start writing actual blog posts

5 files changed, 62 insertions, 10 deletions

diff --git a/src/blog/centralization-through-decentralization.md b/src/blog/centralization-through-decentralization.md
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+---
+title = "Centralization Through Decentralization"
+date = 2023-05-24T20:00:00-05:00
+tags = [ "software" ]
+---
+An opinion piece was recently published in Wired magazine titled ["The Hidden Dangers of the Decentralized
+Web"](https://www.wired.com/story/the-hidden-dangers-of-the-decentralized-web/). It makes a lot of basic factual errors, conflates valid reasons to mistrust centralized social media with antisemitic conspiracy theories and grifts, and somehow even manages to make basic security practice out as conspiratorial. I'm not all that interested in giving it the time of day, except for one paragraph that stuck out to me.
+
+> While the platforms offered by Meta and Alphabet are certainly not without issue, it is hard to deny the convenience of their established existence, which makes it possible to communicate, be entertained, shop, and more all in the same place. By contrast, users of decentralized platforms will need to download a slew of apps for everything they want to do online, because these features will no longer all exist in one place.
+
+Even if we accept the premise that you can somehow get by while restricting all your shopping to Facebook Marketplace, this state of things is not even 10 years old. [Facebook Marketplace launched in 2016.](https://about.fb.com/news/2016/10/introducing-marketplace-buy-and-sell-with-your-local-community/) Youtube and Gmail are both Alphabet/Google products, but they come bundled *today* on flagship phones as two separate apps. If you want to see people whose primary presence is on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Youtube, Twitch, TikTok, Tumblr... you need all of those apps installed. Or you could use your web browser, because each of those is available as a website still (despite what these corporations would want -- they push very heavily on "better in the app!" experiences because it gives them more ownership of what your eyeballs are doing).
+
+That's not the experience you get from decentralization. If you make an account somewhere that runs the Twitter-like Mastodon or Calckey, you can follow people from the other. Or from the 2010-era Facebook-like Friendica. Or the YouTube-like Peertube. Or the Instagram-like Pixelfed. Sign up in one place, see people everywhere. Or so the story goes. In practice, this interoperability is often kind of unstable, but it's better than the literal nothing you get between two platforms owned by different corporations (or even by the *same* corporation; Instagram stories started showing on Facebook ... a few months ago?).
+
+And do you know what I had 10 years ago that I don't now? Literally all of my instant messaging in one place. On my laptop, I had a piece of free software called Pidgin. On this one app, I was logged into MSN Messenger, Skype, ICQ, Facebook Messenger (which used XMPP until 2015), the IRC server for my university honors program, and Twitch chat (which is still [a version of IRC](https://dev.twitch.tv/docs/irc/)). The only thing it didn't do was text messaging, but I carried a phone for that. One application, one unified experience, six accounts that I set up once and barely had to interact with again.
+
+It is not decentralization that results in "app fatigue" as this joke of an article calls it. If you want a centralized experience, you need stuff that's built to work together by design. Or that's hacked to work together, in the case of Pidgin/libpurple plugins talking all sorts of proprietary protocols like the AOL and Windows Live Messenger ones. Stuff built to make money off of you is incentivized to pen you in. Ever tried to use Facebook Messenger from the browser on your phone?
diff --git a/src/blog/foobar.md b/src/blog/foobar.md
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----
-title = "Second post"
----
-Second post, hooray!
----
-This one has an excerpt so there's extra stuff under the cut!
diff --git a/src/blog/hello-world.md b/src/blog/hello-world.md
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----
-title = "Hello, World!"
----
-Hello, World!
diff --git a/src/blog/not-a-femboy.md b/src/blog/not-a-femboy.md
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+---
+eleventyExcludeFromCollections = true
+permalink = false
+
+title = "Why I'm Not a Femboy"
+tags = ["gender"]
+---
+<style> * { text-transform: lowercase } </style>
+
+https://plural.cafe/@devin/109647329871170072
+- yes i'm fem yes i'm boy no i'm not femboy
+- no personal issue with its use in sexual fantasy and porn category because hi, though conflation of trans women
+    with gnc men and crossdressers is a systemic issue there. those categories can get really blurry and the popualrity
+    of femboy as a self-identification for a lot of people on feminizing HRT is a testament to that, but i hate how
+    the cisgender eye views trans porn and misgenders trans actors to lump them in with whatever category is in style
+- but the cultural context i have for it is from /lgbt/ on 4chan (thanks high school us)
+    - not going to go into message boards' favorite "traps" (pre 2014-ish) now "femboys" (post 2014-ish), several of
+        which are canonically not men (e.g. astolfo) or are obviously written to be trans women by a writer who doesn't
+        know what they're doing (e.g. ferris, especially in the novelization)
+    - tied up deeply in passing politics where you're passing or you're a "hon", and femboy as the fallback identity
+        for those scared of not being able to pass
+    - the way i navigate transmisogyny is not my gender identity i just *am* a gnc boy on estrogen
+
+
diff --git a/src/blog/why-blog.md b/src/blog/why-blog.md
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+---
+eleventyExcludeFromCollections = true
+permalink = false
+
+title = "Why a Blog in 2023?"
+---
+- because i want to
+- flaws of microblogging
+    - other people, mostly. 
+    - harassment, unsolicited advice - blogs without comment sections add friction. nobody knows what the hell
+        the primary audience of a public post is (hint: it's still followers, just because you can see it doesn't
+        give you license to be an utter asshole as if you're being spoken to directly)
+    - doomscrolling
+    - despite the fact that people keep trying to spin up archives and search and everything, the format
+        is inherently better suited to ephemerality
+- mastodon was pretty decent if you maintained a blocklist of about 1/3 of the instances out there (nazis and foss
+    evangelists) and had a high tolerance for dealing with self-righteous white leftists who think that they're immune
+    from doing anything wrong (particularly perpetuating racism) because they're neurodivergent or queer or both
+- but with tumblr and cloudflare and facebook making overtures towards moving onto the activitypub-compatible fediverse
+    (or "mastodon" for short, for those who haven't heard about all the other software that works with mastodon)
+- and we're just fucking burned out on maintaining both the software and a community