Wider shot of the tourists in Rome
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The Absurdity of Social Media and the Fediverse

Byrichard
Reading Time: 3 minutes

It’s Ten Fourty Eight on a Monday and i have barely touched social media. I have barely touched social media for two reasons. People don’t see it as socialising anymore. They take a utilitarian approach to social media, which makes it absurd. The second reason is that we see how ignorant the world is about current affairs.

In the past when we used social media we were looking to have conversations, share ideas and do more. Now people want to promote books, and fill gaps in time between when they are with family, friends or colleagues, without considering that social networks, for decades, were about connecting people who lived alone, or were too introverted to be the life and soul of “physical world” parties.

Everyone on Twitter says “I am not looking for friendships” and “I am not looking to meet online friends in real life” and as I see these posts every so often I think “then what the fork am I still doing on the Fediverse, and Twitter?” I am not on Twitter anymore, but I wrote that out of habit.

If the people I interact with on Social Media don’t actually want to be social, then my use of social media has become absurd, because I want one thing, and everyone else is utilitarian. It nullifies the use of these social networks.

The uphill battle that I have strived towards, for decades, is absurd as it was in the 90s. It’s as lonely to use social networks as it was in the 90s.

Meetup

I did consider dumping the Fediverse for Meetup.com, to meet with people in person, and to do pleasant sports. I changed my mind when I saw that they want 30 CHF per person, per event, in some cases. When I’m doing the driving and navigating I don’t want to pay someone 30 CHF just for organising something that should be free. I am fine with covering petrol and other costs. I’m not fine with paying a random person money for organising something, without anything being provided.

Facebook

The reason for which I dumped Twitter is clearly present on Mastodon instances so I am tempted to dump Mastodon too. I find myself gravitating back towards Facebook. If people are not looking to build friendships on the Fediverse, and if people are not informed about Current Affairs, then it makes sense to gravitate away from Twitter and Mastodon instances, towards Facebook. Facebook is, after all, a network of IRL friends that we happen to be friends with online, too.

Local Groups

One of the key advantages of Facebook over the Fediverse is that we can find networks of local people. We can meet local people, and go to local events. We don’t have to be isolated with strangers ranting about current affairs that no one has read a book about. We can meet local people, and shift our personal lives from online solitude, to offline friendships, and maybe more.

And Finally

I still hate Facebook but Meetup wants money for events. The Fediverse is filled with ignorant people arguing about current affairs rather than reading and understanding context. Twitter is degrading rapidly, and swinging to the Right. The Fediverse is also filled with the Utilitarianism that I was complaining about from 2007 onwards. In the end Facebook might have become the least worst option around, for the moment. I can’t believe I wrote that.

The reason I dumped Facebook hasn’t left, but there does seem to be a local community at last, and that’s priceless. I use social media to negate solitude, and the Fediverse is not helping negate that sentiment.

Facebook is still filled with a lot of kitsch.

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Instant translation with Google Chrome

Byrichard

One of the best features of google chrome at the moment is it’s instant translation function. The idea is simple. You surf to a page, it automaticaly detects the language and then presents the content in a language you understand.

With such a feature the advantage is that it opens up a whole new batch of knowledge and information. Surf to a Polish page about Kabanos, a Polish/eastern European speciality and the content is instantly available in English.

As a second example if you’re in Switzerland and surf to a swiss page the content may originaly be presented in English but the software will translate it. As a result there is no longer the need to hunt for that language switching part of the page.

The big picture insinuates that whatever the language you speak you will be able to read the content in many more pictures. As a result language will become transparent.

Friendfeed has a great future

Byrichard

I really like Friendfeed and what it’s becoming. What I love is how easy it is to follow many people and converse with them about everything they share. It’s the future of web sharing but it may take several months for people to move towards it.

There are a number of things I love. First of all it aggregates your live stream in one place, so anyone who has an interest in you can share what they like about your work and you can follow this conversation. The second aspect that makes it so strong is that you can do the same for them. You can select those you think are thought leaders and follow everything they do and say. It’s mature, it’s like a web forum but grown up in that it branches out to blogs, twitter, plurk, youtube and flickr to name but a few networks.

That’s just a small part of what makes it so interesting. Something else that makes this website and service interesting is the level and depth that conversations can take. If you get a few people talking together you get a debate and a dialogue, or conversation going. This contributes to the continuation of the discussion. What’s more is that it’s less name based. You can see what FOAF (Friends of a friend) are discussing and joining in.

That’s not where it stops though. The rooms, albeit a little geeky for now will be a great place for people to come and discuss new topics, from political elections to festive events where they live and more. It’s specially designed for this. Look at the Davos room for example. RSS feeds from a variety of sources are aggregated into one place for easy digestion, especially when using the realtime feed option.

The biggest weakness of the site at the moment is user numbers. With just a few hundred passionate users the discussion means the creation of a strong community bond that has long since dissapeared (or at least changed) for Twitter.

Add Feedly to this and you’ve got one of the most interesting services yet to come out. Feedly makes it easy to share your content to many social networking websites, of which friendfeed and Google Reader are part. Read your google reader items in feedly, share them, add notes and more. It’s all synced from one place and it’s not website specific. You don’t need to be on the feedly website to use it. Just add the plugin and it works.

I look forward to welcoming you there.

Cropping an activity on Strava
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Cropping an activity on Strava

Byrichard

When you’re hiking, cycling, climbing or doing other sporting activities it is easy to forget to stop tracking an activity. When you’re at home or static this is less critical. When you get into a car after a hike or other activity that mistake will screw up your average speed and other data.


Yesterday I realised that I had forgotten to stop tracking on my Suunto device and on my apple watch. With the Apple watch this was less important because it logs individual climbs. With the Suunto device however it tracks the speed of the drive as well as the increase and decrease in altitude.



Strava has two options to fix this mistake. Split is good for running and cycling activities. It allows you to split and then delete what you do not want to keep. Crop allows you to select the in point and the outpoint of an activity like you would if you were editing video.



In the image above you can see the track from the climbing gym towards the motorway. Initially I adjusted the sliders simply to remove that segment but noticed that there is a more precise tool.



With the climbing profile view you can see each climb as well as the difference in altitude as you drive from the car park to the motorway. I deleted the superfluous data and pressed “crop”. I then had a clean export of my activity.


This is a quick, intuitive and useful feature to know about. It allows you to keep a more accurate record of previous activities and a more reasonable track of distance covered over the last week, month or year. Some day I might go back and clean up previous activities.

Has Social Media made us less sociable?

Byrichard

Introverts who are not going to compete with extroverts, through social media, have an opportunity to have friendships and interactions that would otherwise not occur. To say that Social media makes is unsociable is a fallacy.

When I was a uni student the second time around I was socialising with fellow students all throughout the day and I was also active in social media. In 2007-2009 facebook was my university friend network. Twitter was strangers. Facebook was an extension of my physical social life.

Twitter was an opportunity to meet new people. It helped me meet people from tuttle. It introduced me to Seesmic when it was in Alpha. I conversed with some of the big names of the time and went to podcamps. I was invited to Leweb in Paris in 2009 and we met had seesmic meetups a number of times

More recently playing Ingress by Niantic Labs has helped me meet people in Paris, lausanne, Fribourg, Geneva, Nyon and other places. To say that social media makes people less social is to ignore that people use social media for conversations, not for brands.

The fallacy of most “social media professionals”, “Social media experts” and other “social media” snake oil practitioners is that they go home to a spouse or better half. They have no need to create a relationship with the people they are interacting with. As they do not create relationships with those who use social media they are kicking dust in the Atacama desert in the hope to raise enough dust to create a nucleus to which water will collect and fall as rain water.

There is a shift in social media today. It is a shift away from conversations especially on websites such as twitter and facebook towards brand brainwashing. As a result of this facebook and twitter have lost engagement.

That is not to say that other niche social networks are not benefiting from the ground broken by Facebook and twitter. In particular I am thinking of websites for slow ups and other group activities. I’m thinking of OVS (on vas sortir), Glocals (Geneva Locals) and many other social networks. I notice that the expatriated and international community benefit strongly from websites that encourage groups of people to do communal activities. Thanks to Glocals I scuba dived every single weekend for more than a year, I learned about Via Ferrata and loved the sport, I finally got to rock climb, I enjoyed canyoning and more. The idea that luddites can constantly bash social interactions via computers and electronic devices fatigues me.

You know what the most amusing thing is about the people who say that social media reduces conversations is? Their one word answer. :-D. Don’t you just love the irony?

Installing NextCloud on a Pi and an HP EliteBook

Installing NextCloud on a Pi and an HP EliteBook

Byrichard

Yesterday I installed Nextcloud on two devices, a raspberry Pi and an HP Elite book and I could see a clear difference between the two machines. The HP is a laptop on which I installed a minimal version of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and I installed a similar version of Ubuntu on the Raspberry Pi.

Fast on the HP Elite Book

I believe I used Snap to install Nextcloud and then went to the web interface to configure it automatically by simply creating a user. Within seconds the system was up and running and I was able to upload images, create directories and more. It worked well.

Slow on Pi

I then tried the same installation procedure on the Raspberry Pi and right from the start I noticed a difference. With the Pi simply opening Firefox was a slower experience. Downloading Nextcloud took several minutes on the Raspberry Pi and then several more minutes to create the first admin/user.

I setup the Raspberry Pi to provide me with SSH access before trying to upload an image from a third machine. It failed, giving me an error: “insufficient memory” message. I killed the Firefox process, tried again and it worked.

Lack of CPU power

I believe that the error I was getting when uploading from the Nextcloud iOS app was due to a lack of resources but I am not sure. The Pi has sufficient RAM. I was playing with an 8GB model. It’s the CPU that couldn’t cope, which is why I killed the Firefox process.

Why Use a GUI

By using the GUI with the PI yesterday I got to see error messages that I don’t usually get to see and I got to experiment. By seeing error messages we have a better idea of what to fix than when we just get an error in the iOS app.

Next Step

The next step is to try the same experiment but with Ubuntu Server rather than the Desktop version. This should save CPU power and enable the same experiment, without the overhead. If configured correctly then you could plug it into the LAN network and use the device from anywhere where it can be wired in.

Why a PI rather than a Thin Client or Bare bone PC?

In practice you can use any old computer you have gathering dust, but in so doing you’re going to need a space for the laptop if you use a laptop or a tower if you’re using an old PC. A Bare bones PC or a thin client would be more interesting but the cost is around 200 CHF if you count 133 CHF for a NUC and 70 CHF or more for a hard drive. With the Raspberry PI you end up spending a similar amount.

I read that you could setup a NUC with two four terabyte drives. This is a great solution if you want to invest in a slightly higher spec solution.

The advantage of the Pi is that it doesn’t take much more space than a deck of playing cards. Your Nextcloud client could live directly plugged in to the router with a tiny footprint.

Flexible

One of the great things about playing with Raspberry Pi is that we all have at least three or four microSD cards. This means that we can install one OS on one card, and another OS on another card. We can swap from one OS to another within seconds with the Pi.

Remembering the 90s

When I was playing with Linux in the 90s I had to burn CDs and DVDs every time I wanted to experiment with a different OS. This was wasteful as each CD-ROM or DVD would be used once or twice at most, before being waste. When I installed Linux on the latest laptop I had to write the USB key, and then install from the USB key to the laptop.

With a Raspberry Pi SD card you write the OS to the microSD card and 30 seconds after you finish writing it you’re booting up the Pi. This means that experimentation can be very fast. To use an apt french expression “it’s not like drinking the sea”, “ce n’est pas la mer à boire”. It’s easy to experiment until you break something. It’s easy to reset.

And Finally

If you want to keep your personal Nextcloud instance available 24 hours a day then a Raspberry Pi makes sense because you can use a 500 gigabyte MicroSD card and store twice as much data backups as you have on your phone. The other option is that you can plug in a box like this to your Nextcloud laptop every now and then and get terabytes of storage for much cheaper than if you use Synology or another brand. The other advantage is that if a Pi or laptop dies, you can plug in another device and recover access within seconds.

There are simpler solutions for sharing disks between computers, like Samba but sometimes it’s good to learn tools that can do more.

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