/tech/ - Technology

meh, i prefer to stay out of these kinds of platforms, but if it works for you go for it

>>32189
I like Substack as well to be honest, lots of slop there, but it's my favorite platform in the mainstream.

It took me a bit to realize you were calling twitter X rather than this being a copypasta where you could ad lib different sites in the X as a placeholder.

I'd recommend mastodon or something activitypub based. Takes a bit to find a good instance but you can make an account on one and transfer over to a different one later.
Instance software usually has a character limit set out of the box but admins usually raise it or uncap it entirely, and freedom of speech is unparalleled since you're either self-hosting or communally-hosting.

>>32200 (me)
Also if you just want somewhere to publish essays you could get a neocities or nekoweb.

I've built a bad habit of mostly reading right-wing substacks.
Leftists has the problem of telling me things I already know and believe, but rarely bringing up interesting new ideas or theories and, in particular, rarely engaging in casual sociology. Since they're not novel enough, I tune out.
Meanwhile rightists, perhaps because they're more willing to work at the level of the individual or the arbitrary social group instead of always having to tie things back to class warfare, often have interesting sociological theories that you can test out in day-to-day online life. Or perhaps it's because the right always has to explain why it's losing when, in reality, it's winning, while the left usually has to explain why it's winning even when its losing. Thus, you can get worrying pieces about how Trump voters are clearly (ahem) "low human capital" instead of an essay about how Lenin's revolutionary heroism continues to inspire us to this day even as the state he founded has been dead for longer than most of the article's readers have been alive. Or perhaps it's because I don't agree with many of their baseline conclusions, I can then have fun picking the wheat from the chaff.

Either way, it's a bad habit of mine. I should read more general interest topics and less politics or pseudopolitics.

I use substack occasionally because Sam kriss is in there and ironically Sam kriss was the reason I joined Twitter to begin with a few years before he got cancelled

>>32203
What are some good things to read from that guy? I remember reading something about abolishing outer space that was entertaining.

>>32208
anything is good, he is indeed a fairly entertaining writer, but recently I've been thinking about this one

https://samkriss.substack.com/p/in-my-zombie-era

OP here, forget everything I said. Substack is garbage, and for the exact same reason Reddit and X are garbage. The problem is the accounts; they're the root cause of narcissism and self-promotion. The big platforms can't replace imageboards precisely because they aren't anonymous. It changes the entire dynamic of a platform when everyone has an account. I'm back to imageboards. It's the lack of identity that's the great advantage of imageboards. I've finally realized that.

>>32220
Imageboards suck too. People are playing the exact same game, just without anyone but themselves to keep score. Pay attention long enough and you'll realize people are just chasing (you)s and refusing to admit they're wrong, same as in any other narcissistic argument. Imageboards don't make you humble, they reassure you that you're humble so you feel secure in telling yourself that (a) you're better than everyone else, and (b) everyone agrees with you except this fucking newfag who doesn't understand the board consensus (which is what you think.)

Fundamentally, whether imageboard or not, the dynamic that determines how good any community of scale is, is moderation. The advantage of an imageboard for moderation is that you don't have to (knowingly) ban/warn your friends for bad posts, or if you do, you can't personally be held accountable for doing so. That, and not having to register makes life easier. Do not, for a moment, believe that they actually promote better discussion. If you want the best discussion possible, I regretfully have to inform you that you probably have to find a circle of friends somewhere.
(If you find one, let me know. I've wasted enough time on imageboards to theorize about the damn things.)

>>32221
I'm not even interested in having "good" discussions anymore. Since AI came into being, I've basically stopped discussing things with people online altogether. The only reason I still use these platforms is to dump some thoughts or to read some interesting thoughts from other users. But discussing things is pointless for me because anyone can research the hard facts themselves in a second, or AI can construct perfect arguments that can destroy anyone. Discussing things online has no meaning for me, not even in small, isolated communities. It's pointless because technological progress has rendered it obsolete.

>>32222
You should be talking more to AIs so they can get even better

>>32220
every social platform needs a little bit of narcsissism to survive, it's the delusion that our words need to be read what fuels them. perhaps we're a bit more conceited because we believe our words are worthy as is, and dont even need to be signed under a name or brand

that being said i don't think the narcissism is the problem for substack, it's that the brunt of substack are careerists who only want to inflate their own numbers by linking with each other in order to "share" their readerships, and substack encourages this roach behavior and pushes dozens of artificially inflated midwits in your feed, literally worse than xitter in this regard

There being only a group frees the individual from responsibility and accountability, while the simple algorithms for sorting give near equal power to every commentator. I don't like the ephemerality of posts, seems kind of pointless, and the interface makes it difficult to collect and repost in later discussion. Resolving this would make a decent enough hypermedia system for regular power users. It's also be cool if the deletion password could be used to draft new versions of old posts, but this is more complex.

I guess feeds might have lead to the development of the sort of political culture we have today. A better chunk of the the actual "facts" come from the same places as always - there's some control here. But there's no real mechanism to hoist the right view on to the people. Does the undercurrent of the American Dream (false-consciousness) and Manifest Destiny (settler colonialism), surface in all its detail as the political reality? The wasps build their home together, but without there being any real control.

Of course this is old hat. Ideally there would be some mechanism for something like left-wing control as a replacement for feeds. Something yet still with outreach potential… Any ideas?

>>32230
>Ideally there would be some mechanism for something like left-wing control
The only think I can think of is to run an LLM censor on all the posts while otherwise operating in way I described imageboards as operating before: there's only the group and no individuals, and equal power is given to every commentator.

I'm thinking about how imageboards like leftypol could still have a reason to exist in the future, especially in the context that AI has made marxist interpretations of reality and discussions largely obsolete. Since AI draws its knowledge from the internet, including imageboards, leftypol would need to provide certain original content that AI cannot synthesize. but what kind of content would that be?

currently, all discussions on leftypol are very easily reproducable through AI. there are actually very few patterns on this site, which constantly are being regurgitated. what is it, what humans on leftypol can offer, what AI can't? this the question which will decide the fate of this site.

>>32245
we can meetup and suck each other's dicks. think about it

>>32245
Well there are still unknown unknowns, consensus building/following, perspectives that don't show through a computer generated average, and probably a host of other things.

>>32245
>what is it, what humans on leftypol can offer, what AI can't? this the question which will decide the fate of this site.

Any original idea, even if most posters here have brain damage

>>32189

I'd recommend using something like https://bearblog.dev/ instead. If you want to be more technical you can try making your own website on Codeberg Pages with Hugo.

>>32323
why should anyone use this? nobody reads my posts on twitter or substack, then why should anybody read my stuff on this obscure blogging platform?

i have come to the realization, that the only reliable way to dump my thoughts on the internet is by using imageboards as my personal blog. imageboards are the last place where i have the feeling, that i am not totally screaming into the void.

>>32326
What's your substack? I'll attempt to read some of it.

>>32328
thanks, but i have no substack. i only have 4chan and leftypol.

>>32339
In that case, I suspect the reason that "nobody reads [your] posts on … substack" could be because you don't have one?

>>32326
Well because it means you can't be censored. You can basically say whatever you want compared to Twitter or substack. Some people go as far as self-hosting a website themselves. If you want traffic you can always just join a webring.

Like I like mlp. And there is a mlp webring here: https://theponyhighway.neocities.org/. So I'd probably do that.

Or you can try making your own website on neocities, every neocities cite gets indexed by this search engine: https://neocities.org/browse

This isn't mine but I found this on neocities, just trying to prove you can get traffic: https://mental-labour.neocities.org/

>>32341
>Well because it means you can't be censored.

oh, c'mon you know this is bullshit. this the same thing like musk's "freedom of speech, not reach!"
yes, i could theoretically make my own blog and write whatever i want… but it doesn't matter anyway, because nobody will find my site!

there is no free speech on the internet. you can either scream your own views into the void or you can amplify select existing views on the big platforms.

>>32342
I think you're being overly cynical though? There's a lot you can reclaim out of your digital life as long as you have the interest to. Like, okay so basically I have a homserver at home, just an office pc I got for like £30, stuck a hardrive of 1TB alongside the preexisting SSD that came along with it. Stuck ubuntu linux into it with a simple ssh login with no display so that it sips as little power as possible.

I'm now able to stream MLP episodes form a nginx webserver with mpv I'm hosting in my own home with no reliance on Netflix. And I'm even storing some family photos. Just maybe as a bit of ecnouragement, here's my docker-compose file: https://codeberg.org/compuhsition/homeserver

>>32342
I'm also running a booru using shimmie2 alongside this too! Which I use to just host a few anime art references for fun. I make sure to block AI crawlers using anubis + I also use Cloudflare tunnel so it takes a lot of the bandwidth and security concerns away.

>>32342
All I'm saying is, as long you're willing to put in more effort, you can definitely be as uncensored as possible even in 2026. As long as it isn't like literally illegal.

>>32342
>because nobody will find my site!
Just link it on fedi or a minecraft server or whatever. No one will find you on anything if you don't share it with people you know. A website is just more stable and you can do more with a full HTML toolkit than what a social media post composer can provide. (rip cohost)

>>32189
did anyone else noticed, that substack is flooded with AI generated articles and substack doesn't seem to care? actually, it looks like they have completely embraced it.