I sometimes forget that most of social media is governed by an attention span algorithm instead of a reverse chronological algorithm. There are at least a couple times, however, when I’m reminded of that fact:

1. I Google a new topic or interact with a new creator on a platform and suddenly my feed is all about that topic or creator. As an example, my current Youtube main page is D&D and Cities: Skylines II. Just one week ago it was retro gaming single board computers, programming, and Cities: Skylines II. The stark difference in the recommendations on a page that I load at least once daily can sometimes be jarring.
2. Semi-related to the first point, my phone’s alerts for Youtube and Twitter tend to narrow to the last 1-2 creators I interacted with. Right now I’m only seeing YT alerts from the official D&D YT account and City Planner Plays. On Twitter I’m only seeing alerts from my local county and this person who posts about 1990s-2000s Contemporary Christian Music. And this has the weird effect of making it seem that no one else that I follow is creating new content. Then I go to my follower page on either app and realize that, no, there is a TON of new content by all the people I follow. I recognize that if the phone were to alert me for every person I follow, I might never be able to use my phone for all the alerts, but I do wish it were slightly more balanced. Maybe more of a power law or something. At one point I was only getting Twitter alerts for an author I follow and I’m sure it seemed odd that I was always commenting, but that also made the algorithm see more engagement so it kept giving me more of her Tweets.

I was on Identi.ca back when it first launched and I joined Mastodon a few years ago. Identi.ca had a decent number of FLOSS devs at the time, but by the time of Mastodon, Twitter was ascendant. So “no one” was on Mastodon. Even a few of the FLOSS developers I followed on Mastodon never posted on there. Network effects - it’s the reason almost everyone who threatens to leave Facebook never does; social media is only useful if you can be social (ie your friends/acquaintances are on it).

Steganography is the process of hiding a message within another message. The difference between steganography and encryption is that encryption seems to make a message indistinguishable from noise. Encryption will turn “my cat is black” into “df cok eropz” while steganography could involve you sending a picture of a car and the receiver would run that image through some software to get the message “my cat is black”. Why use steganography over encryption? Because it’s less interesting to those who want to know what you’re saying. Imagine we’re in the world of Game of Thrones during Seaons 2 of the HBO show and Rob Stark needs to send a message about troop movements. He has to assume that the man carrying his message might be captured or bribed to give up the messages. If it looks encrypted, then King Joffrey will put his best minds on trying to figure out the encryption. If the message looks like a condolences to a lord for his son’s death, then they might let the message pass.

The thing I like the most about Twitter is the ability to interact with creatives in real time.  In the past you had to write a letter to a writer, artist, musician, etc and hope that, maybe, they’d actually read it and that, maybe, they’d feel compelled to reply with something more than boilerplate.  I started following Paolo Rivera after meeting him at Baltimore Comic-Con.  (Related topic: meeting a bunch of creators in person at Baltimore Comic-Con helped make them more “real” to me.  I’m not a jerky person, but it really does give me pause when I post a criticism to someone on twitter.  Unlike these guys.)  So when Paolo tweeted something from his blog that I wanted to comment on, I kept failing the captcha he had on the comments.  I tweeted and (to my surprise) was retweeted by Paolo:

A little past the end of February I started having problems with my internet connected devices.  In the basement we have a Roku box that the wife uses to watch Netflix.  She reported that it was no longer connecting to Netflix.  We’d had issues before with it needing to be re-registered with Netflix, but that did not seem to be the case.  I’d click on the Netflix channel and it would say “retrieving movies” for a while and then pop back to the main menu.  At first I thought something was wrong with the Roku box, so I tried the Amazon channel, but that worked and I was able to watch my content.  I figured it’d resolve itself.  So she just popped in the latest DVD from Netflix into our DVD player.  Later that night she was in the bedroom and learned that our Samsung BluRay player was no longer connecting to Netflix.  I thought that was weird, but figured maybe it was a Netflix problem.  I checked on my computer and I couldn’t log into the Netflix site.  Neither could Danielle on her computer.  These were Linux boxes (Fedora and Ubuntu respectively) so I tried on my Windows computer.  Strangely, that one could log in.  That’s weird.  I tried on both Firefox and Chrome with no difference.  So then I tried the guest computer - that computer hadn’t been used since December and I knew it was working for Netflix back then.  That would help me eliminate the possibility that I’d installed a distro update that had killed it for me.  (I knew that didn’t totally make sense because of the BluRay Player and Roku) That one could reach it either.  What was going on here?  Was Netflix blocking Linux?  Well, I figured it might go away so I waited until the next day.