bombs in bottles
Sorry about the pun in the title. I am too middle-aged to resist them.
I logged into my old Bear blog account to update my home page with a URL here. I used Bear obsessively for about a month and a half, but I ultimately left for three quite personal reasons.
One: Bear's "Discover" feature, which uses upvotes or "toasts" as part of its calculations in determining what's "trending." Closely related are Bear's analytics, which let users learn a lot about when, where, and how visitors are reading their stuff.
If these features work for you, great! But they tend to work against me. I have spent too many years writing to please The Algorithm. It's become pathological. It is not healthy for me to have access to that information, because I tend to obsess over it. So I'm walking away from it.
Two: Bear uses Cloudflare. As part of my escape from Big Tech, I included Cloud Firewall in my LibreWolf extensions setup. Cloud Firewall automatically blocks sites from Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Google, and Cloudflare.
If this sounds like it breaks a lot of the Web, well, it does. But I also consider it part of my resistance to the oligarchs.
I allow myself access (via Falkon) to two categories of sites Cloud Firewall blocks: (1) sites I am absolutely required to access and (2) one, and only one, "want" site.
The first category includes sites like my bank. I could switch banks, but I don't want to. Mine has by far the best interest rates around. Besides, I'd be surprised if a bank existed that didn't use some Big Tech tools.
The second category is currently assigned to Pixel Cat's End, because I thoroughly enjoy it and cannot find a comparable site that isn't using one of the blocked services. Finding a replacement for a dead simple blogging site, however, was easy.
This may not matter to anyone else. It matters to me.
Three: Smol.pub does more of what I want from a blogging site and less of what I don't. There are no analytics or algorithms to rank my writing. There is insta-triposting to the Web, Gemini, and Gopher. Win-win.
Anyway, if you followed me here from Bear, I recommend my last most recent post. It's a ride:
in which i tear out a fence and remember my fake best friend
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