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Wow, that shoe dropped sooner than I expected. Verizon is already shopping around to sell Tumblr. I figured it would be toward the end of the year, not the middle.

After Tumblr’s ham-handed ban on adult content last fall purged a bunch of accounts, sparked a lack of confidence, and triggered an wave of users leaving in digust, it became clear that Verizon had no idea what to do with Tumblr (not that Yahoo! had much more). If they hadn’t already started the death spiral, they’d at least knocked it out of orbit.

I’ve never been super-active on Tumblr, but I interact with a few people, and I used to occasionally post things there that weren’t reposts from my blog, or Flickr, or Instagram, or wherever. So, just in case, I backed up a full archive, imported some of the original posts, and pared down all the old duplicates and outdated signal boosts so that when Verizon inevitably gave up monetizing the site, it would be easier to find the pieces I wanted to keep.

Honestly, I’d rather Verizon sell it than shutter it and sell off the data (you think Verizon wouldn’t?). But it depends on who buys it. If anyone wants it.

Here’s hoping Tumblr finds a suitable buyer who understands what they’re getting and is willing to invest in the community, not someone who just wants to squeeze out the last few drops of cash before sending it to join GeoCities in the great Internet Archive in the Sky.

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wWooden balcony with patio furniture and plants.I’ve been going through old scenic photos that either never made it online or I only posted low-res versions on my blog and uploading the ones I still think are decent (or at least interesting) to Flickr. Which has got me wondering: When did I start using it?

Other social networks are easy. I signed up and wrote a Hello World post of some sort.

But the oldest photos I have on Flickr are some test posts I made from my RAZR flip-phone (remember those?) using the post-by-email gateway, in mid-2008. Before I’d even joined Twitter. I was looking for some way I could upload photos directly from my phone instead of waiting until I got home. I don’t remember how many other test posts I made and deleted, or whether there were any older ones. But that’s not important either, because…

I have several blog posts where I linked to or embedded someone else’s photo on Flickr going back even further. The oldest I could find was on the batch of Hawaii photos I posted here in 2005, and just posted on Flickr a few days ago! I was looking for the name of a small valley I’d photographed on the side of the road, and found someone else’s photo from the same spot. I asked him if he remembered where it was, and he was able to look it up and give me the name.

I’m not 100% sure, but I think I may have signed up on Flickr to ask that question.

And then three years went by before I started seriously posting my own photos to the site!

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Protecting the environment isn’t just about saving the planet. It’s about saving ourselves. It’s about being responsible custodians of nature not just for its own sake (though that’s important too), but so we can keep relying on it…instead of sucking the life out of everything we can like there’s no tomorrow, leaving a world that’s too inhospitable for us to live on in any sort of comfortable civilization.

Tens of thousands of years on, the planet will recover from just about anything we throw at it, as long as we stop messing things up at some point (like, say, dying back to subsistence level as famines and wars over the remaining resources kill us off). It may take longer for biodiversity to recover, but it will happen eventually, as it has after each great extinction event — though always taking new paths to replace the possibilities that didn’t make it.

But I don’t have 10,000, 100,000, or a million years to wait for things to recover, and neither do you.

I miss the optimism of the 1990s, when the message I got was “Things are messed up, but we can fix them.” Remember when we were more worried about running out of oil than about the effects of burning it? Now the message I keep seeing is, “Too late! We’re all screwed!” Especially with large entrenched interests trying to not just fight the gains we’ve made since the 1970s, but actively roll them back.

Maybe we can’t solve the problem completely anymore. But at least we can try to mitigate it a little.

Indignant geese.

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I’m thinking about social media backups again after Prismo lost all its data, and after one of my own test blogs crashed.

I can and do automate backups on the VPS where I host my main blogs.

I can manually backup my social media accounts, but IIRC none of them offer automatic scheduling. I have to remember to run a backup, log into the site, find the right control panel (which sometimes changes!) and request a backup.

I’d like to be able to schedule recurring backups on Mastodon, Twitter, etc. Send me an email each month with a link when it’s ready.

OK, you don’t want to keep generating backups for abandoned accounts. Here are some ideas:

  • Skip the process if I haven’t posted since the last archive.
  • Instead of scheduling a recurring job, schedule a new one 30 days out each time I download an archive.

Refine as needed.

Now, those of us with a little more tech savvy can automate some things with IFTTT. Not the native backup process, but we can set up rules to listen for new posts and automatically save the content somewhere else. But while I can reliably save the text of every post from Twitter, Mastodon, etc., saving media depends on what I’m saving it to. Often the best you can do with IFTTT is embed, not copy. (And that’s if the media is even available in the source feed. Pixelfed’s RSS doesn’t include image URLs, and Mastodon’s RSS/Atom includes them in a way IFTTT doesn’t recognize.)

Eh, maybe I should just read up on ActivityPub and see if I can make a subscribe-to-archive bot.

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Sometimes you choose which social app to open based on

  • who you want to talk to
  • who you want to hear
  • what you want to talk about

Sometimes you’re just shouting into the void. At those times, I figure I’ll choose the void that feels less exploitative.

That’s part of why I still have a blog. And why I post more on Mastodon, while Twitter is mostly auto-shares from my other networks, retweets, and occasional cross-posts.

(And politics, because I’d rather keep that on Twitter, where it’s sort of the main topic anyway, than on the network that’s still fun. Not that Mastodon is apolitical. Far from it! But it’s a lot more varied than the overwhelming focus on US partisan politics I see on Twitter. And the culture and structure make the discussions at least somewhat less train-wrecky. Most of the time.)

Update: If you’re interested in checking out Mastodon and the Fediverse, good places to start are JoinMastodon.org and JoinFediverse.wiki.

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An orange ring in the blackness of space

How cool is it that we now have an actual image of the event horizon of a black hole! More precisely: it’s the glowing accretion disc of matter falling into the black hole, and the event horizon’s silhouette.

The Event Horizon Telescope, actually a worldwide array of telescopes, used interferometry to effectively create a planet-sized telescope to see the light around the supermassive black hole at the center of M87, a galaxy 55 million light years away.

I remember talking with a college classmate about giant interferometry telescopes back in the late 1990s. It’s incredible to see the technique actually making discoveries like this!

What we’re seeing in this image isn’t a top-down view of the accretion disc, but an angled one — think of Saturn’s rings — and the gravity of the black hole is bending the light from the disc. Phil Plait has a great article on the science behind the image. Katie Mack has a Twitter thread on how the image was produced, why the ring looks the way it does (it tells us which direction the disc is spinning!), plus simulations of this type of black hole seen from different viewing angles.

Here’s a paper talking about the history of black hole images, with a detailed discussion of what you should expect for the “shadow” image we’ve just seen. Check Fig 12, with renderings of shadows for disks at different angles arxiv.org

4x4 grid of black circles with red/yellow outlines, with bright and dark spots in the outlines.

— Katie Mack (@AstroKatie) April 10, 2019

Direct links to the articles she mentions:

And this Mastodon thread by @SohKamYung@mstdn.io collects some more articles worth checking out:

Forbes makes the excellent point that, while we’d seen a lot of circumstantial evidence for black holes over the last few decades, this confirms that they exist.