Blog freely

     Blogging is one of my favorite past time. However, my blogs are not thought out, laid out and thoroughly researched. Majority of them are thoughts/rants which make me "write". I think I have been blogging since the year 2010. As you can see, there is no specific time and routine with which the posts are written. They vary from technical to note taking to local issues upto the restaurant at the end of the universe. So, what keeps me blogging. Well, to start with, my basic drive is the fantastic world of FLOSS developers, users and maintainers. What passion do these people have!. When the whole world believe that the end point of all actions of human beings is money, these people think different. For them, money is the means to satisfy their passions, their will, their tastes, their thinking of general well being, their thought that the fantastic food, the human race is enjoying today is because of the FLOSS philosophy of all the people associated in studying and preparing food.

    I had always wanted to blog from my favorite editor, emacs. By, the way, I also love vi. However, I will stop here on this topic. I dont want to add to the plethora of information available on the public network. The war of words is so great that our future generations, when we become the cave people will be astonished at this war of words and will forget all about the wars which bought the ending of human race and concentrate on this. There you go again, you have dragged me into it. I knew you would do it. I hate you for that. Or do I love you for that!!. Argh!!!.

    Coming back to my first line in the second paragraph, I came across a project called write.freely. I liked it. I liked that it federates beautifully. But, then somehow, it just went out of focus. Maybe because I was not blogging much at that moment. I do have longer lean periods than periods of flourish. However, I am active on mastodon(@srinicame). Again, as active as my blogging habits in posting. But, I am an avid reader and try to consume posts from my favorited individuals. During one such session, I came across a post from Marcel on the Mastodon fediverse offering invites to his write.freely instance. Thank you Marcel, for allowing me to create an account on your instance. Once this was done, I was in the FLOSS market for plugins so that I could publish my blogs directly from emacs. And lo and behold, there is exactly one here https://github.com/dangom/writefreely.el

    Followed the configuration on the github page(Did not work for me), and I am now ready to post a blog from emacs. Downloaded the command line tool from https://github.com/writeas/writeas-cli/blob/master/cmd/wf/GUIDE.md. This is now my first post on a federated blog. Congratulations to me. Thanks to all the devs and users of the write.freely fediverse.

This is the link to this post(This same post) on the federated blog https://qua.name/bknf7v9835

Bring back the feed readers and push back the algoritms

In the present world of social networking, the corporations have pushed us into the push method of giving information. That is information is forced through our throat. It is a torture but with golden and platinum tools. It is like we have been manipulated to enjoy the torture. The torture of forced feed of information. The information which is curated by the 1%. There was a time before the explosion of the public network, the 1% did not have "real" information of the remaining 99%. It was just a vague idea that people are in misery in general and they have to be maintained so. But, today, the corporations know the level and extent of misery of every individual and this information is extracted to the maximum. The information is available free with the consent of the individual. No need of any special sponsored survey, which was happening before the era of the public network. Data of the people was only with the government. Corporations would cozy up with the governments for the data. Now, it is not so. It is the other way round, the governments are cozying up with the corporations. That is the amount of data available with them. All this is because the corporations are modelling the behavior and acts of the individual by carefully curating the information which will be bombarded to the user. The user will have no option but to digest it. In the beginning he might resist. But the same data is coated with sugar in another pushed information. Until you "like" the information you will be bombarded with the same info in plenty other forms, hidden.

This push strategy does not give the user any sort of freedom regarding choice of avoiding it. If you search for a certain information, the search result which is payed for is pushed to you. You think that you are pulling the result from the search engine. But taking your query as an input with various other personal information, the search result is "personalized" and "pushed" to you. Whatever is presented to you would not be what you really wanted. But, you will be told, this "is" what you searched for. The same with all the social networking algorithms. The name algorithm is a fancy name for the service provided to puss what he wants to tell you regarding any subject you search for with your hashtag. Hashtags are not for the convenience of the individual users. It is for the convenience of the corporations. Just see the amount of hashtags in any post sponsored. The hashtag is one key which is visible to the user. There are plenty in the metadata of sponsored posts which will be used to feed to you based on the metadata collected from your likes and dislikes. Dont think that your dislikes are neglected. Dislikes grab more of your eyeballs than the things you like. If you come across a post which you like, you will see the subject and like it without even reading it. It is not the same with your dislikes. You want to read through and pat yourself on your back for you being correct.

This is the time for Feed readers. The feed reader which google killed. The feedreader which mozilla, the ethical browser wants all the users to forget. Now, what is so great about the rss/atom feeds. Well to start with the technology is tried and tested and works beautifully. It is simple to implement. Whenever I have requested a website maintainer of my interest for adding feed support, it was done in a days time. It is so human. This is a pull strategy of getting updated information from your preferred/trusted information provider. It supports individual websites. That is the websites run by individuals. It supports blogs, which again was killed and pushed to obscurity by all the social networking behemoths. Blogs are so simple and beautiful.

A simple website is a treat to watch and browse. They appear the same in the most featured and also the minimum browsers. If I like the content on and individual's website, I will subscribe to his feed. Only when I ask my feedreader to refresh do I get information regarding any new posts. If I dont want to read, then I will not refresh my feed. This feed is chosen by me. There is no algorithm here. It might be suggested to me from a friend, But, I have the choice of going through his content and to subscribe or not. Once you like an article, since you read only the first few lines, you are going to visit the page. You are now supporting him by visiting his page and may or may not click on some ads, so that the content creator earns money. If the created content is so good, you can donate to him and encourage him to continued to do more. It is a win win situation for both the creator and the consumer. The creator need not worry about people from other domains reading, not understanding it and providing shitbag of comments. The creator is the king as should be. He should have the full rights as to whether any comments should be kept up or not. It is his content. You might not like it, and you may unsubscribe. The creator will find other fans, but, the consumer might not find more capable content creators. The feeds give ample opportunities for both the creators and consumers.

If you are a content creator, kindly add RSS/atom support to your website/blog. And if you are a consumer, support your content creator by using feed readers and supporting the creator directly without any intermediary who is making money out of the creator and also the consumer. Let us make the public network a better place.