Year in Dreamwidth

As of this Saturday, I'll have been on Dreamwidth for a year.

You wouldn't know it from my schedule here, or the tone of my recent posts, but I love this place and hope it endures. Which is by no means a given, between things like the recent sale of the .org TLD (please help save it if you can) and the even bigger threat of Article 13 (did you forget about it? EU lawmakers haven't). The power of corporate lobbying reaches far these days. That silencing the masses also happens to suit increasingly authoritarian governments everywhere is just the icing on the cake. With efforts to decentralize the internet again far from ready, things are about to get rough.

But enough politics. I was hoping to avoid it here. For now, dangers to social media are more immediate. The other shoe has dropped for Smack Jeeves, whose redesign broke the site and scattered the community. While the dust settles on that fiasco, and it will take some time, Tumblr is one social network still plodding along just fine. Well, at least until the new owner actually takes over and discovers what mess they got for their money. That 80% of users are still there (if the list of people I follow is any indication) may not mean so much. Those who left still number in the millions, and will pull others after them.

Suffice to say, in recent months I've posted more original content here, not even counting the various groups I'm in.

It's probably time to take down the little sticky post that started this blog and make myself comfortable. For as long as it lasts, anyway. My expectations are low in this day and age when everything is slipping away like in a bad dream.

Not looking forward to 2020. How about you?

Update: as of 1 May 2020, the .org domain is saved. Guess that makes the year not a total disaster.