Swiss Kettlebell advert
I find this swiss kettlebell advert amusing. It shows a cow peacefully grazing in a field until a woman starts ringing a cow bell.
A few days ago I went towards the lake to take pictures. The wind was strong and cold. The temperature was close to -9°c. The last time we had such cold weather the
It is amusing to see these porcelain boats. This boat
When you get some pictures you need to experience the weather. On this specific day I had to walk along a frozen jetty. I did not care about walking normally. I walked so that if I slipped I could grab on to the rocks on my left. If I fell to the right I would fall into lake water at around 5°c. When I got close to where I wanted to get pictures I wanted to photograph the waves breaking and I got the image that you see above.
The wave splashed me. My coat was soaked and so were my jeans. Within seconds my coat started to freeze but I continued to take a few pictures. Within minutes I could feel that the damp jeans were beginning to freeze. I stopped taking pictures and as I headed back I could feel the parts exposed to the wind start to freeze. I got some warm food and went to thaw and dry.
I could feel that my hands were cold, especially one or two fingertips. It didn’t take long to warm them up. Despite the cold wind, this is nothing like scuba diving in five-degree waters for 20+ minutes like I used to do for two years a while ago. There was no excruciating pain, no desire to cry because of the pain.
Within a few days we got another treat. Deep snow by the lakeside.
Winters are most fun when they look wintery. Snow and ice make winters more fun. With snow and ice we can take seasonal pictures and for those of us willing to brave the
Before 2006 we talked about social networks. it’s only with Twitter, Facebook and Instagram that the idea of social media emerged. With it came a golden age of online communities where Facebook was for Uni students to keep in contact with each other, Twitter was to microblog about project progress and more, and instagram was a place to share images taken during the daily commute to work, sporting ativities and more.
At the time social networks were small, tightly knit communities that eventually wanted to meet in person, whether at tweetups, barcamps, and unconferences. The pandemic, and mass adoption changed these. The social networks unravelled and they became networks of strangers and friends of friends.
Threads Is Not About Community
Although Threads os over-hyped as a Twitter killer the real Twitter killer is Twitter. Until November people who wanted to flee couldn’t, because it had critical mass. It’s because of cascading mistakes that Mastodon even stood a chance of being noticed, that BlueSky and other apps were spun off, and that Threads was marketed. Threads is not a twitter replacement for the simple reason that it has no chronological timeline to see posts by the people you choose to follow. Threads, like Instagram and Facebook is just a glossy mag, where an algorithm chooses what you see, or don’t see.
Live Radio and WinAmp Analogy
Imagine that you decide to listen to music. You have two choices. You can listen to live radio, with adverts, paid promotions, a little dj chatter and music that was chosen either by the DJ or a musical algorithm. The choice isn’t yours.
In contrast with Winamp you have no adverts, you have no dj. You have complete control on whether you want to play songs, choosing each one, playing a playlist, or allowing an algorithm tho choose depending on your mood or most played songs.
Both fall within the scope of listening to music, but one is entirely controlled by the listener, and the other is controlled from above, by the radio station
How it ties in to Social Media
Threads is seen as a Twitter killer and the media love it but threads is an algorithm driven social media option where the user is not controlling their own experience. The higher ups are. If you use Facebook you see posts by strangers, not friends. If you use instagram every fourth post is influencer rubbish or an advert. The community has been weakened. I don’t expect Threads to be any different.
The Fediverse Alternative
By fleeing from Twitter to Threads you’re fleeing from the frying pan into the fire, rather than a bucket of ice. Twitter, Facebook et al are controlled by the same people, so by fleeing from one to the other you’re staying within the same sphere of influence.
In contrast, if you flee to the Fediverse, then you’re fleeing to the Winamp experience, where you are in control. You can choose which instance you want to be on, and yet you can chat with the global community if you like, or the local one. When I say local, I mean local to that server, not local to where you live, although if you had that desire then you could setup a local server instance for your physical world community.
The beauty of the Fediverse is that if you’re a blogger then you can add your blog to the fediverse natively, and have your own fediverse instance. You can microblog with it, if you like, or you can write full form blog posts. People can comment, like and more, and those will be mirrored on the blog, and the blog will mirror to the fediverse. It’s so dynamic that if you make a typo in a blog post that you have already published, you can correct it and it will propagate to your followers.
The Community
With the Fediverse, the more time you put into it, the more you will expand your network, and the more visible you become. You become visible, by chatting, commenting, liking and re-tooting and more. Algorithms are not used. Chronological timelines are. The more engaged you are, the more visible you are.
With Mastodon you don’t need to enrage people, offend them and more. Being a conversationalist is the only requirement. It really does feel like Golden Age twitter, rather than what we have had since 2008 and beyond. It feels like a worthwhile network once more.
European Intuition
I can’t play with threads for two reasons. The first reason is that Threads requires an absurd amount of permissions, from health, to spending habits, to browsing history. In summary it requires every permission that an iphone app could ever ask for. Europe said no, so in Europe, for now, we can’t use the app.
I browsed YouTube to see if I could find examples to see if I could find how different Threads is from Instagram and Facebook but couldn’t. What I did find were vlogs by people over-hyping the social network as revolutionary, and ground breaking.It isn’t. It’s the same pig, with different lipstick. To be clear, by pig I mean Facebook app, built to waste our time and sell adverts.
The Fediverse and BlueSky are more fateful Twitter competitors but they don’t have a userbase of two billion people. To join the Fediverse or BlueSky either requires joining an instance or getting an invite.
Mainstream Media and Social Media Control
Threads is being pushed as the Twitter clone and killer for two reasons. The first is that it’s brand new so it attracts curiousity so it makes sense to over-hype the thing that people are curious about. The second reason is that the people who control and own social media also control and own mainstream media, so they’re promoting the product that they want to win.
My Perspective
From my perspeective Threads is not a Twitter clone, or a Twitter killer because it doesn’t see any value in allowing people to follow their friends. It sees no value in giving people a sleek user experience without adverts, and injecting influencer ‘content’. I want to use a stronger word but will remain polite.
Blue Sky has taken itself out of the running recently, because it has seed funding from venture capitalists, and we know that all websites that get VC funding eventually get destroyed.
The true contender, in my view, as a twitter replacement is Mastodon because it shows the values and morality of early Twitter. It’s a network of friends of friends having conversations across servers, timezones and more. With time communities willm strengthen and expand and eventually true communities will exist.
The Fediverse is already broad. It has Mastodon, Lemmy, Kbin, WordPress and more already playing nicely with it.
And Finally
If and when Threads connects to the fediverse we will suddenly have an enormous amount of noise, and the cult of personality, that helped destroy Twitter and Instagram will destroy the fediverse if people are not careful. Threads is already 70 million people.
Final Thought
At the time of writing this post the fediverse had 13 million accounts. Threads already has 70 million. When Threads connects into the fediverse, the fediverse will be diluted and destroyed by Threads users. People say “but we can’t build a wall to keep people off of the fediverse. If we don’t block Threads, we will have no refuge from big tech. Remember, we left big tech websites for a reason.
Advertising and documentaries don’t mix and this is especially true in the US. When you have ad breaks every 5-10 minutes telling a story is impossible. You have to think of the people tuning in half way, and you need to think of those leaving after just one ad break. As a result of this the documentary has to be sensationalised. It also needs to be a loop. Mythbusters are a series that I enjoyed watching for many months. As the series progressed however they were made less watchable. The reason for this is coping with the advertising regime of the channels on which they are broadcast.
On watching these documentaries episode after episode you spend three quarters of your time being told what happened before and what’s going to happen afterwards. New content is about twenty percent of the show. If you were to cut down their shows to remove the repetition you’d go from a one hour programme to a 15 minute show. This is perfect for the web, but impossible to watch on television.
Commercial broadcasters say that they have to fight for the audience’s attention, that they have to make it as sensationalistic and entertaining as possible. They need to use breathless reporters, they need to use advanced graphics and more. They blame the audience for not having the attention span to sit through 45 minutes of content without switching.
The audience is not to blame. It’s the content interruption that is to blame. Television adverts are disruptive. They usually add nothing to the enjoyment of a show. Television watching, as it’s broadcast, has become old fashioned. Why watch something live when you’re going to waste twenty to thirty percent of that time watching adverts for products that are of no use to us as consumers at this point in our lives. If we record the show using a PVR we can skip the ads and watch the show almost without interruption. It’s pleasant. It’s efficient.
Advertisers are not happy with this. They want a guarantee of eyeballs. That’s where our new media landscape comes in. Video on Demand is so convenient today that if we like an advert we’ll go to youtube and other sources, find the advert and watch it. You don’t need a show for people to watch the advert. You don’t need an advert to pay for the content.
Last week it was comfortable and warm so it was tempting to go cycling. This week it has gone back to being cold. Yesterday it was cold and windy and today was cold but sunny. I went for my usual walk but rather than listen to a podcast I watched TikTok videos as I walked at full speed. I am so used to the paths that I do not always need to pay attention.
The paths are dry. It hasn’t rained in days. The rivers are lower than they’ve been in a while and in theory river walking may be possible once again, as long as you don’t mind cold feet.
What was out of the ordinary today is that I saw people walking through fields on two separate occasions. On one occasion it was a trio of older people and their behaviour made no sense to me, for the simple reason that you can very easily walk around the field, and that the field has crops on it. If you’re going to walk through a field make sure that it has been harvested, that it is fallow or that no cows are using it.
I later saw a duo of people doing the same thing on another field and this does seem odd. Why would two groups of people have the same discourteous behaviour of walking over a crop?
Rather than walk along the usual routes I cut through the forest, walking through leaves, over dead branches, between trees and more. I filmed the progress I made. At the moment walking through forests is easy because none of the undergrowth is out yet. Walking between trees is easy, and so is navigating. When the undergrowth grows in spring such explorations will no longer be possible. That is when cycling will be more fun. I look forward to the cycling season starting properly once again. I went to be on the bike, and to explore. I also want to feel that something is finally changing.
I saw a Trio of older women and I thought that they may be having adventures like the three men in Last of the Summer Wine. A trio of friends going for mischievous adventures in nature during their afternoon walks.