Rearranging I don't know if it's the ADHD. It probably is, but I have this urge to constantly rearrange everything. By everything I mean: my home office, the bag I carry with me wherever I go, and lately, this website. The Home Office With the home office, I've never stopped since I got one in 2018. It's been a constant stream of modifications. My old one ended up full of patched holes in the walls from shelves I put up, moved and eventually removed. A floating desk for guests (I rarely had guests). During the COVID lockdown, things got especially intense. I spent most of my free time watching woodworking videos on YouTube (along with Animal Crossing: New Horizons, woodworking and sourdough bread YouTube videos maintained a relative level of sanity in the worldwide male population during 2020). Let me cut that paragraph there to comment that those really long parentheses breaks are also a manifestation of the very thing I'm writing about. Anyway, I bought some power tools, sourced some plywood and planks, and spent almost a month designing and building a big and complicated closed monitor stand with hidden space for cables, nooks for the laptops, and a mounting system for two monitors. It was glorious. Glorious and all, I spent more time building it than I enjoyed it. The next week I set out to modify it. Then, a few days later, I did it again. I don't remember its final form. I think I'm addicted to building things, not to having things. From that era, a table I built for my youngest kid still survives, and he still uses it and loves it. The red table. That makes me smile. At least something tangible remains from all that. This Website This is the subject that led me to write this post. Since its relaunch, I haven't stopped messing with its code, very much like I did with my fabulous closed monitor stand. I add things, I remove things, I change the navigation structure, I get tired of it, I fall in love with it again. In the last few months, I tidied up a lot of code behind the code of the website and modularized everything into components. I even generated a secret style guide that I like to look at just because. Now I'm setting out to throw all that away. Yesterday, I was looking at Darren Hester's website and the need to simplify got into my mind. Straight pages, minimal layout, and structural changes. I don't know what I'm going for, but I want something simpler to look at. Fewer bells and whistles, straight text and some images here and there. Here's what I'm thinking: Group blogish things (posts, thoughts, links) Group slash pages (about, now, plus adding a bunch more) Move memories out again to a Pixelfed account, and import them from there, as I'm doing with the Art section, to outsource the management. Although I don't really have a plan, I might start doing it really soon (I know myself), and I'm afraid to regret it later. As I wrote that, I realized it's my fear of uncertainty acting up and rejecting change. And I have to remind myself here that I usually enjoy the process more than the result, and if everything fails, I can always scratch everything and go back. And they say writing is not therapeutic. Yes, I know, nobody says that. In Conclusion There's no conclusion. This post was really a stream of consciousness, almost like a free-writing exercise or a conversation with myself. I think I needed that. If you're still reading at this point, I'm very sorry, but thank you very much. <3 https://axel.mx/blog/rearranging/ #homeoffice #newhorizons #animalcrossing #group #adhd #rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

I'm in Love with the Fediverse Back in May of this year, I returned to the Mastodon account I'd opened when Twitter went to shit the hands of Elon Musk. I don't remember the exact date. The years around the COVID pandemic are fuzzy. I hadn't really used it before, and this time I decided to start following people other than the dead accounts from that first week, the angry signups that eventually turned into abandoned accounts. I followed some people from Latin America I came across, along with some of the authors of blogs I'd been reading since I got back into blogging, about six months earlier. That was enough to get a live feed going. Those first follows, with their reposts and likes, led me to more people, and suddenly my feed was really interesting. The lack of a revenue-driven algorithm This is the best part of the whole Fediverse thing. Nothing's shoved down your throat endlessly. Your feed is chronological and consists only of posts from people you follow. If you don't want to see likes and/or reposts, you can turn them off. This is also what puts most newcomers off. When you first sign up, the place looks dead. We're so used to social media being extremely noisy, with content appearing faster than we can scroll, that an empty feed feels broken. On mainstream platforms, if you don't follow anyone, the algorithm fills your feed for you. Because no matter what, they need you to stay engaged. Within the first 10 minutes on X, you're already angry at somebody. On Threads, you've read the same post ten times, each from a different "author." On Instagram, you probably already feel inadequate. The first 10 minutes on Mastodon are pure silence. An empty container waiting to be filled with the people and things you actually want to see. Numbers don't matter Followers vs. following? Ratios? Reach? Whatever. In my experience, most people on Mastodon don't care much about any of that. I used to care, and now I barely even think about it. Want more reach? Engage with people. Talk to them. Most will talk back at you. What a novel idea, right? Like in the real world! You quickly learn that if you post at 2 a.m., almost nobody will see your post, because there's no algorithm to bring it back from the dead. And that's so refreshing. I suppose some people do care about numbers, but they must be a small minority. Because if numbers are what you're after, you probably wouldn't be on Mastodon in the first place. Things are simple Want to download an image from your timeline? A video? An audio file? A GIF? Right-click and save. As simple as that. As the web always should have been. Want to move to another Mastodon instance (think of it as a server)? You can do that in a few clicks. Want to change your address, not just your username? Sure. Want to cross-post to Bluesky? You guessed it. You can do that, too. There's more than Mastodon Mastodon isn't the only thing out there. There's Pixelfed, an image-based social network (think Instagram) that works pretty much the same way. I moved all my artwork images from Instagram to an instance with the best URL in the universe: punk.photos. Looking for a video platform? There's PeerTube. Something like Facebook? There's Friendica, if you're into that sort of thing. There's BandWagon for music, Funkwhale for sharing audio, and Lemmy for open discussions, Reddit-style. There's even something similar to TikTok: Loops, from the creators of Pixelfed. As you can see, there's a whole world outside Meta, X, and TikTok. Come join us! If you haven't tried it, I invite you to give it a shot. Find me on any of my profiles and say hi. I'll almost certainly say hi back. social.lol/@axel punk.photos/axel I'm thinking of trying some of the other services listed above, too. I'll update this post as I do. Punx.social is a good resource for learning about the Fediverse and getting started. It's geared toward independent bands, but the information is useful for anyone. https://axel.mx/blog/i-m-in-love-with-the-fediverse/ #mastodon #fediverse #want #elonmusk #latinamerica #because #numbers #may #rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit