Or so they say. This morning my little corner of the internet was buzzing (sort of) with the announcement that App-dot-net (I won’t put a link here, given the circumstances) would be closing down soon. For those of us who have stuck around, this is it. We have always known this day would come, since the announcement in May 2014 that there would be no further development from the owners and the network would be put into a form of hibernation, just ticking along.
In the time since, people have stuck around, drifted back to Twitter, or found other places to hang out. Gradually they have dropped their subscriptions down to the free tier – something I had planned to do at my next renewal, which is moot now as the lights will have gone out before then.
Since joining ADN I have met quite a number of people who I enjoy chatting with online and I think a lot of us are still in touch on other social networks – failing all else, Twitter is still around. I value the connections I have made using the service; my life has been much enrichd by the conversations we have had – and still continue to have. People there have encouraged me to have a blog, have helped this n00b with setting up her domain records to point to her blog hosting and myriad other things. I even, at one point, dipped my toe into CSS, purely so I could replace a dark blue theme with a much nicer purple. Easy, you say? ‘Twas more than enough for me.
For my part I mostly use 10 Centuries Social and I have this blog (plus a couple of others) hosted there. I don’t see that changing. However, being part of the ADN community has allowed me to learn more about the internet in general (I was never really interested before, having grown up without it). Not that I can profess to understand all that much, to be honest. I occasionally consider using my Raspberry Pi as a dinky web server, just for a bit of fun, but pretty soon I come up against the need for some kind of dynamic IP service, which seems to cost rather too much for something that’s just a bit of fun! Still, I have some domains (some unused) and some blogs – baby steps.
I have backed Manton Reece’s Kickstarter for a decentralised social network and micro-blogging tool called micro.blog. As much for the book as anything. I think it means that I can post from my blog to his social network. Mind you, I can publicise my blog posts at 10 Centuries, or Twitter even; I choose not to, as I doubt anyone would really want to read my ramblings. I’ll be interested to see what develops from this. It might see this blog site having more short posts to go over to his site, or I might utilise a different domain for that. I’m not entirely sure, to be honest. I have kind of got used to this username, but I think I’d like this blog to remain as a home for longer pieces of writing – can I choose which posts go out into the world and which don’t? Unfortunately, having chosen this username on Twitter many years ago, I find that a lot of domain names aren’t available for it, yet it’s a username I have in a number of places. I have Mydnyghtrose but I’d like to keep that more to the craft side of things. I could always use one of the domains I have that are actually in my own name. That would be brave of me… I can always pay to have a hosted service over at micro.blog – but as I already have one, why do that? Much pondering to be done and probably advice to be sought from other people.
I have dipped my toe into Mastodon and Pnut recently as well.
Suffice it to say that I am easy enough to find in other places on the web:-
Hazardwarning on Twitter, Plurk, 10C, Mastodon and Pnut
MydnyghtRose on Instagram and Twitter
So, thanks ADN, it has been fun (although I shan't miss the constant auto-correct to AND).