Easter Friday traffic heading past Nyon on the A1 motorway

Threads And Europe

Byrichard
Reading Time: 2 minutes

Yesterday Facebook, discguised as meta, and Meta, diguised as Instagram launched Threads. Threads is meant to be a twitter competitor. The paradox is that Facebook has always been a twitter competitor, and this has become more evident with every iteration of both social networks. It is paradoxical that Facebook would need threads, to compete with Twitter.

Not Available in Europe

Threads, at the time of writing this blog post is not available in Europe because it requires data, which brings it in breach of GDPR rules. The only European Country where threads is authorised is England.

Commercial Use of Fediverse Data

Today I thought about the way in which Meta, through threads, could syphon data without user permissions for commercial use. Is Meta allowed to gather our data through the fediverse, and use it for commercial purposes or am I mistaken?

No Chronological friends timeline

I glimpsed a few lines that implied that Threads is a social network where we do not follow a chronological timeline of what our friends are posting. I left Facebook and Instagram because I had no desire to follow strangers that reminded me of what my life could be. It felt like a glossy magazine where you pay for adverts, rather than content. That is why we dumped plenty of magazines.

Why would you want to be on a network where you declare your friends, but see posts by strangers instead?

No Desire To Play

Although I should, I have no desire to play with threads and I read something that would worry me, if I was on Threads. Signing up to threads, via Instagram, binds both accounts. This means that you cannot delete your threads account, without also deleting instagram. Joining is easy, but once you’re in, you’re locked in. You can’t change your mind. You can deactivate your account but nothing more.

The Paradox of Competition

Although Threads is seen as competing with Twitter I think this is a flawed perspective. In so far as I can see Twitter is self-destructing itself. Mastodon, BlueSky, Threads and other apps don’t need to take active measures. Simply exiting as an alternative to Twitter is enough. Remember that Mastodon has been around for years, and that it only became of interest because people did not agree with Twitter’s new direction. It’s not that BlueSky, Mastodon or Threads are stealing users, it’s that Twitter is driving them away. Twitter is pushing people towards the competition.

The Social Media Migration peaks are as a direct consequence of moves made by Musk and Twitter, not the other way around. Twitter blames others, instead of analysing how its behaviour is the push factor.

And Finally

Threads “by Instagram” is just Facebook, rebranded, for those that are not attentive enough to realise that Threads and Facebook are basically the same thing, but rebranded to avoid some of the stigma that Meta collects, without ever apologising about.

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Half a Million Steps in July
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Half a Million Steps in July

Byrichard

In July this year I took half a million steps as I was banned from driving. I’m using that phrase for comedic effect. As I had one arm in a sling driving was out of the question for a few weeks and then it was out of the question because my tendons and muscles were in need of physio therapy.


Carbon Footprint


By not using the car for around one and a half months alone I avoided using at least one tank of diesel for every month of injury and one scooter tank of petrol per week of petrol.


By not using buses I saved on my carbon footprint too. Buses are large and heavy and they are not always full. This means that walking is still more environmentally friendly.


In a normal month I walk from two hundred thousand to three hundred thousand steps. The application estimates that I walked 47 hours. That’s almost a weekend of walking. This excludes all the time spent walking when cooking or doing other tasks.


Waking everywhere is time consuming. Instead of taking half an hour to do a task you have to count at least an hour for the closest shop and an hour and a half to two hours for another shop I like to use.


Walking everywhere requires you to think of time differently. Simple tasks become events and the world shrinks. For over a month my world was anything within two or three hours walking distance.


Optimised for vehicles


We often hear about how towns are not optimised for walking but neither is the countryside. If you walk along secondary roads you have to deal with tractors, pesticides, combine harvesters and other machines. On some rural paths you have to deal with dogs that are not kept on a leash and when you’re afraid of dogs this can be anxiety inducing.


Too many roads connecting villages to shopping centres and too many roads connecting villages have no provision for walkers. This summer I had to choose between walking through thick grass and plants to stay on the side of the road or walk on the road with drivers not moderating their speed. This is paradoxical as, when you’re driving you always get stuck 20km/hr below the speed limit. When you’re walking, just as when you’re cycling, people feel the need to make the gap between oncoming traffic rather than slow down and wait a few seconds.


I came to the conclusion that they should put bike lane markings on every single road if they are unwilling to prepare and maintain walking paths by the side of the road. As a pedestrian I used bike lanes as if they were pavements mainly because of bushes and long vegetation. I believe that as a general rule cars should only be allowed to drive into a cycle lane when overtaking is not possible otherwise. People need to be trained to see bike lanes like bus lanes and avoid them unless there is no alternative.


The Wearing Down of Shoes


One of the things I love to do is look at the soles of my shoes and see how much wear they have as well as whether it’s symmetrical. This time around the wear on my shoes was symmetrical. There is a downside to this wear. Those bits of shoe are left on the roads and in the grass waiting to be washed into the rivers and rivers before making their way to the lakes and seas.


Final Thoughts


Taking half a million footsteps in a month was a pleasant and enjoyable experience. It allowed me to slow down in a way that I have done before. It allowed me to explore even more than I did last year. It got me used to walking to some locations rather than take the car. I walk to physio therapy, to the shop nearby and to the swimming pool. It means that I am not subjected to modern traffic and that for some tasks at least, my carbon footprint is reduced. For the price of a single tank of fuel you can buy two pairs of shoes that will last half a million steps apiece.

City Cat Sitting.
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City Cat Sitting.

Byrichard

For the first time in my life I am cat sitting. I’m used to village cats and this is a city cat so I don’t know how much time I need to spend with the cat, how much I need to play and more.


When I look after toddlers I know that I have to be attentive to them from the moment they wake up to the moment they nap or sleep. It’s a challenge to have that level of endurance.


I’ve started the first 24hr day of looking after a cat and so far it seems that I’m more attentive than I need to be. I feel like I should keep the window open and keep the cat entertained but this is a cat we’re talking about. They entertain themselves.


If we were in the middle of summer I would go for three to five-hour rides taking advantage of the new starting and endpoint. As we’re in the middle of winter I’m waiting for a film festival to start. As soon as it starts I will have something to do in Geneva. For now, I’ve been walking around and playing Ingress.


It’s nice to be so close to the centre of Geneva. I can walk everywhere within half an hour to an hour. Geneva is a small city when you know it. There is no need for buses, trams, taxis etc. Usually, something like going to the Apple store would be an expedition because it takes a 20-minute walk, a train, and then another 20-minute walk. Today I could do the walk within 20 minutes.


We will see how my impressions change over the coming days.

KDrive – A Viable alternative to Google One and iCloud

KDrive – A Viable alternative to Google One and iCloud

Byrichard

KDrive peaks my interest because instead of cost over 100 dollars per year it costs around 64 if you buy directly from their website rather than The Apple App Store, but also because once you send your photos up to the cloud, you can get them down more easily.


With Google One you can store all of your images to the cloud quite easily but because apps like Picasa and others no longer exist, you cannot get them back without spending hours downloading them manually. iCloud is not quite as bad but they are still not ideal. You can upload images to their service, but if you do so, your image gallery must be on a drive with enough storage to take the gallery offline. On mobile phones and laptops this is complicated. In effect your images are stuck until you buy a higher capacity laptop or phone. I know an HD would also work but the issue is that when your image gallery is on another drive you have to keep it plugged in, or sync regularly for it to be efficient.


Simple Synchronisation


With KDrive you have a folder that is synched automatically from your device to the cloud, and from the cloud to another device. If you decide to move your images from one device to another you can do so by requesting that the images are downloaded, and eventually they will be synced. This is a key selling point.


Google One


With Google One you have two terabytes, which are shared between photos, file folders, e-mail and more. They are however, separated. You can access all of the files that you uploaded as files, but you cannot access all of your photos and download them easily. In the past I tried to download images from Google Drive and I found that I was blocked by how many hours it takes to download zip file after zip file for days at a time. This is not a good solution despite being cheaper than iCloud.


iCloud and Price


Aside from the size of the HD you need on your mac laptop or iOS device to download your galleries you also need to pay 120 CHF per year, in perpetuity. With Apple device you pay a premium for the phone, for the laptop but then you pay a premium for the apps, for the services and more. Apple wants 120 CHF per year to keep your data safe, when drives of that capacity are going down in price every single year. I object to paying a tax of sorts, every year, when I have already payed a premium for the products.


KDrive


KDrive, by Infomaniak, based in Switzerland has a number of advantages. The first is that the company is local, so it feels good to support a local effort rather than the giants. The second reason is that their price point is half as much as their competition, especially if you commit to two or three years. The third selling point is that all the files are accessible as if they were already on your local machine. This means that within a short period of time you can recover the files you want to recover, or backup the files that you want to backup.


Features


In the settings you have photo backup, and within this you can enable automatic backup but what makes this one different is that you can choose where to save the images, including which folder. It also creates directory by month and year. This makes it easy for you to find images when you are looking for them.. I like that you can select to upload photos, videos, screenshots and even delete photos once they are backed up, although this is in beta.


I like these features because I don’t want to backup videos because they’re heavy and take time to load, but also because they are not relevant to my photos. I prefer to take care of them separately. No other service offers the option to exclude videos.


Another great feature is that you can choose whether to sync your photos from “now” or all. That is useful. If you’re on a trip and you just want to backup recent pictures then that’s a useful feature. If you have all the time in the world, and enough battery life, then you can sync your entire image library. The fact that you can exclude video initially speeds up the process considerably.


For more information about KDrive. The Prices.


And Finally


Google Drive and iCloud complicate rather than simplify your life, when you are dealing with photos. KDrive simplifies it. If you can migrate your photos away from Google Drive and iCloud to a solution that is more user friendly then you can also reduce the amount of space you need on your devices, as you have offloaded them to the cloud, but then the files that were offloaded to the cloud can be synced your local machine seamlessly. As a media asset manager I greatly appreciate this.


KDrive is now a speedy and efficient solution for the sharing of files, with some intelligent features for the backing up of your phones’ photo galleries. I am in the process of doing that now. I hesitated with other services in the past, but to me this is a clear winner.

Mainstream Fediverse

Mainstream Fediverse

Byrichard

I started writing a post, but felt that it was too negative so I stopped, and now I’m writing this one. I want to explore the way in which Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter and Reddit are still front and foremost on The Guardian Website, as well as many others.


As I write this Twitter has become x.com. Reddit has had several weeks of protests and Facebook reached over three billion users. The paradox, with Facebook is that it’s the most unpleasant “social network” I know. I find Facebook and Instagram deeply unpleasant to use.


The Slow Pivot Away From Corporate Social Media


The goal is not to speak about the social media giants, because plenty of people can do that. What I want to consider, is the lack of attention that is being given to Lemmy, Kbin, Firefish, Mastodon and the Fediverse in general. There is now a fediverse of social networks that we can use to share news, and life.


I don’t see any “share with Pixelfed” or share on “peertube”. I don’t even really see “share via the wordpress community.


By now I would have expected the Guardian, New York Times, Le Monde and other papers to start sharing their news stories and articles via the Fediverse, especially since making a website fediverse friendly is relatively easy, especially if you’re on a self-hosted wordpress blog. Within minutes a wordpress blog can be a fediverse server, if not sooner.


Professional Social Media


If I was working in Professional Social Media I would already have pivoted towards streamlining fediverse participation. With the fediverse a website, or instance, can be fully integrated within the fediverse, making it easier to engage, rather than more difficult. No need for people to sign in, to sign up, or even to browse away from their mastodon feed. Everything is integrated.


You can reply to a fediverse blog post, as a reply, and it’s seamless. There is no barrier to interaction, as we had with older social media websites.


No Navigating Away – No Threads


With the fediverse you can write posts of any length. You can microblog, if you wish, or you can write a dissertation. Both are native, so need to navigate from one website to another, and because character limits don’t exist, if you’re on the right instances, then there is no need for threads.


Threads and the Network Defect


Threads was launched and picked up 100 million users, but they were soon angry that they couldn’t cancel their accounts without destroying their Instagram accounts, but they also found that by not being able to see their followers with ease, the new site/app had little to no value, so 70 million left. It might have been quick to grow but due to design flaws it was also quick to lose users.


FB hasn’t learned


I left FB and IG because the sense of community was lost. The reason people fled Twitter too, is because of the disintegration of the communitiies that they wanted to be a part of. I said that Threads would not be of interest, and as we see, within a week it had lost its appeal.


Not Just Conversations


The fediverse is not just a way for people to chat with each other. It’s a way of sharing entire articles, blog posts, videos, photos and more.


Blog posts, articles and photos are more than that. They are the start of a conversation. If people comment then that content becomes more visible because it bubbles back to the surface again.


New Opportunities


in 2006 and 2007 Twitter was limited by the bandwidth that we had on mobile phones, wifi and home connections. In 2023 the environment is mature. Live video whilst walking, sharing of photos from anywhere, and more, have become common place. The Fediverse is already, video, text, audio, photos, articles, blogs and more.


The Fediverse as Portal


The concept of web portals is an old one, and one of the oldest ones still around is Yahoo. If used properly then the Fediverse can be seen as a portal, for communities to join together and communicate. The Guardian, New york Times and others should take advantage of the opportunities that the Fediverse provides people with.

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