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Title: Social media and headphones
Date: December 16, 2022
Written On: BBEdit on 2008 MacBook Pro (MacOS 10.6.8)

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  I'm awake early to take a family member to a doctor's appointment, and right
now, I'm listening to some music on a new pair of JLab Studio Pro Wireless
headphones that one of my mates bought me for an early Snowmas/late birthday
present. They're pretty damn good for $40 USD headphones, especially after some
tweaking with the equalizer in iTunes. Lindsey Sterling's music sounds amazing.

  I think I've calmed down a bit in regards to social media again. Still wish
others would chill out a bit as well, but that'll come eventually. But
something brought up elsewhere kinda...hit a nerve? I don't know how to explain
it, but what was said effectively boiled down to:

"This shit's too hard to do on my own. Why can't it just be easy?"

  The thing is, there *is* an easy-to-host social media option, but I seriously
doubt most people would flock to it, even if they knew about it: twtxt[0]. It's
just a plaintext file that one puts on their server in a specific format, which
people can pull when they want to see updates, and use a client to parse the
updates themselves. There's even Yarn.Social[1] to make hosting a multi-user
server easy.

  Unfortunately, it's also *too* simple for most people. They won't believe it
to be that easy, and many would dismiss it entirely because of a lack of their
favorite built-in features, like notifications, replies, status boosting, among
others. Yarn's made so much of this possible, but given how little people are
paying attention to even the rules on the Mastodon servers they join (like CWs
on political stuff), I doubt many would take notice.

  Besides, I think the twtxt people would rather stay a bit smaller than that,
especially with how the alternatives keep ending up. I know Mastodon is going
through some attempted cultural upheavals by Twitter migrants, and I shudder
to think just how much twtxt might suffer from such a surge.

  Speaking of, I might need to revive my twtxt file[2] at some point.

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[0]: https://twtxt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
[1]: https://yarn.social/
[2]: https://twtxt.prismdragon.net/twtxt.txt