Yep. Much as I hate to say it, GBoard just feels good in a way that none of the other major swipe keyboards have for me.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach is a favorite shorter read of mine.

A dizzying number of notable people and people in my personal life have hopped onto Threads, day 1. The “fuck Elon / Twitter” sentiment and generally good vibes to this point mirror the experience I had here when I hopped onto Beehaw and we also had similar optimism and a “fuck u/spez” sentiment. But the major difference I see is this — for the sake of sticking it to Elon these folks are getting themselves even further entangled in Zuck’s world, and we’ve already seen the monsters that emerge from that muck.

Any social network that builds up a massive, general userbase inevitably enshittifies as the marketers / advertisers / influencers and otherwise self-promoters get their content boosted. With its extremely close ties to Instagram, those sorts of users will be ramped up on Threads in no time, and this period of positivity with fade in turn as that content starts getting vomited out and funneled to everyone.

The independent Fediverse is not without its faults, but I’m much more comfortable building community within this coalition of a space than in any of Meta’s creations.

I’m very much a rocky road / cookie dough / moose tracks kinda fella!

Reddit ramble: I nuked my reddit history of 16 years (as of this upcoming July 10) without thinking to download it first. I was a bit saddened at first, because I realized that my reddit history was about as close to a diary as I had kept from the time I was a high school senior. Given digital footprint and whatnot, I’m sure it’s mostly for the best that it’s all in the ether now. The now bare profile is a decent if bittersweet deterrent keeping me from hopping right back onto that site. But! I did remember that I had another handle that I used as my primary for a handful of years (got locked out of it, so I went back to my original one), so I have those vignettes of myself to look back on.

I’ve had good experiences with Castbox.

Oh man, ain’t that the truth. I really gotta make a point to get a backup of all my photos from Google Photos onto a hard drive one of these days. Problem is, Google Takeout batches only last about a week or so and I have a very hefty amount of data to get out. The alternative is to download it month by month, year by year, which I’m not looking forward to doing at all.