Josie Stewart

I don't think y'all understand how much I don't want to be the one out here creating new Internet infrastructure to replace what the corporations are fucking us over with. I love software development, but this is such a huge task and requires coordinating so many different skillsets without any upfront investment. But there's not enough people doing it in a way that is sustainable at the community level, so as a result we have a lack of viable options.

Mastodon may exist but it still requires technical skill and infrastructure to set up, and its user interface could still use work. These are not trivial tasks. This is why so many people bounced off Mastodon whether they realize it or not. All that chaos of finding an instance that works and it not collapsing due to some bad moderation situation--that's a community issue. We need software built at the community level to mitigate that problem.

I think a lot of people who say they're ditching social media are kidding themselves. I see most of them on LinkedIn these days. Even the most low tech person is forced to rely on the cell network for communications. That's not social media in the traditional sense, but it's still social technology. This isn't a problem that we can just stick our heads in the sand about and wait for the AI bubble to burst.

Donating to a think tank or a nonprofit is not going to solve this problem either. They're by and large way too focused on the commercial scale than the community level. They're not ready to take a hit. We've talked to CEOs whose plan for their company not getting affected by anti-trans legislation is "over my dead body". That sounds noble but that's not a plan.

I know we're all falling into the same economic hole, so I'm not pretending like we have so much money to spare but for those who are not literally struggling with eviction, you have some funds going to community--there's no way you don't. Maybe it's board game night or movie night or chill at home and potluck night. I'm not saying to stop those things, but consider how you're prioritizing your expenses in that area. 100 people contributing 50 cents a month to a community communications fund is $50 a month to do something about this.

I worked my first shift as a DoorDash delivery driver today. I think I'm pretty good at it. Gonna start doing it part time for supplemental income since the Kickstarter didn't fund. If anyone needs any kind of technical support, let me know. I would love to start bringing in more money through Blue Shark Friends too.

I really feel like our asking price for a website is not too much. It's like 20 delivery order tips, and it definitely takes so much more work to produce than 20 delivery orders worth of work. If you can tip for 20 meals, you can do this.

Maybe you don't know what you would do with a website, but I know we all have different technical needs and I'm fully equipped to help with them. Consider scheduling a call with us. We have a schedule button on our home page at bluesharkfriends.com.

I know we're all used to getting so many digital services for free, but that's because these companies are selling your data and stealing your content. They make so much more money off of what they rob from you than you realize. On top of that, they're poisoning our communities both literally and metaphorically. It's time for us to reclaim the Internet for our communities.

I should know better by now. I was getting to know someone new on Facebook, and I did that thing where I started typing a long comment and then looked away for a second and it was gone. So frustrated with myself for not starting that comment in a separate app.

But it got me thinking about how low the bar is for accessibility in Big Tech. We have these big polished sites that take years of work and the skilled labor of many designers to build, and something as small as drafting comments in a way that can't get whisked away by a refresh is left unaddressed for years and we just accept it.

That isn't to say this is the worst manifestation of this problem, but it got me thinking about our ownership of the writing (or video or pictures) we share on these platforms and how casually we accept some anonymous third party's control over its survival. It shouldn't be this way.

When I was at the Computer History Museum this summer, I took a picture of a relic that stood out to me. It was an early (1975) computer kiosk called Community Memory. A device for preserving publicly accessible information for the community. The Internet and later the Web started as a way for us to network community ideas from one community node to another, not only sharing but also preserving them.

We have this idea that everything on the Internet is forever. It's really not though. What we do have is a system where whether our content persists or not is entirely up to people we don't know who don't have our best interest in heart. Local storage is a partial solution to this, but how many of you have the capacity to handle your personal data like an archivist?

Not everything should be forever. In an existential sense, nothing really can be and that's ok, but there are things at the community level that we should preserve. We shouldn't surrender all our efforts to share knowledge and beauty with each other to the void.

This blog is my attempt to start taking back control of my writing online. The Shiver software solutions are Blue Shark Friends's attempts to make preservation sustainable. Digital archives like the Internet Archive are great, but they are ultimately just another place where data is housed outside your community. We can't preserve what's important to us alone, but working together as a community, we can make a tangible difference in what lasts.

I've been trying to figure out a way to start blogging on my website without too much upfront investment. I wanted a drop-in technical solution, but it seems like that just didn't exist. Existing solutions in Node were either large blogging or static site generator frameworks or step-by-step instructions on how to create your own lightweight CMS. I didn't want either of those.

Anyway, I don't think most of you are interested in the technical details. The point is that for now, while we're not adding large new features to our tools, I'm going to be experimenting with a more ad hoc solution that requires minimal technical work for me, which unfortunately means it's not going to be something that I can make accessible to everyone yet.

But at least I can get some of my thoughts out there on my own page without relying on existing social media or blogging platforms.