On the verge of a change for the better

13.11.2022/12.34

I can’t find the original toot on Mastodon but I was led to this piece in the MIT Technology Review by Chris Stokel-Walker, ‘Here’s how a Twitter engineer says it will break in the coming weeks’. As I’ve cut back on my Twitter usage, I haven’t witnessed any issues, but it does highlight the efforts […]

I’ve left the data farms but occasionally revisit the Matrix

06.11.2022/00.04

Warner Bros. Even though Twitter is now in its MySpaceX era, I won’t shut my account. I have scripts that run through it, and I don’t wish for some schmuck to come in later and claim my username. Mastodon has taken off this week, my Twitter notifications are at a low, and as I […]

China in 2022: speak Cantonese, get banned from social media

08.10.2022/01.48

If you think some of us were being uppity about New Zealand Chinese Language Week, how’s this for a real-life report? Speak Cantonese, get banned from a social media platform. That’s what’s happening in China right now. And I had already mentioned schoolchildren being told off for using their reo. The Google Translate translation is […]

Facebook saves private medical information despite saying it gets scrubbed

02.07.2022/11.37

As embedding from Mastodon is not working tonight, I’ll copy and paste Per Axbom’s post: Nice bit of reporting from Swedish Radio. They built an online fake pharmacy and activated Facebook advertising tools. Thousands of simulated visits to the pharmacy were made each day, and the reporters could see all the sensitive, personal information being […]

Musings for today: back on Facebook, untracked ads, Autocade rankings

16.05.2022/11.32

It’d be unfair if I didn’t note that I managed to see a ‘Create post’ button today on Lucire’s Facebook page for the first time in weeks. I went crazy manually linking everything that was missed between April 25 and today. Maybe I got it back as it would look even worse for Facebook, which […]

Facebook admits we’re experiencing a bug preventing us from managing Lucire’s page

08.05.2022/06.20

Last night’s hour-waster was chatting to Facebook Business Support. No, that’s unfair. I was actually assigned an incredibly good rep who took me seriously, and concluded that Facebook did indeed have a bug which means, of all the pages I can manage, the one for Lucire is alone in not allowing me, or any of […]

The end of Facebook pages?

01.05.2022/12.20

Some of the articles in Lucire are still manually designed in Dreamweaver, and those need to be added to the social networks in a similar way. There we use Zoho Social to update things. In practice, we only do Twitter, as IFTTT then takes care of reposting our updates to Facebook. Today, I noticed that […]

How to end social media censorship

16.04.2022/10.28

Kristina Flour/Unsplash This Twitter thread by Yishan Wong is one of the most interesting I’ve come across. Not because it’s about Elon Musk (who he begins with), but because it’s about the history of the web, censorship, and the reality of running a social platform. Here are some highlights (emphases in the original): There […]

Back, on the new box

28.03.2022/00.50

There are a few experiments going on here now that this blog is on the new server. Massive thanks to my friend who has been working tirelessly to get us on to the new box and into the 2020s. First, there’s a post counter, though as it’s freshly installed, it doesn’t show a true count. […]

Don’t put your events on just Facebook—they won’t be seen

31.12.2021/06.50

We’re probably far enough along from the event for people not to know which one I am referring to, as I’ve no wish to embarrass the organizers. Earlier in 2021, we saw a weekend event that would take place at the ‘Johnsonville Community Hub’. No address was given other than that. Both Duck Duck […]