Western Rifle Shooters came back a couple weeks ago. They’re at https://westernrifleshooters.us/. It’s probably a permanent move.
Knuckledraggin My Life Away came back quite a while ago. They’re at https://ogdaa.blogspot.com/. I’d guessed it was a temporary move but it’s been there for a while so who maybe it’s the new permanent home?
What reminded me of this is that my search engine Duck Duck Go (just a privacy oriented front end over Google) is down today. Man, Google is shit isn’t it? (Using Brave and Duck Duck Go lets you forget just how uselessly biased the ‘net can get.)
I don’t know how much recent shuffling is deplatforming and censorship, versus how much is just creaky infrastructure. (Outsource tech support to Bangalore and fire nerdy programmers? Sure! Employ a fleet of purple haired Karens with degrees in grievance studies to police discussions? Sure! Oh no, our customers are pissed off and there’s smoke coming out of the server.)
Regardless, I’ve updated my links.
Also, I’m idly pondering blog approaches that go around deplatformers. Cancel culture ‘aint going away anytime soon folks. Might as well dig a moat before the pitchfork and torch crowd arrives.
Possibly, something as crude and simple as paper in envelopes? Before you laugh at least ponder the idea. One tends to reject it out of hand as a massive, expensive, unworkable pain in the ass. Is it? AOL spammed us with disks and CDs for a decade. Newspapers lasted centuries before they woked themselves good and hard (most them all the way to bankruptcy). There’s nothing sacred about web based interfaces found via links and Google searches. What we have now works, until it doesn’t. I don’t see printouts (or thumbdrives) stuffed in an envelope and mailed with a stamp as a necessarily wise idea, but I’m willing to think of new worlds. We’re smart monkeys. We haven’t yet lost the secret of movable type printing. What would a 21st century pamphleteer look like? Also, it would be fun to maintain a signal that will always reach the ‘verse.
It couldn’t be free. I’m probably the wrong guy to bother with it. I’m not even overly political. But I’m a helpless romantic, I’m having visions of those old school blue mimeographed sheets; delivered by pony express and drone. Can anything interesting be done? Is it the right time? Comments welcome.