Before & After & Inbetween

I decided to use this blog a lot more next year, so let's start early with that, shall we?
2024 is still six days to go, but here I am. :-)

Changes during 2024 (part 1)

Spotify to Tidal:

This is the most recent change. Spotify crossed the "has to go" enshittification threshold a week ago, when I first needed fifteen minutes on their crappy app to find the christmas music playlist I made last year and then discovered that half of the songs on it were either missing or replaced by "suggestions" of elevator music. Then there was this blog post by Cory Doctorow that linked me to an article about Spotify's muzac side-gig on Harper's (explains a lot, really!), plus their abysmal paying of the artists (think 227 streams for 1 Dollar [source]).
So I canceled my abo (effective Jan 2, 2025 - after which that account will be deleted) and looked into alternative services: Deezer, Tidal, and Napster. I didn't consider Apple (I'm on Android and Apple doesn't play nice outside its sandbox) or Youtube (Google is unreliable when it comes to continuing services) and Amazon is so close to the enshittification threshold by now that I certainly won't take any new business there. Deezer and Tidal have both intuitive apps and all my must-have favs.
I'm now on Tidal, of the two, they pay the artists better (80 streams vs 157 for 1 USD) and I liked their app a tad better. I didn't use their transfer service for playlists and such, since Spotify made a mess out of my lists anyway and I prefer listening to albums. For that I already spotted two new ones from "Two Steps From Hell" that I never found on Spotify and the audio quality is superb even on my tinny kitchen speaker.
Also, their themed playlists, something I avoided at all costs on Spotify in the end, are a positive surprise. Starting the "Rock Christmas" playlist (I needed a soundtrack on short notice yesterday) with "Fairytale of New York" by The Pogues and Kirsty MacColl is certainly a bold choice and I was halfway through the list before one of the ubiquitous jingles showed up (Wonderful Christmastime by Paul McCartney). And there are a lot of songs on that list I never heard before. Wow.
If you like podcasts and audiobooks along with your music, you'll probably want to look into Deezer, but if it's music in superb audio quality: have a look at Tidal. I'm certainly positively impressed at this point.

Twitter to Bluesky and Mastodon

My Twitter handle (AKK666AKK) was unused and the account locked since EM bought the company and put enshittification on speed dial.
In November 2024, I deleted it for good. I started accounts on Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky - and found myself using Bluesky (AKK666) and Mastodon (AKK666) the most, with Bluesky being mostly books, fan activities, art, cats and plants, and commentary in English, whereas Mastodon is German everday talk and science. More to Threads later.

Facebook, Instagram, Threads:

I stopped using these cold Turkey a couple weeks ago, when they demanded that I as a EU customer (a) confirm again that I'm fine with being ad-tracked and (b) get unskippable auto-play ads that are so much fun on a commuter train in the morning in my feed if I don't pay through my nose. Nope. Nope. Nope-ty-nope!
The accounts still exist, the apps are still on my phone - because I enjoy seeing the desperate notifications of "you missed this..." and "look at our crap..." that are increasingly off the mark regarding my interests (so much for their algorithm *eg*)
So, if you want to stay in contact with me, find me on Bluesky as AKK666 or here on this blog. :-)

There's more to come, but this post is certainly long enough by now.
Feels good to post in a format I'm atuned to. Verbose text. ;-)

Dear readers on LiveJournal,

this will be the last cross-posted entry to LiveJournal, so if you are one of the few people still following my updates, please bookmark my Dreamwidth Journal http://akk.dreamwidth.org for further contact. You can easily reach me there logging in with your LiveJournal account under open-ID.
I'm sorry for the few ppl I inconvenience with this, but frankly, the overwhelming majority of my contacts either disappeared or moved to DW, most of the communities and fandoms I followed are dead with Viewfinder's "Club Sion" and "Yamane Ayano" being the notable exception, and LJ's interface has long since become a pain in the mors even for checking the crossposts once in a blue moon.

Hope to meet you on DW,
AKK

I have a free account on fotocommunity.de now. While they don't allow a large number of photos online, I very much like their take on quality and copyrights.
The slideshow currently holds only two pictures - to "test the waters". After all, this is a community of (hobby) photographers - and I make my snapshots with a smartphone. ^^;;

For free to good hands. :)

A few days ago, a friend of mine mentioned that for her, DW is very quiet (almost "deadish") and all her blog-action happens back on LJ. Since I didn't feel that way, it made me reflect on it and I noticed that I've begun to mentally separate my DW experience from what I expect on LJ.

( allow me to elaborate... )

After playing around a while - and spending some time checking the imported entries from both LJ (active until March 2008) and IJ (active since I think May 2007; I imported my LJ sans comments back then) - I have the following summary:( on to the long summary )

A few days ago, I learned about Dreamwidth from solo, which seems to be a truly nifty service once it starts. They are working hard to make moving over from LJ (IJ, JF) as painless as possible, including porting comments! There's a lot of thought being put into the project to avoid most of the inconveniences (for example of friending & friendslock, etc.) on LJ and how to make it smoothly interact with an existing account elsewhere (like here on IJ). :)

If you want to know more: here's the DW-FAQ.

Special Tag: "Do Androids dream of electric sheep?"

If you want to print a long text posted in a blog based on the same code as IJ (or LJ fr that matter), there's a simple way to get rid of the elaborate styles and sidebars that are useful for blogging but a waste of paper in archive. Just create a bookmark, give it a recognizable name and copy the following javascript code into "location":

javascript:location.search+=(location.search?'&':'?')+'usescheme=lynx&format=light'

If you are reading a blog-page you'd like to print (or if the style is hard on your eyes), you can just click the bookmark and the page will reload in light-format. This does not change your settings!

...geez. I meant to post this ages ago, when I came to IJ.

squeaky has posted a poll about which option for a new web hosting provider we as his customers would prefer: http://squeaky.insanejournal.com/72463.html.

Recent events -- namely Strikethrough, BoldOut, InterestDisappear, and finally this statement of the SUP director (human translation) -- convinced me to move my writing and blogging activities away from LiveJournal. It wasn't an easy decision for me. When I came to LiveJournal in August 2005, I found wonderful readers with whom I had many fascinating discussions and I feel sorry for leaving them behind, but I do not want to add quality content to a site that aligns it with pornography, pedophilia, and such filth.

I won't delete this journal and I will continue checking my friends' list and announcing fanfic updates and such in the respective communities (if they allow me to do so when the links go to a different journalling site), but there won't be any new fic-related content here on LJ - including the FM-PMS updates. My journal from now on is AKK @ InsaneJournal with a mirror at AKK @ JournalFen.

You can find
- my new journal at akk@insanejournal.com
- a syndicated feed for it to keep on your friends list at akk_ij
- an rss feed for a live bookmark: http://akk.insanejournal.com/data/rss/

I also made a Guide post to my fanfics on InsaneJournal, which I intend to keep up to date when adding new works.

I hope this makes the move as non-disruptive as possible. Originally, I planned to at least finish Family Matters here and make a clean cut afterwards, but things deteriorated too fast.
Good bye - and I hope we meet again elsewhere.

~Ann