bzzrt

Category: Life Beyond the Algorithm

  • Bluesky

    Bluesky

    Social media isn’t really my thing. I used Facebook a lot up to 2012 but lost interest when it commercialized the newsfeed and aimed at dominating the Web 2.0 landscape. Since business accounts on Facebook are tied to personal accounts, I kept mine much longer than I wanted. Eventually, I decided to drop Facebook completely once I realized it wasn’t generating any value any more. This event triggered a larger cleanup operation, one that I’m still working on. In 2024, I decided to remove myself from all social apps I had tried over the past decade. Almost none of them stuck anyway.

    Why I switched

    Online social spaces are in large part shaped by commercial algorithms. I am not a fan. They create marketplaces and trigger addictive behavior instead of cultivating social hangouts. I don’t have a very socially-oriented personality to begin with, and the use of commercial algorithms makes social apps vile places for me to be around. I constantly feel on high alert. I hate it. So, over the course of the last three years, I deleted my accounts.

    But I do crave some sort of online interaction. So, I’m on Bluesky now, admittedly somewhat reluctantly. Bluesky gained popularity last year after the-platform-formerly-known-as-Twitter experienced an exodus. I’ve never shown any interest in Twitter myself, as I am easily triggered and would probably spend too much time bickering with complete idiots making me that exact same idiot. Among the social platforms today, I’m told Bluesky is like Twitter in its early days, but more focused on self-moderation at the user level. I like that.

    So, how is it?

    I like Bluesky so far. I’m socialising with complete strangers, as no one I know in real life is on the platform, apart from my wife. I’ve met some interesting people and I’ve never seen so many cats, birds, mushrooms, flowers, insects and beautiful landscapes in one place as I have on Bluesky. But last January I almost uninstalled the app. I have set up an ignore list to hide posts containing words specifically related to Russian, American and Dutch politics, which works pretty well. Until a flood of shitposts hit the proverbial fan around the inauguration and the days after. Some people on Bluesky are posting screenshots with minimal to no comment and no hashtags. As a result, I ended up blocking 80 people in 2 days. Which is just silly. I’ve since unblocked most of those people and started ignoring specific accounts instead, which feels a lot more constructive.

    Starter packs

    What really helped broaden my horizons on Bluesky was when I discovered a starter pack dedicated to artists who live or work in the Netherlands. Starter packs are curated lists of people to follow. Anyone can create and share these lists. This particular one was created and shared by a guy called Henk, who happened to pop up in my discovery feed. I followed everyone in the pack with a single click and asked if I could be on it. Apparently I could.

    My understanding is that Bluesky takes a slightly different approach to feed content. In addition to having a feed that only shows posts from people you follow, the ‘discovery’ feed is influenced more by personal signals and actions, and less by virality or popularity. This suits me much better. I have a deep distrust of anything hysterically popular. I’ve even had a few really nice conversations with fellow artists.

    So. Could I interest you in joining us there?

    @bzzrtblue.bsky.social

  • No cookies for you

    No cookies for you

    So, WordPress it is. I’ve decided to build a new website on this platform that’s been online since 2004, I think. I’ve published websites since 1995 but only built one WordPress website before, so it’ll be a bit of a discovery. While thinking about the layout and content for the site, I am also looking at a few plugins.

    The plugins I am checking out are about website security and statistics. I may cover the security side in a future blog post, but for now the statistics are not only of interest to me, but to you as well—because you are here, visiting my page. And just like every webpage or application currently in use, you are being tracked. So, what I install to help me collect user data is definitely relevant to you.

    The Burst Statistics plugin

    Since I’ve become a little Googallergic, I’ve installed Burst statistics for WordPress. It is a data collection plugin that has some very interesting options that I didn’t realise exist. Firstly, it is self hosted. This means that all the collected data is stored on the server this website is hosted on. It is only available to me, the website owner, and you, the cookie monster.

    Do not track

    Second, it allows me to honor ‘do not track’ requests. This is a privacy feature built into most browsers that lets you send a request to websites to stop collecting and sharing data. The catch is that websites can choose to honor this request or not. If they don’t, they can just track you like they do everyone else. Although its use has been ‘discouraged’ by advertising companies and their cronies, it might still be worth setting it up in your browser and improving your privacy, even if it’s a little bit. Here is an article on how to set it up on most browsers.

    Cookieless tracking

    In addition, Burst has a feature called cookieless tracking. Cookies have become increasingly risky, leading to security breaches through data leakage and conflicts with current data regulations and privacy legislation. The industry has been looking at new types of tracking to limit these risks. One of those technologies is cookieless tracking. It aims to (still) collect information about your visit through small pieces of code, just as cookies do. However, these snippets are only available to the visitor and the website owner. So, when cookieless tracking is enabled, no data is shared with other parties such as advertisers, search engines, affiliates and so on. This technology is server-side, which means you don’t have to do anything to make it work. I do.

    Cheers!