In this week’s roundup: another week in Mastodon, the Twitter exodus intensifies (and the resulting hiccups to me personally), wrangling WordPress to do what I want and Taskmaster.

The Twitter exodus intensifies!

Right, so, the big one first… shit is really hitting the fan now, huh? I spent most of the week and the week prior feeling very much like Cassandra, shouting into the void about how everyone should grab backups of their Twitter data and get themselves a lifeboat and tell people in their circles about said lifeboats, while the large majority of fandom people I follow or interact with on there seemed rather gleefully unconcerned.

And then Thursday happened.

I actually went out to dinner with friends, and hadn’t so much as glanced at my phone for 3 hours when I came home, got online, and found, well, this:

And at that point, finally, people started worrying about “what shall I do if this place goes down?”. BTW, I don’t actually believe Twitter will cease to exist overnight. I think there will start to be more and more outages (hello, failwhale, old friend), potential data loss, and it will up a husk of its former self… but then again, I certainly couldn’t have predicted the current dumpster fire, nor how fast it all happened, so what do I know?

Anyway, I’m glad people are taking steps, finally.

Most of the people I know on Twitter are going back to Tumblr. I enjoy it there, it’s silly, it suits me fine. Only a trickle of those are looking into Mastodon, and a lot are confused.

However, from my view as someone that has been there about 2 weeks, a LOT of people are coming to Mastodon, just people I didn’t previously know. Which has been interesting. Sometimes good interesting, sometimes not so good.

Another week in Mastodon

It’s interesting because if I recount my week over there, it’s everything before Thursday night and everything after. I continue to really enjoy the way things are over there, it’s chill, I like that it’s WAY way less image heavy than Twitter or Tumblr. People are thoughtful and I’ve had some great conversations.

By necessity, when I came aboard two weeks ago, I started following and interacting with many people, some of whose interests match mine and some not. It’s been nice. It’s been especially nice to connect with other “fandom coders”.

On the specific MDZS fandom side… well, let’s just say on Twitter I’m very selective of who I follow and it’s generally people that like the same characters and ships. That has also been nice.

The thing that happened after Thursday though, is lots of people from my fandoms, but with specific, more mainstream, interests I don’t necessarily share, have joined, and well… conversation has kind of revolved around those things, and I would prefer, selfishly, for my timeline to be discussing more varied topics. Certainly more topics I’m into.

Probably means I do need to start being more selective about who I follow. I also think it will get better as people learn to use the “unlisted” option both in replies and in subsequent toots in a thread (look at me, using the lingo!).

So, I know it will sort itself out, and it’s just a product of many people coming in very fast.

Wrangling WordPress

I had the idea to make a couple of fan directories (for sangcheng and CLAMP fans), sort of successors to what fanlistings used to be, except more useful in that you could list all the places you can be found at, so it could be used for actually finding people (I don’t know if anyone ever used the actual list in fanlistings like that, but I certainly did not, for me fanlistings were a fun excuse to make a nice site with a pretty layout without needing to worry about the content too much).

Anyway, decided to use WordPress, since I actually work with it a lot. Started out looking into membership plugins, but in general they’re all way too much for what I want to do. So I wound up going with Advanced Custom Fields, to expand on the information in profiles, and a plugin called ACF Extended, which lets you use ACF’s meta fields on forms in the frontend, and it actually comes with the functionality to just create users with that information for you. Nice. Just what I needed. I also found a Delete Me plugin, so people can do that, and New User Approve, so I can review applications as they come in.

Now I’m in the process of writing my own code to show the actual list with the new fields I made on ACF (as a shortcode in a plugin), and then time to make a simple theme, and should be done.

No idea how many people will want to use this, but it’s been fun to work on.

Taskmaster

I’d watched a little bit of it, when visiting my brother (he lived in the UK for awhile), but I just started watching this season and, well, it has eaten my brain. It’s so dumb, I love it.

Other stuff

As part of that whole getting to connect with other people that like to code and make fansites and shrines, I have reregistered hitsuzen.net! I used to own that, back in the time of fanlistings, but I let it expire. Now I got it again, and have no idea what to do with it, other than it should obviously be related to CLAMP somehow.