Three products that aging boomers (will) desperately need

I am, it seems, the last of the Boomers. An early adopter, I'm more comfortable with technology than the majority of my age cohort. So here are three products that elderly Boomers will desperately need in the years to come:

1. Hearing-aid headsets. Some of these exist, but they're rare, insanely expensive, and not well-made. Most hearing aids seem to be designed for people who want to hide the fact that they're wearing them. This isn't just stupid and hopeless, but I believe it cripples the basic functionality of the devices. A hell of  a lot of boomers grew up listening to music with earphones, unlike previous generations. That's probably part of the reason that so many of us are going deaf now! So "hearing aids" that are full-sized headsets would work for my generation, I believe. They'd also be a lot harder to lose, and I know from personal experience with my father that losing (incredibly expensive) hearing aids is a huge problem for the elderly. I also believe that a larger hearing aid device could be far more effective. More size offers more potential power to work with. That's common sense, isn't it?

2. Easier TV remotes. Given the increasingly-boring wasteland that is modern cable TV, easy access to streaming services is critical - but a lot of tech-illiterate seniors simply can't cope with the mystery of HDMI1 vs HDMI2. Hell, my mother has serious trouble pressing the "ON" button on her TV remote! There has to be an easier way to switch from broadcast TV to YouTube to Netflix-etc. Some sort of really simple remote with buttons the size of quarters.

3. Cell phones. Okay, I know that simplified cell phones for the elderly exist. They're advertised by the AARP, among other places (which I have NOT joined, despite constant junk mail). But while they have large buttons, they're not designed with a real understanding of how easily confused the elderly can be by technology. Handing a Jitterbug to my mother would be like handing her a real phaser from Star Trek. She'd put it in a drawer and never use it again. Which was the literal fate of the cell phones she's been given, by the way. Want to make a phone that tech-hesitant seniors can use? Make it talk. "I am low on power. Please plug me in.", for example. Would that be so hard?

Okay, those are three devices which are needed, and which will only be MORE needed in the years to come. I hope someone makes them. And if they do, I hope I never need them.

New Day, New Google Problem

 For some reason as of today I can ONLY reply to comments here from Chrome. Brave (my current default browser) and FireFox both produce the following results even if I've already logged in:

And then:

My guess is that Google is getting more aggressive about forcing users towards Chrome. They're getting more evil every day. I really need to work on alternatives for Gmail, Drive, and Photos, because I'm expecting more cash grabs from Google in the months and years to come.

I'd also like an alternative to YouTube Music, but we're a little trapped in that one because we've uploaded so much of our music on it. And I created a playlist that replicated the tapes I'd recorded in the 1980s; it has nearly 800 songs on it, and took a huge amount of time to make. Although Google keeps deleting songs off that list (and others), which screws everything up.

The world needs publicly-owned, democratically-operated online services of all sorts. Big Tech needs to be demolished. They contribute nothing but problems and keep milking us for every last penny. Come to think of it, the exact same thing applies to Big Pharma!

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?

Social Media Alternatives

Censorship on Facebook and Reddit is getting worse and worse - particularly when it comes to progressive and socialist content. That trend is only going to accelerate. It would be smart to find backups and alternatives for Facebook and Reddit now, before leftist communities are smashed, shut down, or censored out of existence.

When Google announced that Google Plus was going to be shut down, a group of us there got together to research social media for a new home. We gathered a lot of data and stored it in a Google Docs spreadsheet that I created. I published that spreadsheet to the web here:

Social Media Alternatives

To summarize, the primary candidates were MeWe, Mastodon, and DreamWidth.

MeWe picked up a lot of enthusiastic converts. The owner had put a lot of effort into getting G+'s soon-to-be expatriates on MeWe. I, however, was a skeptic. Here's why.

MeWe is owned by a libertarian businessman. The site is effectively a "walled garden"; anything you write there is invisible to outside search engines. So new people will never stumble on your work, and no one can share anything that you write with people outside of MeWe. 

That is, unless changes have been made in the last year. The owner said he was going to have some of those issues fixed, but I had the strong impression that the "fixes" he was talking about weren't really going to address the issues. Basically, MeWe is sort of a web ghetto. I also worry because I don't entirely trust the owner. I've been screwed by sites that were owned by venture capitalists too many times.

Of course, the real problem with ANY competitor to Facebook is the user base. No matter how great an alternative is, if your friends aren't there too there's no point in posting there. And if not much is posted there, your friends don't have a reason to join. Catch-22.

I have a MeWe account myself, but I make very little use of it. I started a couple of groups there: "Facebook Refugees" and "Change the World" (a socialist/revolution group). Facebook Refugees has a lot of members, but there's nothing much of interest being posted there. People still join, though.
But as I said, I only go there to approve new members for the Facebook Refugees group.

If you try to post a link to a MeWe article, what others see is an invite to join MeWe - not the article itself. I don't think you can read anything there unless you join. That's part of the whole "walled garden" thing. You can only read stuff there if you're already there. It's basically a dead end. And as your posts get older, they disappear to all intents and purposes. So even if you write something absolutely brilliant, it will never, EVER go viral - or make an impact outside of MeWe.

MeWe is free, but there are paid subscriptions available with extra features. They're a bit pushy about marketing those paid subs.

Mastodon

Mastodon is an open-source self-hosted federated social media site. I like that it's not owned by any one person or entity, and it does seem to have some activity on it so far. But again, it's nowhere near the membership level to make it worthwhile to spend much time there. Maybe that will change. 

Perhaps I should explain the whole "federated" thing. There are individual server-hosts for Mastodon. They have a limited number of members. But all of the hosts are effectively connected by the software, so you can follow anyone on any Mastodon host. One drawback to Mastodon is that at this point it's not possible to create groups there. You can follow other users and be followed, but as far as I've been able to discover there are no groups on Mastodon. Also, Mastodon works via hashtags - you must include hashtags in your posts or they're unlikely to be discovered.

Another drawback to Mastodon is that you're limited to 500 characters per post. Still, it's an interesting and appealing option. Not having a single owner is a big advantage.

DreamWidth

I'll admit up front that I am biased in favor of DreamWidth.  It's a separately-owned code fork of LiveJournal, and is considerably older than MeWe or Mastodon. It's owned by a couple of former LJ staffers; they seem very idealistic and supportive of free speech. That said, although I have some friends on Dreamwidth, I haven't been getting much interaction there. It's pretty dead. I wish that it wasn't.

It allows you to create and join groups. Posts aren't limited in length. Free accounts don't get image hosting, but you can link to images hosted elsewhere. There's a fine degree of control of who can see each post that you make in your own account; you can create all sorts of filters, or post publicly.

Posts can be linked to outside of DreamWidth, and anyone can read public posts there without having to join. Search engines such as Google are able to crawl public posts, so they come up in search results.

All of those social media alternatives are free, although MeWe tends to nag you a little about getting a free trial of the paid version. Dreamwidth has a paid version too, but the free version is totally functional and they don't nag. As far as I know, Mastodon is just plain free.

Apps

Just a note, but if you're interested in secure communication, I'd suggest following Edward Snowden; he sometimes recommends apps to use or stay away from, and he knows what he's talking about. Right now I have ProtonMail for secure email. Signal and Telegram are both options for encrypted IM and telephony. All are currently available for free.