Notices by Seth Goldstein (seth@sethgoldstein.me)

Bluesky had a massive outage the other day, and people are wondering how could a “decentralized” social network go down like that?

You know how? It’s not decentralized yet. Most of the users are still on the main server and that’s what went down.

You don’t see stuff like this happening on Mastodon or the other ActivityPub services. You know why? They are all decentralized and if one server goes down, the others don’t.

It’s not a complex concept.

Look I like Bluesky. I like that there are people that I want to follow over there. There’s a community there for me. But I also have a even bigger community on the Fediverse (Mastodon etc.).

What bugs me is that Bluesky touts that it’s decentralized when it’s NOT.

Not yet at least.

I mean it can be decentralized and that makes it far better than X/Twitter and the other Web 2.0 apps out there that are centralized and walled off. But it’s still not decentralized — not yet.

And until it can be easily decentralized and in fact is, we’re going to have outages like this and censorship like we’re seeing with Turkey and Bluesky.

Thoughts? I’d love to hear your take.

#Bluesky #Decentralization #Outage

Hudson Atwell is a fellow Post Status (a WordPress community) member. He just published a nifty and light weight plugin that strips the meta data from uploaded photos in the background. It doesn’t do it retroactively only new photos after the plugin is installed.

This is a handy little plugin and it’s free!

Check it out here: https://github.com/atwellpub/mu-plugin-clean-image-meta

#coolPlugin #noMetaDataOnPhotos #securityPlugin #wordpress #wordpressAtItsBest

Happy Holidays everyone!

It’s been a great holiday season so far here.

Christmas Eve-Eve to Christmas Eve my wife, son, and I went on our annual trip to Hershey, PA to go to the Hershey Lodge for some swimming and some chocolate goodness.

Now we’re in the in-between week. It’s still Hanukkah, but the kiddo got all his gifts from us on the first night. XMas day and Hannukah night one, we put together his new Ikea desk for his gaming rig. He’s getting used to it and loves all the space.

The kid made out like a bandit this year, he’s gotten, so far, two 24″ monitors, a new desk, and lots of Robux. There’s still more stuff to come when we get together with my in-laws on the last night, which is on New Years Day 2025!

Any how, I hope everyone is having a good holiday and in-between week.

#chocolate #Chrismukkah #Christmas #Hanukkah #Hershey #hersheyLodge #holidays

I really hate the term “Pick Your Brain.”

First off, it just sounds yuck.

Secondly, when you want to pick someone’s brain it usually means you want FREE advice.

To me pay people for their time, especially if you’re picking their brain on something they do for a living.

What do you think?

#askingForAdvice #brainPicking #payPeopleWhatTheyReWorth #pickingSomeonesBrain

Inc.com posted an article that their reporter did with Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder of WordPress.

In the article the reporter, David H. Freedman, doesn’t paint a sunshine and rainbows picture of the whole fiasco between Matt (et. al) and WP Engine.

Matt, in his right, responded calling the piece a “Hit Piece.”

https://ma.tt/2024/12/inc-hit-piece/

I don’t blame Matt for not liking being called out on his actions, but what does he honestly expect? Honestly, he put a, formerly mandatory, checkbox that made people swear allegiance to pineapple on pizza to log in to WordPress.com. It’s now optional.

I’d love to hear all of your thoughts.

#MattMullenweg #MattVsWPE #wordpress #wpengine

Sam Cole over at 404 Media wrote an article about a Hugging Face Machine Learning Librarian making a public data set of 1 million Bluesky posts available to everyone for Machine Learning.

People were of course outraged. Afterall it’s the Internet. People thrive on being outraged, pissed off, and otherwise salty.

What people seem to miss is that what they’re posting on Bluesky is public and scrapable.

The way this guy made the data set was a bit sloppy and , in my opinion, irresponsible. He didn’t anonymize the data and left personal identifiable information in the data set. He also didn’t get consent from people first.

Yea, I agree it feels a bit icky that this was done, mostly without consent or anonymizing the data. But for the love of the Web, what you put online publicly is — PUBLIC. People will see it and possibly use it for whatever they want. How hard is this to grasp?

This collection, according to Sam’s article, is also in a legal gray area right now and is going through the courts around the world.

To give some credit to the librarian, he down the data set after getting quite a bit of “feedback.” 😵💫😜

But that didn’t stop the trolls from making even bigger data sets and putting the out online.

I really do in fact understand why people are upset, but those posts are public. Don’t post stuff and expect it to be private when it’s PUBLIC!

Honestly, I’m fine with my content that I post publicly be used to train LLMs and AI, because it will improve the technology that I benefit from.

I agree with Rand Fishkin, the founder of Moz and Sparktoro.

He posted on Bluesky:

I know others are probably upset about this, but LLM training is, for me, a benefit of participating in spaces like this. I *want* my word usage, brands, and content to be part of how AI answers questions in the future. Just like I wanted Google to index my websites.

— Rand Fishkin (@randfish.bsky.social) December 8, 2024 at 4:06 PM

I don’t think that’s crazy desire. Right? Am I completely off-base? What do you think?

#AI #Bluesky #Data #Datasets #LLMs #MachineLearning #PublicVsPrivate

https://wptavern.com/wordpress-org-login-introduces-mandatory-pineapple-pizza-checkbox

Seriously, how old are we? Instead of having people swear they have nothing to with WP Engine they now have to proclaim their love for pineapple on pizza before being let into WordPress.org. WTAF! Come on!

In other news State of the Word happened in Japan this AM. It was 4am eastern so I didn’t attend. But Eric Karkovack has a good write up here.

#checkBox #pineapples #pizza #stupidity #wordpressOrg

There have been reports of drones over New Jersey quite a bit lately. The NJ governor has declared a limited state of emergency grounding drones and the FBI is involved. The military says it’s not them. And a congress-critter is saying they’re from Iran. 😵💫

It’s been all over the news and my tech podcasts as well.

Now they’re over Doylestown, PA. Granted we’re not too far from New Jersey, about 30 minute drive on US 202 North. What’s interesting is that we have an airport and these drones seem to like airports and military installations. Curious much?

I didn’t get video of them last night, but the sound of the jets (yes, JETS!) were quite loud. It was around 9pm or 10pm and I thought it was a local car dealer CEO’s private jet at the airport. This morning my wife was looking at the local Facebook group for our community and people got video of a cluster of drones and they were behaving the same way the have been in the media reports.

These buggers have jets and probably are fixed wing not the rotor-copter ones that you get at Best Buy. But I can’t confirm because I didn’t see them.

I’ll go outside next time for a look.

This is getting creepy.

What is with “Post-Economic” people lately? The judge in the WP Engine vs. Matt Mullenweg et al. case just ruled on the injunction in favor of WP Engine.

And… well Matt Mullenweg rage quit the Post Status, a WordPress enthusiast Slack group in a major huff.

Now I get being upset. The judge didn’t rule in your favor. But maybe that’s because you’re actions aren’t as altruistic as you want people to think. Maybe acting so brashly and publicly isn’t the best course of action. And I get it, trying to stay quiet isn’t easy.

But throwing your hands up and taking your toys and going home, is a bit childish.

Matt continues to forget that even though he owns the trademark, domains, and is head of a three-person foundation, that WordPress is so much more than just him. It’s a huge community of passionate and very opinionated people.

WordPress powers around 40% of the websites online. That’s a HUGE burden and stressor for any one person to take on. It’s also huge if Matt goes nuclear and blows up the whole project, which I (hope) he’s not going to do.

Let’s wait and see how things turn out as the dust settles. But my God Matt act your age, man.

#MattMullenweg #wordpress #WPEngine #wpeVSmatt

Not a hugely searched term in Google, but I come up in multiple locations for the term Philly Startup Advisor.

It’s a one-pager setup on Carrd.co and isn’t even a .com. It’s a freaking .us!

It’s the small things in life.

Happy Holidays!

#Com #Us #carrd #Domain #onePager #PhillyStartupAdvisor #ranking #seo

I’m being pretty well behaved this post-Thanksgiving-Capitalism-Buying-Days time.

I got a few needed things. But hardly anything that my ADHD wanted me to buy.

Though, the season isn’t over and Cyber Monday is still coming! Argh!

Wish me luck and wheel power! 😵💫😜🤣

#blackFriday #buyingStuff #cyberMonday #holidays

There are two ways to ask for something to be done before a break where everyone in the country is pausing work for at least a day and possibly traveling.

One way is to acknowledge that the holiday is coming up and ask for a rush to get it launched prior to the holiday and put some money behind it for the effort.

The other way is to just say “let’s get this done by Wednesday” and that’s it.

Both projects have been going on for quite a while. The first one is already launched. The second will hopefully get done today. But, the second one really perturbs me for a number of reasons.

1. No acknowledgement that the holiday is coming up and the push might not be practical.
2. No knowledge of what’s in the hopper prior the holiday.
3. Not even a whiff of acknowledgement that this is an ask that is a bit forward.
4. Compensation? No where in sight.

Look, it’s all through email. Tone and inflection get lost in email all the time. That’s why writing an email, then taking a step back, then re-reading before sending is sometimes the best.

Often adding a word or a phrase like “Is it possible…” works wonders.

I’m guilty of not doing the best job of this. But I’m striving to get better.

#deadlines #demands #holiday #projects #thanksgiving

Daniel Post, a WordPress buddy of mine, has made an awesome plugin called Autoblue to post blogs to Bluesky and to bring comments back into the blog!

This is sick. I’m helping beta test it. So that’s fun!

Please reply and let me know if you see it in Bluesky!!!!!

Thanks!

#autoblue #blueskyWordpressGoodness #commentsFromBluesky #postToBluesky #wordpress

I’m beside myself today. I pretty much cleared my day of meetings and just did what work I could muster.

I can’t believe that Trump won. But then again, what’s with the Democrats going to the center? Obama won because he spoke to progressive causes.

Our two party system is a wreck. And I can’t even say Trump didn’t get the popular vote, because he fucking did.

The problem is that people didn’t show up and vote for Kamala Harris. White men didn’t vote or voted for Trump in a much larger way than vote Democrat.

And to those who didn’t vote and want to complain later? STFU. If you don’t vote you don’t get to complain when shit hits the fan.

Look, all we can do is brace ourselves for a dumpster fire.

This isn’t going to be good.

Fittingly, it’s November 6th and 80 fucking degrees in the Philadelphia-metro area. Ironic? Nah, Mother Nature just said “fuck it, I give up!”

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t looking to move from Pennsylvania. Somewhere more Blue and will give some protections, while we have them.

I’m shocked that the Latino vote went so much for Trump, when they will probably be the most impacted by his policies. And not in a good way.

Honestly, this is so fucked up. A convicted felon (among a bunch of other things) just became POTUS (and for the 2nd time). And yet people can’t get a job at McDonalds with a criminal record. That’s messed up beyond belief.

https://sethgoldstein.me/im-beside-myself-today/

#2024Elections #ForeverAntifascist #POTUS #WTAF