Kevin's Blog

One of the most impressive digital offerings I’ve ever seen from a musician

http://www.neilyoungarchives.com

I know I felt the pull to make this blog and establish my own digital space. I can only imagine how many times stronger that pull would be for an artist who is expected to distribute music via apple, google, etc. Cheers to him for presenting his work his own way (and high quality, free, and painstakingly organized at that).

Wondering how more artists can do this but in a way that’s not so siloed and without making the investment he surely had to make in this.

A few months ago, I decided to make a radical change to my smartphone lifestyle. I wanted a phone that would limit the amount of personal data I was broadcasting to third parties – namely Apple or Google – and decided to run a more-or-less vanilla version of Android, without any Google Play Services (i.e. no Google […]

via Living with an open-source phone — Read the Tea Leaves

I just wanted to post my initial thoughts on this experiment.

This is fun!

I’m super glad I did this. I just love the feeling of having my own little mote and turf to post things on. I feel more comfortable posting things here than I have to other places online in years. I love tinkering with it to make it more like I want.

Blogs were super feature rich

When I think of my ideal world- some kind of a replacement for the facetwitsnapgoogple hellscape of closed social networks today, old school personal blogs really nailed a lot of the big stuff. I think we collectively moved on without appreciating how far we’d come and how much we had to lose. This sentence was typed a few hours after the last one. I was able to hit ‘save draft’ before heading to dinner and resume right where I left off. For that and a million things more, WordPress itself is incredibly robust.

Really that’s beside the point that we got a lot right at the paradigm level. I own my space, and I can publish whatever I want wherever I want whenever I want and I can monetize it or not however I do or do not wish. I own everything I write. Every post I write has a permalink that anyone on the web can link to. It’s just an incredibly empowering situation for myself and for readers. There’s this underlying feeling of control and that this is how things should be.

“Have fun screaming into the void”

After describing what I was doing to a friend, this was his totally legitimate response… to which I immediately replied “I WILL!” A lot of people are going to try a lot of different things in response to the crappification of social media. My retro personal blog is just one of these, and the multitude of problems with it are no surprise to me. In fact, they’re part of the reason I did it. If you live the version of technology you wish to be used, you experience first hand the problems with it and get the most visceral connection with the possible solutions.

Mastodon, scuttlebutt, app.net, steem, etc. have all been attempts at different solutions to the obvious glaring problems with the existing social media landscape. The problems with this one are older, and we thought we licked them with twitter and facebook. I can’t easily construct the social graph those allowed me to… something that profoundly (and largely positively) shaped my personal and professional life. I can’t @ mention or include others easily. For people interested in what I’m writing (family/friends), ways to follow along are non-obvious (and cross-posting to twitter irks me and undermines what I’m doing). It costs money to self-host in a way where you’re not beholden to a third party. Plus, as I mentioned in my first post, it’s a pain in the ass to set up. We thought social networks were the answer to these problems, but it turns out their convenience came at a cost, and their strengths bred problems we’re still only beginning to comprehend.

But here we are

I’m blogging about blogging, which is all blogs were ever good for, which means that this truly is a blog and I’ve gone full circle. Amen.

I’m having a pretty “get off my lawn” moment here and decided to take it old school with a blog. This isn’t for long-form blogging. I really just want it to be a direct substitute for what I post on twitter, instagram, etc.

I’m unhappy with the current social networks and their increasingly algorithmic clickbaity garbage feeds. If you want to subscribe to me, use RSS, a great open standard! WordPress is a fantastic piece of open source software and I’m running it on my little digitalocean vps. This was a pain in the ass to set up, but the old internet was never convenient. That’s part of the fun.

The internet feels like it took a hard left from potential utopia to potential dystopia. Still, nobody’s forcing us to be lazy and continue to centralize onto these closed platforms that just build higher and higher walls around their crappy and frightening gardens. The old ideals, progress, optimism, and amazing technology of the open web are still there for anyone who wants to join in. Fight the power! I feel like a combination of super old school (starting a blog) and super new school (decentralized blockchain-based crazy stuff) will lead me to a happier and more interesting digital life.

My posting will probably remain infrequent (as it was with twitter), but for now it’ll all be done here. Onwards and upwards!