🎇 The report of this 2023, at least in terms of posting!

By OctoSpacc

- 9 minutes read - 1896 words

Caution

The content of this page has been entirely machine-translated into English, from Italiano. Therefore, it might contain any kind of errors.

For the end of the year, many make a list of good resolutions for the new, while this time I am compiling a collection of some of my shortcomings... welcome back to my world.

I'm afraid I also have to hurry a bit with this post, because if it came out on the 31st, probably no one would give a damn... at least not before next year (and having said that, it's very scary, I know ). Not having made it in time for the 30th, here I am posting late at night, before mimir. 🌌

In recent months I haven't had the opportunity to deal with the site perfectly, because my words have been stolen by alternative outlets, or perhaps a little blocked by setbacks. And what exactly, I imagine you might ask yourself who diligently follow the CTTT site, but only the CTTT site, and otherwise never wallow in the scam?

The BBS, Spacc forum with an ancient flavour

During this summer I had a slightly unusual idea, at least by 2023 standards: opening an old-fashioned discussion forum for hustling, with the vague idea of ​​building something that could slowly grow into a place ideal for discussions of that kind, taken beyond the practical boundaries allowed by the most modern social platforms or chats. And here he is proud, there on https://bbs.spacc.eu.org/. 😎

I have some moderately ambitious future ideas regarding the Spacc BBS, which I have not yet had the opportunity to complete and/or set in motion, due to issues of skills and time; from the connection with ActivityPub, to the multilingual support with translation in the backend, up to the idea of ​​a role-playing game that would take place in the forum with ad-hoc designed code (in short, a real video game, not like on other forums where people talk and we pretend to play)... and who knows if I will ever be able to accomplish everything, especially not being able to find people capable of providing the pieces that I am missing.
Hosting the forum costs me nothing, whether it is used or not, and for this reason alone I don't think I will ever declare bankruptcy or close down. It's really so convenient to host at home.

Although I have not exploited it to extreme levels, I have used the BBS to write some posts that otherwise I would perhaps never have launched, because I feel that in some way the forum format (even in those cases in which no one queues the thread even after weeks of waiting...) offers me a particular way of expressing myself, which I would sometimes feel unsuitable on the blog.
On the other hand, who knows, maybe having only the blogoctt I would have published there, feeling that the MicroBlog certainly would not have been a suitable alternative. Speaking of which...

The brand new MicroBlog, so much for Du Rove

The "MicroBlog" that I have on the ctt site is not really a microblog in the classic sense... it's a category that I arbitrarily decided should keep my shorter posts. I have always practiced true microblogging partly on the Fediverse, partly on Telegram, with a channel that has historically continuously switched back and forth between public and private for complex reasons.
At the same time, these platforms have always also served as "PicoBlog" for me, with posts of one or two sentences, while I let the dust form on the section of the site. 🕸️

  • On the one hand I had tried to move to my own site for these things, because I wanted to have a way to really control my data and the management of publications... but with the static one it was all quite inconvenient, and the desire to publish I got over it.
  • On the other hand, a small problem was my having to choose every time between publishing on Telegram, and therefore often not being able to effectively share my words even outside that bubble, and publishing on the Fediverse, being able to replicate the posts on my channel only with obnoxious limits (which lowered the experience and made people complain). At the end of the day therefore, months ago the desire to micropost began to wane more and more... and I don't know exactly how I spent my days then (perhaps administering the technical side of the forum...), but I started posting more rarely.

Just this December, however, everything changes, after one night I can't fall asleep immediately, but on the other hand I remember that...

  • The ActivityPub plugin for WordPress should have made some decent progress by now, and could almost be suitable for microblogging...
  • ...and it so happens that I have a WordPress site on Altervista (therefore, unlimited space and traffic but with complete WordPress, free) that is in disuse, which would be perfect for trying this little thing...

This thing perhaps deserves a separate article, but the fact is that I immediately put this way to the test to change my microblogging workflow for the better, after having flaunted it on the new MicroBlog note (https://octospacc.altervista.org/2023/12/04/138/ , this is for example the message in question). 🔗

Billionaires' platforms leave everyone stranded

As luck would have it - ironically, on the evening of December 24th, as if it were a bad, rotten gift - the Telegram account where I was the admin of my channel and of the comments group was banned, for reasons that we still haven't understood (clearly automatic, and in my opinion incorrect). As it is, it also seems that I have lost all my data forever: if they don't respond to my manual request for data portability, they will have violated the GDPR, and in the meantime I will be left with nothing in my hands (if I I'm not freaking out...)

Luckily, having started publishing from WordPress, the ban didn't interrupt my shitposting flow in any way (phew!), but I had to waste some time catching up with people (and there are those who don't we have still collected) to finally bring it to the Matrix (a federated and truly free messaging protocol)... because unfortunately they didn't want to listen to me when 2 years ago I said that it would be wise to move there before accidents, not after. 😮‍💨

This stuff also deserves separate discussion, and just for good luck I'll leave some of my new links here:

I dismantle everything

However, all this also means that it's time to review some little things on the site.

  • The section that is now called MicroBlog there is no longer right - because with this name it wasn't right before - and I have to either remove it (by pouring all the posts present there into the Blog), or rename it. I would lean towards the first option, so as to reduce for a moment the fuss that I would otherwise have to make when deciding when an article was long enough to be in the Blog, and when it wasn't.
  • At the same time, the PicoBlog will disappear (becoming an archive, I don't delete anything). I didn't update it before anyway, and even more so I doubt I'll ever use it now.

The eternal return of the Knowledge Base

I'll try to be brief here, because by now this issue risks becoming the biggest inside joke of my life, which, just look at it, equally deserves the elusive separate article. 🫣

From more than a year ago, as I also wrote on the ctt site, I started using TiddlyWiki to create my own knowledge base of... I'm still not clear on what.
Let's say that above 90% are lists of links that are useful to me, of which 30% perhaps with short personal notes, and the remainder of the content made up of small pages of notes and things like that that I wouldn't really know where to throw otherwise. It's public because it's convenient for me, it would be more inconvenient to keep it private, and I think it can be useful to other people, just as the personal wikis of other random individuals have been useful (or at least interesting) to me.

The point is that, since I've been using that little thing, I have practically no reason to update the non-blog pages on the ctt site, because it's just more inconvenient and less organizeable in the long term, compared to creating them from scratch wiki.
Adding to this also the now having to recognize the failure of statioso (the generator of my site, which is a spaghetti, difficult and annoying to extend), but while my complaint about the fact that I can't find other generators that are satisfactory for me remains true, the idea of ​​transferring everything to TiddlyWiki comes naturally to me (which, yes, works excellently as a generator of static sites)... 🙂

...It's a shame that it's not easy to recreate all my special pages and particular internal functions with the templating and macro system of this otherwise magnificent software, and so I've been working on it since March 2023. In all honesty, what happens is that I work on it for days, then I stop out of boredom, then I forget about it for a good month, and then I start the cycle again as late as possible.
At this rate, who knows if sitoctt and OcttKB will ever truly be merged into one source... they will finish the bridge over the strait first, those there, this matter about me. 🙃

The time that passes away...

This section risks not making the slightest sense, but I wanted to write it anyway, partly for atmosphere and partly out of desperation.
There has never been any doubt that time cannot help but flow, leaving behind everything that has been past and that constitutes the present because there has been no way to change it. However, time seems to be less and less useful, more volatile, less tangible. Entropy rises, regrets crystallize, divertissement appears to be an increasingly less effective way of escaping trouble.

But, dramatic jokes aside, this is what I really feel, especially when external circumstances remind me of it: speaking in the short term, despite having eliminated some of the things that led me to waste time, it seems that I have less and less available; regarding the long term, every now and then there is a strong feeling that the time really available to materialize, despite all the justifications that my brain invents to eliminate the pain, is almost running out. 😶

The end.

Let us therefore hope - because it is generally right to never stop hoping, even if perhaps it is not a good idea to use hope as a substitute for action - that this new year can bring us many equally new but truly beautiful things, even if I have no idea how this could happen. Happy Holidays, little people who live in my computer and read my crazy things!