~semitones on TTBP

29 may 2024

Guide needed for a Public persona online

I have nostalgia for early facebook, which will likely never circle back again. I loved the freedom of being myself, online. Not the anonymous, 'free' version of myself I could always be online, but the freedom to exist as my true identity, with my name, face, real world location, and real world friends, all extended online.

Early AIM was similar, in the sense that my contacts list was full of people I knew from school. Where I could exist online as an extension of who I was in the physical world.

Today, it feels as if I don't have as many in-person friends. Taking this tangent briefly; I've always felt stronger human connections when I spent a large part of my life around other people -- in school, in jobs with a large cohort of staff mixing around, with enough time and freedom to sometimes talk or spend time with those people, and see what they were about. These days, I have a long tail of people I know, folks I remember, fleeting connections, gossamer strands, extending outward from me, maybe like lines to a parachute canopy. That's a more apt image than a spider's web, surely. But those lines float out there, unmaintained, untested, and it feels like I am sometimes in free-fall.

But that's not what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about early Facebook

That time when anyone you knew in real life was likely to interact with you online. I miss that.

These days, I'm not on the predatory social medias. I mean, my old accounts are still there. And here's where my paranoia starts.

On one hand, I want to leave them up, as an archive of who I was in the old days. The facebook of high school and college. And small constellation of other sites with my name, face, and information about what it means to be me.

But on the other hand, it's not as safe as it was back then. If people haven't figured out yet how to use images of you, text of you, and innocuous bits of information about you, they will soon. So it's probably not a good idea to leave those up. Shit.

That's not what I wanted to talk about either. I wanted to talk about what felt so right about early facebook. And how I want to try capturing some of that lightning in a little fedi-shaped bottle.

It felt right

It felt right to be myself online It felt right to use my name It felt right to talk about where I lived It felt right to talk with other people I know It felt right to share pictures of myself, and see pictures of my friends It felt right to organize local events, and see who was planning on going, and discover things that way

Some things will never be the same

I might not be able to use my name, but maybe I can? It may not be advisable to publicly post images of my likeness If I share other details, I need to be careful that they do not constitute a liability of some kind Most people I know in real life will not join "free" social networks. At least not at first. At best I'll be an early adopter. At worst I'll be publicly myself in a realm where I don't know the other people, but they'll know me.

-- Quick aside, what editor am I even in?

I'll need to find out other ways of discovering local events, and it will probably not be based on who else do I know who is going, which is really sad

Public and Private Identity?

I guess I'm looking for the Marie Kondo of online privacy and identity. The person to take in all the information, and proclaim, this is what you can share. This is what you must keep private. As far as I can tell, no one is doing this... maybe because privacy is so elusive? There are plenty of guides to how to protect your privacy when you are trying to be anonymous. But what if you want to be yourself? Is there a safe middle ground?

Here is what I imagine.

Assumptions

If

If the information I share is relatively private and ephemeral, and
If I refrain from sharing searchable, personally identifiable details, like name, address, etc., (Why did the editor wordwrap here...? Is it because I used an asterix? And why isn't it word wrapping now???
If I stick to relatively generic details, i.e., broad strokes about my life, interests (it word wrapped here too!!!??) location
- But the quesiton is -- how broad?
If no one is collecting my postings for posterity and running analysis on it to identify me from my word choice and writing style

Then

Then it should be safe to talk with, and connect to, people who are somewhat in the same physical location as me
Then it should be safe to share some personal details without that information remaining public for the rest of my life
Then it should be possible to be myself online, somewhat

What about Real Name, Photos?

Photos may never be safe, I'm not sure. That's very sad. I've heard too many stories of people using technology to create false photos using publicly available photos, or to identify you in a crowd / in public based on publicly identifyable photos of yourself.
It may be safe to use your Real Name, but only in association with details that you would be comfortable with everyone in the world, in present, and future, forever, to know about you. As of now I don't have a good idea what details I would be comfortable sharing "forever." I think the reason here is, if someone has reason to wish you harm, they can use almost anything as ammunition. :(

Conclusion

I'd like to research and distill what I'm comfortable sharing online
I wish I knew how to share this with others

permalink

11 january 2024

Trying this markdown business in feels

feels was exactly what I was looking for, even though I didn't know it. Can I start a sentence that way? Just a little record of how things are going, posted online; where given the inevitability of time and probability, someone will come across it. That's you! And me also, so, hi!

I thought to make a website, I would get tired of writing with HTML. All those angle brackets. Markdown is a little easier -- I can write normally, and something will appear. Other things I like about Markdown:

I learned some formatting through osmosis, over the years. Maybe on tumblr, reddit, or other bulletin boards
Hey, vim automatically inserted a new line after that comma there, after tumblr! Whoa and it did another one right after 'after'. I really don't understand vim.

Other thoughts:

I wonder if vim has a 'wrap text' mode... I'm sure it does, but I'd rather wonder about it here, publicly, forever, than look it up. That's just how I am.
I am a vim novice. I am thankful to 'linux upskill challenge' for encouraging me to take the plunge and learn how to do basic things in it. Now at least I can save, quit, and do stuff like that. I wonder why this line doesn't get an automatic new line?
And when I do press enter, it indents my next line, and I have to single backspace to enter in my next *. Something weird afoot for sure.
Feels is great! And onto the style question: do you put a period at the end of list elements? Yes when some of them are multi-sentence?

I suppose next I can think about editing index.html to link to /blog... still not sure how it all works to get a single page that updates with new entries at the top. Maybe ttbp automatically handles everything? We'll see. Feels pretty great! -p

What's next

There's still a lot I don't know. I am a little afraid of 'email' as it exists on a linux server, between users. How does it work? Leaving that to another time

Other things:

I am logged into irc, with nick 'semitones'; haven't joined any channels yet, partially because I know people will see the join and talk to me, and I'm not sure I have anything to say, lol. Will probably join later and say hi.
I'm connecting via Hexchat and an SSH tunnel which I set up some time ago. I'm definitely not a commandline native -- it is kind of a second language, learned when I was a teen.
This is line 37 of the ttbp entries file for today.
Town IRC does not seem to have MemoServ, which is a shame bc I like memoserv :P
I will try to figure out what this Song of the Day (SOTD) business is... right now, Baptism by Crystal Castles just came on, and it is such a nice nostalgic tune. I would make that my song of the day. :)
Back to my "pre-feels" entry about privacy, by now I'm sure that I've written enough here that someone could figure out my identity if they had enough of my other writing with my name attached. Whatever. There's being careful, and there's paranoia. I guess that's a feel too. :P
Typing emoticons after the period has to be one of those things. :P
Also, that specific tongue-out smile. :P

If someone wanted to contact me, they could probably send me a pm on IRC to user semitones. If I'm really logged in, or if they are persistent, I will probably see it.

Other ways:

I'm not sure how tildemail works, but if it alerts the user at login, then i'll probably see that.
In this server, you can read files in other people's directories? Do you have write permission too? There is a lot I don't remember about this town from when I signed up and learned some things. There's always `ls -l'