Anyway, hi, I’m Austin and I am indeed a real human being with meat organs and everything definitely not a robot wait shit where’s the backspa

Another flashback to when I joined Facebook again after a long time away, and she was the first person I added. So naturally I posted “hi I’m Austin and I’m real” and for some reason people were really suspicious

Flashback to me wife telling me she thought I was made up. She looked at my Instagram and was like “no way is that his real name”.

It’s available to stream! You have to go into special features on Disney+ for the original Star Wars: A New Hope and it’s listed with the director’s commentary and whatnot.

We had a landline phone that was wired to the wall when I was younger, later it was cordless. No cell phone until I was 15 and that was a flip phone with 160-character texts, and we were charged per message or had limited texts per month. No internet on the phone.

We couldn’t look things up as easily. If you were lucky enough to have a computer, it was a desktop PC and internet was slow. Many pages were dubious, and no Wikipedia. If you didn’t have a PC, you could go to a library or ask someone you knew but a lot of questions would just go unanswered.

Exactly! And there's so much depth to it, you can get absolutely *lost* in the various subgenres of metal.

All this is to say, if I had an open platform where I could write freely, share with friends, cross promote each other’s work, and know there’s open channels to promote to a wider audience without being beholden to Big Tech, I’d be one happy camper. I bet other writers would be too. Thoughts?

With this, anyone could aggregate their favorite reads without being boxed in by one company. The fediverse is one potential answer to this — I haven’t read the AT Protocol specs thoroughly enough to know for sure but I understand fedi has similar goals in terms of openness and not siloing creators.

I don’t know if RSS alone will solve the problem entirely but what I’d really love to see is a resurgence of “blog rolls” where authors list their favorite blogs to read, combined with some automated (open) means of reading them with a web crawler.