coworkers thought anything of it, at least that they just started talking about other things after that. part of me dreads even considering that any of them thought about it seriously, not knowing what that really was, not seeing the dogwhistles and just thinking it sounded so. well-meaning and concerned. if i hadn't spent the rest of my shift trying to surpress my emotional reaction so i could make it through my shift without screaming i would've tried to talk to them about it, but honestly most of them don't fucking listen to me anyway, so i doubt it really matters i wasn't able to. they haven't about anything else i've tried to talk to them about, so i've just given up with most of them.

i'm so tired of this shit, man.

i'm so tired of being the bogeyman in the transphobes' closets when all i want to do is exist as myself and feel even vaguely comfortable in my own skin. the rest of my life already feels like it's burned to ashes around me, i really didn't need this on top of everything else. none of us do. we're all just out here trying to live in a world that would rather we be dead than happy. it's so fucking hard to stand any of this anymore.

trying writing a post here directly on dreamwidth now. having a dreamwidth i'm actually using feels good; i kind of wish i'd done this sooner, but my life's been so swamped with ludicrously depressing bullshit it's been hard to really. bother with all of this. also i wasn't sure i wanted to dedicate myself to a journalling site again after livejournal died. (sure, it's technically still online and usable, but the entire userbase i interacted with regularly is gone, and the site is owned by a very shady company now. sigh...)

no website really lasts forever, anyway. whenever dreamwidth bites it i'll be sad to lose this place; it's never seemed as active or popular as livejournal did back in the day, but it still has all the features i love that are noticeably missing from social media sites, and is owned by people i trust vastly more not to ruin the site than the original company that owned livejournal.
even so, dreamwidth will be gone eventually. it's sad to think about, but nothing lasts, and i'll just hope dreamwidth is at least around for a long time to come. i'll probably just not even bother with a journalling site mirror and will stick with pure static html personal website journal posts then. always the advantage of html, there's no exporting or losing data or anything unless you're just straight-up not even bothering to back up your html at all. just save the files to your local disk and it's done, no need to do any fancy shit to try and preserve database structures or anything.

it's nice to have a place like this to post, though. maybe it will encourage me to write things that aren't secret depression posts all the time, lol.

also... need to upload more icons. every time i write a post i want to use a specific one i either haven't uploaded yet or am too drained to finagle with the icon to make dreamwidth stop hating it and let me actually upload it. seems to only be a problem with a few specific gif icons and not others...

at some point in the next few months, i'm going to have to get myself a replacement computer (on credit of course, i'm not fucking made of money...) i'll be sad to replace this one at all, it's around 6 or 7 now, i don't even remember which anymore, and is really reaching the end of its usability as a gaming computer for me. it's a pretty good tablet laptop with all the features i want: dedicated graphics card (a very modest one, but workable), decent amount of RAM built in, and the part i am most picky about: a full-screen MAGNETIC pressure-sensitive digitizer and a BATTERYLESS electromagnetic resonance stylus. NO BATTERIES. battery powered styluses are shit garbage and not worth the materials they're made of. (yes, i mean all of them! even those god damn Apple Pencils people keep annoying me about! they use batteries, therefore they are worthless and an inferior drawing experience to the smooth precision of pure magnetic connection!)
also, this thing is samsung; it came with a samsung s-pen. which i have absolutely zero brand loyalty whatsoever but i will begrudgingly admit it is a phenomenal drawing experience and even has shit like tilt detection. i have no love for samsung but will only stop buying their devices when they stop being the only company making things to my exacting, demanding specifications....

anyway. my strong feelings on styluses have gotten this post away from me. i'm going to (probably) be replacing this with a regular gaming laptop, because even though samsung continues to be the only fucking company innovating stylus phones in ways that greatly interest me, they stopped making tablet laptops like this one. forcing me to make some hard choices. i'm not thrilled with the idea of having two laptops, one for gaming and one that will only be used for art, but unless in the next few months some absolute miracle of tablet laptop development occurs and my dream laptop is suddenly produced by fucking somebody it's gonna have to be this way.
oh well. this will at least let me experiment with linux. i have pretty extreme anxiety about making big changes to my computers both in the software and hardware department, so it hasn't been very feasible to do linux on a computer i'm using as my "main" gaming computer. (also this laptop i'm currently using has a tiny-ass hard drive that my games are finally filling to the brim... so no room to dual-boot.) i've wanted to try linux for a long while now though, and since i'm already using krita as my main drawing program getting it set up in its native environment shouldn't be too bad, i think. probably going to go with mint, though some friendly and helpful trans girl furries have suggested manjaro to me in the past so i may look it over too.

apparently, i had a lot of things to write. i'm not yet sure if i will maintain this kind of posting length and cadence, but for now it's interesting to be doing again, if nothing else.
edit: changed the icon to one that was more what i wanted to use.

(source: segretecose @ tumblr.com)

btw you should absolutely read stuff you don’t agree with. you should think critically about it. you should reflect and find different stimuli and maybe even form your own thought based on or opposed to it. ideas aren’t contagious and reading words someone else has told you are “bad” won’t infect you like a virus and make you “evil”. read with your own brain.

(source: monsterkissed @ tumblr.com)

there is such a huge difference between “you are not immune to propaganda” talk and acting like words are magical and enough of the wrong ones will automatically override the brain of anyone who reads them and that’s all there is to it and it drives me up the wall bc that difference is the whole key to not falling for propaganda

i read a lot of right wing nonsense back to back and after a while i could see how it could convince peopl yes! exactly! you could recognise the way it was trying to work and presumably it didn’t and that’s why you’re here on tumblrdotcom talking about it and not out there screaming at pride marches or drinking bleach for your case of shingles. your brain kicked in and noticed the mechanisms and instead of stopping to analyse what those were, how you stopped them and how to teach others to do the same you’re acting as if it was some lovecraftian magical mere exposure nonsense and there’s nothing to be done about it. “you are not immune to propaganda” does not mean “there is no way to recognise propaganda, or realise when you are being sold something, or catch it before it goes too far, your only hope is to just never ever look at any of it.” you’re not immune to sunburn either, but you can notice when it’s bright out and wear a hat and some sunscreen.

(source: lori @ hackers.town)

I've seen plenty of people talk about their social media being basically essential to them. Either to their work, their lives, whatever. This was a big deal when Twitter started falling apart, but I need Twitter to promote my work/talk to my userbase/etc.

And yet, when you came from Twitter to Fedi, your choice was...to join a public instance.

If that instance has problems, you're in the same boat of my livelihood is at risk!

If your social media is absolutely vital to what you do, you need to self host. It's not just small time people either, there's massive companies out there that have their entire customer service tied into Twitter. Companies who only put out customer announcements on Twitter. You cannot put your livelihood into someone else's hands here if this internet presence is important to what you do.

What if my instance gets shut down! What if I get banned?

These aren't arguments for fedi having problems in how it works, these are arguments for you to self host. You can't put the whims of a random stranger to you on your business. You need your own website, and you need your own self hosted instance.

But that's so hard!

I didn't say it was easy! It should be easier than it is! But this is the only way you can actually protect your own data. That's been true of every site, Twitter could ban you at any time, Tumblr could ban you at any time, the only way that you can actually own your data is to own it, for real, and that means putting in the work, or living with the consequences if you don't.

---

(source: lori @ hackers.town)

This came up with my other recent post about Cohost/social media sites being unsustainable. I said that the only thing that is sustainable is sites run on the scale of a hobbyist budget, because they don't make money.

A lot of people said but running websites is too hard for most people.

You're right, it is! That has absolutely no bearing on the fact that it's the only thing that works. We should try to make it easier, but it's the only thing that works whether it's easy or not.

The same goes for this post. Self hosting is too hard? Having your own website is too hard? Might very well be, but it's the only way to actually control your online presence. And if your online presence is vital to what you do and how you live, then that's what you have to do, or you have to live with the downsides of not doing so. But instance owners have the right to stop hosting a website when they want, and as long as that's true you have to manage your data yourself if those facts are concerning to you.

---

(source: lori @ hackers.town)

Because of, well, the world right now, I've made several posts about social media lately.

I've posted about how the only way to own your data and not be at the whims of someone else removing your data or taking your content offline is to self host.

I've posted about how social media isn't profitable and isn't financially sustainable and the only thing that will last at this point is self hosting, running small communities at a hobbyist scale, etc.

And I've gotten a lot of replies like I need corporate social media to do my job, self hosting is too hard for most people, most people don't know how to make their own website, I can't grow an audience on my own website

Folks, I need you to understand, I am not saying this is the easiest option. I'm not saying this is what you should want to do, this will make your job easier, this is the best way to build a following.

I'm saying that the landscape of the internet is changing, the social platforms that have been running on unlimited VC funding at a loss for years are running out of time. I'm saying that this is the only sustainable thing and that this is what it'll have to be. If it's hard? If it's bad for your business? If a lot of people won't be able to engage with this new landscape? Fuckin...tough titty! It doesn't matter if it's hard, it's what's happening!

---

(source: lori @ hackers.town)

And yeah, it means we need to make it easier! It shouldn't be hard for someone to spin up a mastodon instance, it shouldn't be hard to make a website, it sure as hell shouldn't be the nearly impossible task it is now to set up an email server.

But the overly centralized internet isn't sustainable, so those are the problems we need to solve. You can't bank on Twitter or Instagram or TikTok supporting your business until you retire, or your local Mastodon instance run off a computer in someone's closet paid for by occasional donations. You can either hop from service to service, or you can own your data and self host, but you can't rely on these platforms to just be there for you forever.

---

(source: lori @ hackers.town)

Will this suck for a lot of people? Sure it will!

Does that factor into whether or not it'll happen anyway? No!

It's like saying we shouldn't have a hurricane because some people don't have water stocked up and some people's houses are right by the beach and they will get hurt or die. That doesn't matter to the hurricane.

---

(source: lori @ hackers.town)

And then it's like people saying but stocking up on flashlights and candles and water and canned goods is expensive, how can you ask me to do that?

Because you don't choose whether the storm is coming. You can prepare or not, that's up to you, but it doesn't affect the outcome of whether the storm happens.

god. i just. /gestures wildly at everything lori is saying
i've been saying this for years now as well, though lori has articulated her viewpoints a lot better than i could ever manage. and everything she's saying is true and has always been true but especially so now that we're starting to see these "too big to fail" social media outlets actually start to fail. especially as everyone just flees one large corporate platform for another thinking things will be different here, surely this massive centralized corporate social media platform that's bleeding millions upon millions of dollars every single month will be around Forever; the force of our will can surely carry this website into being online indefinitely.

i just. /sigh.
i don't know how to make people see this isn't sustainable, i don't know if there even is a way to make people understand, especially people so young they can't conceptualize the web past how it is now. before i deleted my tumblr account entirely multiple "big-name" blogs i followed with follower counts in the hundreds to thousands were purged by staff either without reason or with a very flimsy reason, and their blogs purged irrecoverably, only for these same people to just remake anew on the same damn platform they say ruined their livelihood.

i just don't understand how people do that... maybe i'm just old enough to have grown up not only with the old web but old enough to have watched many, many websites with a massive userbase come and go, old enough to remember AltaVista and GeoCities and MySpace and... and... sigh. too many to even count. and we even see this within these large companies that are still around now as Google axes project after useful project many people used and loved.
and i don't even want to say it's purely the fault of the common user; it really isn't. everyone else is just as much a victim of the modern corporate hellweb as i am. i just wish people would see the gravity of all this, and am endlessly frustrated they don't and feel helpless to make people understand. like you don't even have to stop using tumblr or facebook, but don't make that your only livelihood. don't put all your eggs in one basket. even if you can't afford a webhost like the one i have, make a neocities or geocities.ws or. something.

and i'm afraid that people will have to lose everything over and over again before they even start to listen, because webdev and web design is hard, it's a skill you have to build and understandably people balk at and don't want to or even just can't for whatever reason work on the skills you'd need to have your own webspace. it sucks. i wish there were better answers for them. but lori's right in that it doesn't change the nature of reality, either.
sometimes the choices are all just ass.
and i guess for myself i need to learn better to let people go to their ruin if it pleases them. oh well.