Path: Illogical

Looking for Twitter alternatives

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 03:15:15 GMT

Yup, this definitely isn't an original topic, so I'm not going to write much about it.

Twitter is becoming less attractive to deal with by the day, Identi.ca is a no go due to a shaky ToS, and many of the remaining contenders that I'm aware of have spam problems and other difficulties.
Is anyone out there interested in a community here on DW that's focused on finding a suitable alternative service, getting a couple of dozen people together as a seed community, and making the switch?

Note: Sophie has a much better post about this topic here:

http://sophie.dreamwidth.org/44432.html

My post is really a restatement of my question in the comments of her post so my question doesn't detract from the topics she's dealing with much better.

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Social stuff

Sun, 28 Aug 2011 01:55:45 GMT

One of my back-burner tasks has been trying to be more social and "out there". I'm naturally a fairly extreme introvert, so it can be challenging. I enjoy interacting with people, though -- but that's a pretty recent development for me, perhaps in the last five years or so.

DW is one part of the solution. I'm back on IRC (mostly in #dreamwidth and #dreamwidth-dev -- haven't found any other channels that tickle my fancy yet) and recently joined Meetup and the Ubuntu Vancouver group. I haven't been to one of the events yet, but I'll be at the Ubuntu Jam with Oneiric on Friday.

I'm always looking for new and interesting ways to meet people, though. People here are among the friendliest I've met yet, so I'm wondering if I can pick your brains. What else should I be looking at? Where do you interact with people, both online and IRL? Do you have suggestions of mailing lists (I know -- how archaic! But hey, I'm old skool), IRC channels, websites, groups, and so on?

I'm a late-30s bi male who is pathologically interested in science, computing, maths (though still a relative newbie in this subject), culture, and everything else in the interests list in my profile. My strengths are being pretty easy-going, curious, and fairly knowledgeable. My weaknesses include not suffering fools, bigots, homophobes, etc. terribly well and being utterly addicted to caffeine. I'm in a committed relationship so not looking for singles specifically, though I certainly have nothing against them. :)

Any suggestions?

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DreamHacking, part 2

Sun, 21 Aug 2011 21:06:48 GMT

I now have a 'hack. I also have a lot of reading to do, learning the ins and outs of the DW codebase (and how to do its bidding, or convince it to do mine). I've also met a lot of really great folks so far, and expect to meet more. DW has to have the most insanely friendly dev community I've seen yet.

Thanks to all! I'm looking forward to getting up to speed and contributing.

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DreamHacking

Sun, 21 Aug 2011 01:08:17 GMT

Just sent a message to denise asking for a DreamHack account. I probably won't be especially productive, but it'd be nice to help drive the bug count down on weekends. I could probably host my dev instance myself almost as easily, but my servers are CentOS and theirs are Ubuntu. I'm also apt to make major changes to my servers with little thought (that's why I have them, after all) and having one less thing I'd break is probably the line between having the energy to participate and not. I've got to hand it to them for offering DreamHack accounts -- it looks like DreamWidth really gets open source dev, and that's a nice thing to see.

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DreamWidth code base

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 05:56:39 GMT

While stumbling through the Latest Things the other day I happened upon a post referring to an announcement that people who want to hack on the Dreamwidth code base are well taken care of -- hosted dev instances, and so forth. IIRC, DreamWidth is a mostly-Perl system, and I'm a mostly-Perl kind of guy. Depending on my stock of tuits, I may throw my hat into the ring this weekend and get set up.

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Restful weekends

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 04:02:23 GMT

I've been trying to do more coding on the weekends, and I now think this is a mistake. Weekends need to be for resting and just doing whatever, not for trying to cram in whatever I don't get time to do during the week. I nuked the Yabba repo -- nothing of value there, and it'll never get used now that I'm on DW.

The doglet got fed wheat crackers a couple of days ago and now she has a patch of irritated skin on her tummy. This makes three times in the last several months she's gotten her paws on something with gluten and three times her body's reacted in exactly the same way. At least we know for sure what's causing it now.

Went to Sushi Katsu (or is it Katsu Sushi? It's not a name that makes much sense, anyway) for dinner tonight. It's the only sushi place I've found that keeps gluten-free soy sauce on hand, so they get a great big gold star. The food was good, as usual, and the place was hoppin' busy. Given that I eat sushi five days per week at work you'd think I'd be bored of it come the weekend, but fortunately that's not the case.

No bites on the positive-attitude-LGBTQ queries here or on Twitter. Not surprising, I guess. So many communities are so slanted towards the LG end of things so it'd be interesting to find one that leaned toward the BTQ end.

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Positive LGBTQ communities online?

Sun, 14 Aug 2011 04:27:49 GMT

Are there any positive (in attitude) LGBTQ communities online any more? I've been looking around but not having a lot of luck so far. Things seem to be either pretty quiet or so focused on the negative issues that it's hard to take on a regular basis. In this age of It Gets Better, I'd imagined that positivity might be easier to come by. Does anyone have any suggestions?

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