Category: Tech

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Wow, that shoe dropped sooner than I expected. Verizon is already shopping around to sell Tumblr. I figured it would be toward the end of the year, not the middle.

After Tumblr’s ham-handed ban on adult content last fall purged a bunch of accounts, sparked a lack of confidence, and triggered an wave of users leaving in digust, it became clear that Verizon had no idea what to do with Tumblr (not that Yahoo! had much more). If they hadn’t already started the death spiral, they’d at least knocked it out of orbit.

I’ve never been super-active on Tumblr, but I interact with a few people, and I used to occasionally post things there that weren’t reposts from my blog, or Flickr, or Instagram, or wherever. So, just in case, I backed up a full archive, imported some of the original posts, and pared down all the old duplicates and outdated signal boosts so that when Verizon inevitably gave up monetizing the site, it would be easier to find the pieces I wanted to keep.

Honestly, I’d rather Verizon sell it than shutter it and sell off the data (you think Verizon wouldn’t?). But it depends on who buys it. If anyone wants it.

Here’s hoping Tumblr finds a suitable buyer who understands what they’re getting and is willing to invest in the community, not someone who just wants to squeeze out the last few drops of cash before sending it to join GeoCities in the great Internet Archive in the Sky.

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I’m thinking about social media backups again after Prismo’s database loss and one of my own test blogs crashing.

I can and do automate backups on the VPS where I host my main blogs.

I can manually backup my social media accounts, but IIRC none of them offer automatic scheduling. I have to remember to run a backup, log into the site, find the right control panel (which sometimes changes!) and request a backup.

I’d like to be able to schedule recurring backups on Mastodon, Twitter, etc. Send me an email each month with a link when it’s ready.

OK, you don’t want to keep generating backups for abandoned accounts. Here are some ideas:

  • Skip the process if I haven’t posted since the last archive.
  • Instead of scheduling a recurring job, schedule a new one 30 days out each time I download an archive.

Refine as needed.

Now, those of us with a little more tech savvy can automate some things with IFTTT. Not the native backup process, but we can set up rules to listen for new posts and automatically save the content somewhere else. But while I can reliably save the text of every post from Twitter, Mastodon, etc., saving media depends on what I’m saving it to. Often the best you can do with IFTTT is embed, not copy. (And that’s if the media is even available in the source feed. Pixelfed’s RSS doesn’t include image URLs, and Mastodon’s RSS/Atom includes them in a way IFTTT doesn’t recognize.)

Eh, maybe I should just read up on ActivityPub and see if I can make a subscribe-to-archive bot.

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Sometimes you choose which social app to open based on

  • who you want to talk to
  • who you want to hear
  • what you want to talk about

Sometimes you’re just shouting into the void. At those times, I figure I’ll choose the void that feels less exploitative.

That’s part of why I still have a blog. And why I post more on Mastodon, while Twitter is mostly auto-shares from my other networks, retweets, and occasional cross-posts.

(And politics, because I’d rather keep that on Twitter, where it’s sort of the main topic anyway, than on the network that’s still fun. Not that Mastodon is apolitical. Far from it! But it’s a lot more varied than the overwhelming focus on US partisan politics I see on Twitter. And the culture and structure make the discussions at least somewhat less train-wrecky. Most of the time.)

Update: If you’re interested in checking out Mastodon and the Fediverse, good places to start are JoinMastodon.org and JoinFediverse.wiki.

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An orange ring in the blackness of space

How cool is it that we now have an actual image of the event horizon of a black hole! More precisely: it’s the glowing accretion disc of matter falling into the black hole, and the event horizon’s silhouette.

The Event Horizon Telescope, actually a worldwide array of telescopes, used interferometry to effectively create a planet-sized telescope to see the light around the supermassive black hole at the center of M87, a galaxy 55 million light years away.

I remember talking with a college classmate about giant interferometry telescopes back in the late 1990s. It’s incredible to see the technique actually making discoveries like this!

What we’re seeing in this image isn’t a top-down view of the accretion disc, but an angled one — think of Saturn’s rings — and the gravity of the black hole is bending the light from the disc. Phil Plait has a great article on the science behind the image. Katie Mack has a Twitter thread on how the image was produced, why the ring looks the way it does (it tells us which direction the disc is spinning!), plus simulations of this type of black hole seen from different viewing angles.

Here’s a paper talking about the history of black hole images, with a detailed discussion of what you should expect for the “shadow” image we’ve just seen. Check Fig 12, with renderings of shadows for disks at different angles arxiv.org

4x4 grid of black circles with red/yellow outlines, with bright and dark spots in the outlines.

— Katie Mack (@AstroKatie) April 10, 2019

Direct links to the articles she mentions:

And this Mastodon thread by @SohKamYung@mstdn.io collects some more articles worth checking out:

Forbes makes the excellent point that, while we’d seen a lot of circumstantial evidence for black holes over the last few decades, this confirms that they exist.

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What’s the minimum viable blog feature set these days?

  • Rich text posts (output; the source can be anything)
  • Titles
  • Permalinks
  • Tags/categories
  • Navigation
  • RSS feed
  • Images hosted locally
  • Media embed (remote or local?)
  • Author info for multi-author blogs

I won’t back down on RSS/Atom, because there’s SO MUCH you and subscribers can do with it.

I also think images should to be built-in and not something you bolt on clumsily afterward.

Not sure if I’d consider comments part of the base level.

What else am I missing?

Candidate Software

Looking for something lighter weight than WordPress.

The last time I tried Plume and WriteFreely, they didn’t support images, though IIRC you could embed remote images in at least one.

Static site generators I’ve tried like Jekyll require you to bolt on separate commenting systems like Disqus, or jump through hoops to roll your own in a way that will re-generate the site when someone comments…and you still have to reinvent spam filtering.

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“Babylon 5 was the last of the Babylon stations. There would never be another. It changed the future … and it changed us. It taught us that we have to create the future … or others will do it for us. It showed us that we have to care for one another, because if we don’t, who will? And that true strength sometimes comes from the most unlikely places. Mostly, though, I think it gave us hope … that there can always be new beginnings … even for people like us.”

— General Ivanova in Babylon 5: “Sleeping in Light”

It seemed fitting.

While Google+ was never a shining beacon in cyberspace, it spanned the period from when social media was still new(ish) and exciting and hopeful, to when we started realizing that the big tech silos — Google, Facebook and Twitter especially — have been creating the future for us, one recommendation algorithm at a time…and it’s a train wreck.

We need to create our own online future.

We need to care about the people at the other end of the connection.

We can find our strengths, and build up others’.

And there can still be new beginnings.

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In the last few months:

And Google+ has less than two weeks left before Google pulls the plug on it.

Back up your social media accounts! Most sites have some sort of archive utility, and even if what you get isn’t suitable for moving to another site, at least you’ll have a copy in case they change their business model, screw up a data migration, get washed away in a flood or just shut down.

And if you can, consider donating to the Internet Archive to help protect other sites you rely on or would just like to see again. Websites go offline every day. Sometimes even the big ones.