A Cunning Plan

As anyone who has followed me for any amount of time on Facebook knows, I loathe Facebook. I despise everything it stands for and how it treats it product (read: us). I abhor its invasions of privacy, its stalking tracking of users, its manipulation, the secret-and-therefore-unethical social experiments, the repeated breaches of privacy & trust, and the "sponsored" posts it doesn't bother to identify so that programs like Social Fixer can block them.

Its "curating" of what we see, no matter what we repeatedly tell them, via our settings, what we want to see has caused me real harm. I have missed so many important and/or time sensitive posts. I have failed to comfort friends or family who have lost loved ones because I never saw their post. I have not known the change of status, good or bad, of friends or family because I never saw the post.

As noted above, I use Social Fixer and it helps, but one thing it doesn't do is notify me when friends post. Another problem is the Facebook constantly changes its code to thwart Social Fixer's fixes.

I have lamented the loss of Livejournal, which I cannot use when it is owned by Russian interests due to the Russian government's policies of silencing the LGBTQIA+ community and its persecution of and human rights violations against its citizens.

I miss LJ a lot, especially its comment system, which was the best I've encountered in social media. I miss being able to pay to not see ads. I miss my lifetime subscription that allowed me to personalize it in ways Facebook or Twitter don't allow. And I miss its notifications, something that I've not seen addressed well in any of Facebook's knockoffs, including MeWe.

Fortunately, there is a solution -- Dreamwidth uses LJ's source code and not only kept the best aspects, but improved on them. The problem: even fewer people on Dreamwidth than on LJ in its prime, and nothing like the reach I have on Facebook despite Facebook's best efforts. I have tried, time and again, to revive my Dreamwidth account, but I always end up just resuming regular posting on Facebook.

Today on Twitter a user reminded me of LJ and Dreamwidth, and I've made an executive decision. I'm going to begin posting everything I post on Facebook here, and a link to here on every Facebook post. I'm hoping that my friends and family on Facebook will try Dreamwidth and see what it's like to have an ad-free experience and in general how nice Dreamwidth is, and they'll be encouraged to join. The more people we can get to join, the less of a stranglehold Facebook will have. Also, with any luck, people will join and start posting here, and I'll actually be able to see when they do since Dreamwidth doesn't decide for me what I'll see.

Whose Bright Idea Was It...

... to use the same street number twice in the same neighborhood? Once again our neighbors on a different street but with the same house number (which you come to first) have received something we ordered. In this case, dinner. The restaurant refunded us but I had to start cooking when normally we would be eating, so we ate late tonight. This isn't the first time by far; they've also gotten our groceries and once, before the plague, a shipment of yarn that I was luckily able to get them to put back in the mail so it eventually got delivered to me.

Maybe a first world problem, but it is really annoying knowing this could have been avoided if whomever determines addresses had thought of the confusion caused by having two houses in the same neighborhood with the same number.