Bailing on Microblogging

I think perhaps the most noticeable change since my last blog post is that I no longer have any microblogging accounts with my IRL identity. This is a novel experience for me, but it has been a long time coming. You might remember me talking about my disaffection with the experience back in April.

I'm not going to metaphorically live in a cave though! I still intend to keep up with what's happening in the world through mainstream media, hobbyist magazines, podcasts, and an RSS feed reader called Newsify. I will also still maintain my connections to the online LGBTQ+ community via Discord and Slack. These blog posts will also continue.

Of all the microblogging platforms I've tried, I'd say that the well-moderated parts of the fediverse are the "least bad", but sadly the oversights in moderation tooling and usability problems still creates some annoying and toxic community behaviours as well. I gave it one last go with my own self-hosted Mastodon instance, but I still all too frequently saw people on the federated feed trying to "brigade" or "mass defederate" each other over relatively minor personal disagreements that had escalated to ridiculous levels (this is often referred to as "fedi drama"). When you're using your IRL identity for microblogging, an adverse reaction to something you post that turns you into the "main character" for a while can have serious real world consequences, and I concluded that the level of personal and professional risk that I'm exposed to by using Mastodon that way now matches the equivalent for rival microblogging services.

Another factor in my decision is my ongoing attempt to draw a line under Glimpse, a code fork of the GNU Image Manipulation Program that I spent two years working on at great cost to myself and with only limited success, and then left up on the Internet for a couple more years after that. You can't move on from something unless you actually move on, and that's part of the reason why I dropped one of last month's blog posts, titled "The Damned Glimpse." I think rehashing all that again perhaps sends the wrong message, as it incorrectly suggests that I have some unfinished business that needs a resolution. I'm also not blind to the fact that there were people following me for the sole purpose of waiting for me to come back to that project, and I don't want them to feel misled.

While I'm grateful that we were still able to produce three releases, help over a hundred thousand people, and raise money for charitable causes, I think that if I'd truly understood the lengths people would go to oppose what I was doing and torment the unpaid volunteers that were helping me to do it, I probably would've just killed the project early and found a better hill to die on. Whenever someone approaches me volunteering to rekindle Glimpse, I calmly and patiently explain to them exactly what to expect and from whom to expect it. Funnily enough, it isn't long before they make their excuses and find another project to work on! Glimpse is dead, and I think that's how it should stay.

An Ounce of "The Gram"

All that being said, I have recently been experimenting with a non-public Instagram account. For now I'm mostly using it to keep up with what IRL friends and relatives are up to and following useful accounts that don't have good RSS feeds.

Before anyone from my previous fediverse following gets too excited or angry with me about the prospect, my dalliance with Instagram doesn't mean that I'm planning to try Threads any time soon. The main reason I'm fiddling with Instagram at all is that people I know IRL are posting on that more frequently there than on non-public Facebook, and it feels more accessible to me than TikTok.

To be honest, my confusion about what "Reels" are suggests to me that I'm much better off treating alternatives like SnapChat and TikTok as a "Gen Z" online playground with which I am unlikely to vibe, so I'm steering well clear of them!

Linux Gaming? Oh My!

Well, it seems that I only lasted a few months without a gaming PC after all! After assessing my options, I decided to buy one of those new OLED Steam Deck consoles with a dock. Both of them arrived a couple of weeks ago.

The main wrinkle at the start was that more demanding games, such as Crusader Kings 3 and Stellaris, kept crashing or causing the Steam Deck to completely hang until I reset it, which was very frustrating. Fortunately, after some googling, I eventually worked out that I could install CryoUtilities to fix that problem, and I also found some good UI scaling mods in the Steam Workshop for when I want to play those games in handheld mode.

Installing CryoUtilities is so far the only time I've dipped into the "Desktop Mode", which seems to be a KDE Plasma desktop environment running on Arch Linux. I suppose this technically means that I can now truthfully say "I use Arch btw" to impress random strangers on the Internet. Bleurgh! :D

With my previous gaming PC, it felt inconvenient to keep checking game compatibility on ProtonDB. Now I view it as a worthwhile trade-off given how much cheaper and less time-consuming it is to just buy a Steam Deck. One good example is Star Control: Origins, where after making a few tweaks to the launch settings it almost feels like it was designed for handhelds. Another is Sid Meier's Civilization V, where capping the screen resolution in Steam stopped the Linux port from crashing every time a city changed hands.

I haven't yet tried to install games from rival stores such as GOG or EA Origin, or attempted to get any native Linux games and emulators working, but those things are on my "future tinkering projects" list. For now, my Apple Macs are covering those areas adequately.

One minor downside of all this is that my Nintendo Switch now languishes unused most of the time. I don't plan to sell it though because it's a limited edition Pokémon Scarlet & Violet model, provides some tasty console exclusives that I can't play on anything else, and I haven't yet seen how well the two consoles compare for casual party games with guests that didn't remember to bring their own USB gamepad ahead of time.