Monday, June 12, 2023

Reddit, going dark

It was awesome, watching one subreddit after another go dark last night. I don't imagine that it will affect Reddit's IPO at all, of course; money doesn't care about the wishes of ordinary human beings. But with any luck at least SOME permanent damage will be done.

I set up new accounts on Lemmy, kbin, and BookWyrm - all part of the Fediverse, which I'm hoping is resistant to the cancerous corrosion of venture capital. I did try to suggest DreamWidth as an alternate destination, but nobody seemed that interested. They never are, although I'm not sure why. Apart from being privately owned, DreamWidth seems an outstanding alternative to me. But what do I know?

Lemmy is working well, but doesn't seem to allow me to blog; it only allows me to post to communities, as far as I can tell. Reddit allowed me to post to my own profile, which was effectively blogging. Although I have no reason to believe that anyone ever read those posts. On the other hand, who cares? That said, Lemmy is the best community site I've found so far. People are friendly, nice, and responsive. I even got to post some book recommendations there.

kbin is impossibly laggy so far. It supposedly allows microblogging, but I have no way to test it until it's actually usable. That might take days, given what I presume is the Reddit exodus.

BookWyrm (which is focused on book reviews) does apparently allow me to post "direct messages", which appear to be exactly the sort of blogging function I was looking for - except they seem to be private only, i.e. it's possible that only I can see them. Even if that's not the case, I don't know if they're visible to the Fediverse outside of Bookwyrm. I guess we'll see.

Here's the first direct message I posted there:

I'm hoping that this "Direct Message" will work as a sort of general status update about my experience here on BookWyrm so far. Will anyone see it? Is it visible to anyone elsewhere on the Fediverse? I have absolutely no idea. But I can hope.

I imported my CSV from GoodReads, but it carried a lot of garbage formatting along with it - bad links to GoodReads resources, for one thing, some HTML that doesn't work here, etc. etc. Since I have hundreds (?) of reviews, manually cleaning up each one is NOT an appealing prospect.

I could copy the CSV file and do a lot of search/replacing. Then re-import. But I suspect that would result in duplicate entries, which would also suck. Has anyone else dealt with this?

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