Roadrunner Twice

I think Verizon is running their dimwitted corporate version of that scam where you shove some raw ginger up a half-dead horse's butthole, so it looks more lively for as long as it takes you to run off with the buyer's cash. They're trying to sell Tumblr off for parts to some entity (which they believe to be an idiot), so they're doing whatever it takes to get that app back into Apple's store without any regard for the future health of the platform.

(Well, either that or whoever's calling the shots over at Oath was literally born yesterday. But I figure statistically, it's more likely that they're ordinarily-inept scammers rather than extraordinarily-inept platform owners. I guess we'll see.)

Because the idea that Tumblr would have any kind of meaningful future after this type of heavy-handed adult content ban is plain ludicrous. This is the end! And I don't mean in the hipster sense of "Tumblr is over, man," I mean that yesterday it entered a network effect death spiral that will be complete within probably three years, at the outside.

So, I tried VSCO and it's kind of a bust. At least as a replacement for Instagram.

It is just a bad space for socializing with people I like via chatty photo streams. The feed doesn't even show their captions! There's no replies! And you can't unfollow the VSCO account, so my three-ish friends on the service so far get drowned out by a flood of aesthetically pleasing but totally irrelevant Content™️. It is an asocial network. I don't have a use for that.

It had some stuff I really liked, though:

• Pro: Sweet editing interface (once you actually reach it). It's mostly like Instagram, which is good: pick a filter, adjust its intensity, and add a few granular tweaks on top. VSCO's main improvement is to let you save your edit stack as a new preset, which I've always wanted.
• Con: Too much friction to access the edit interface! You have to import photos into your "Studio" (??) with an awkwardly non-standard photo picker, re-find the photo you just added and double-tap it, and then hit an edit button. Just... why. 99% of the time, I just want to edit THIS PHOTO, you could have let me do that in one step. Anyway, it slows me down enough that I resist using VSCO for incidental fun stuff, which is basically all the stuff I share with friends.
• Con: The free filters were inferior to Instagram's, so it took way more fiddling to get OK results.
  • But: A bunch of the paywalled filters look legit good. So if I liked the whole setup enough to shell out, I'd be all set.
• Pro: I like monetizing with premium features instead of advertising.
  • But: I don't believe it can support gonzo VC slot machine payouts; I've seen it cut the paychecks, but that's about as far as it seems to go. VSCO appears to have at some point taken some VC, and I wonder how that'll work.
• Con: No per-user RSS or JSON feeds. I realize normal people don't care, but I do! Interoperability matters! Eventually! Hopefully!

Anyway, I'll just post incidental photos to nfagerlund on mastodon.social for now. There's a media tab on profiles, so I can scroll back through my own stuff, but it'd also be cool to have a media-only stream of some kind.

By the way, I'm now crossposting from Mastodon to Twitter! Let's see how that goes. So far it's kind of reminding me of LJ and Dreamwidth circa 2009. Mastodon is more comfortable in some ways, but it's much smaller and most of my friends are still only on Twitter.

Of course, DW ended up staying small (while keeping an important place in my life!), and the old LJ network fragmented all over the place. Who knows what'll happen as Twitter continues to rot, but I wouldn't be surprised if it rhymed a bit with what we've seen before.

Hey, y'all remember Austin Kleon? I followed his blog like a frickin' decade ago because he was doing this thing where he'd black out newspaper articles to make poetry out of the few remaining words, and the results were reliably great.

Then he put out a book, and at some point his blog got pretty mediocre. But I never ended up removing it from my feed reader, because I don't clean up very often.

Then his blog got good again, suddenly and noticeably and reliably.

Anyway, one, he's making good posts lately and you might be interested in some good posts. But two, I also feel like it's worth calling out those rare souls who dare stand against weblog entropy. My thoughts on the rot I think a lot of us are sensing in the dominant social media platforms are pretty diffuse and blurry still, but one thing I'm feeling pretty sure of is that blogging* is nice and I miss mah bloggers. It's cool to see one come back.

* ...and its close cousin, Gregarious Journaling.