Len's FB replacement experiment

"What shall I do with all my books?" was the question; and the answer, "Read them," sobered the questioner.  But if you cannot read them, at any rate handle them and, as it were, fondle them. Peer into them.  Let them fall open where they will.  Read on from the first sentence that arrests the eye.  Then turn to another.  Make a voyage of discovery, taking soundings of uncharted seas.  Set them back on their shelves with your own hands.  Arrange them on your own plan, so that if you do not know what is in them, you at least know where they are.  If they cannot be your friends, let them at any rate be your acquaintances.  If they cannot enter the circle of your life, do not deny them at least a nod of recognition.

-- Sir Winston Churchill, "Hobbies", ~1932

In general I am continuing to question my default computer/consumer choices and try to get away from services that I think are unreasonably monolithic or otherwise mildly evil (google, amazon being the main ones).  I listen to a lot of audiobooks.  I do try to use library services but I find the catalog is usually limited and the rental times are a bit too short. 

Today I learned about libro,fm which seems to have a very similar catalog to audible (makes sense, licensing is licensing) but splits the profits on each book with a local bookstore nominated by the purchaser (and based on a little digging it looks like they really SPLIT it, i.e. 50%).  The books are a shade more expensive (maybe. apples to apples analysis is a bit tricky, might be a wash, might be a bit cheaper depending on one's buying pattern).

Haven't signed up yet but I am right on the edge.  Does anyone have any prior experience with this?

That blinking sound you hear from this direction is my entire family trying to process the last couple of episodes of Season 1 of 1899.

I was a livejournal user from maybe 2003 to 2013. In the process I accumulated I'll say ~100ish electronic friends, a lot of them around chicago, and generally had a fine time including a couple of live meetups.

I started using Facebook in probably 2007, back when the entries were all "Len is feeling..." and then a response. (It took me a while to reconstruct why the early entries look so bizarre). I started using it because everyone around me in the office was raving about using it to connect with old friends and schoolmates, and that's mostly what I used it for. So the two platforms were very different for at least a few years: lj was to talk with lj people, and fb was to talk to fb people.

Except eventually a lot of lj people migrated over to fb and stayed there. this was at least partially due to a couple of ownership transfers and evidence of increasing russian interference, plus as the site grew it got more clunky and overmoderated. Doubtless lots of other reasons. A couple of years ago I transferred all my (pseudonymous) lj-content to dreamwidth just so I wouldn't lose the archive, and there it has sat.

But holy smokes do I HATE facebook. Ratio of friend content to ads and media is maybe, MAYBE 50/50; I don't see all my friends posts due to the selection algorithm and there's no way to force it to do so; and Zuckerberg and his megabuck ilk are problematic characters that I don't wish to support.

Twitter is clearly not the answer! MeWe is clearly not the answer! A few of us tried WT Social a few years back but it never really gelled and I found the interface pretty bad. So, here I am back at dreamwidth with a fresh account in my own name to try it out. The only problem is how to get my entire facebook feed to migrate over at the same time, so then I'd never have to use facebook again.

The interface is pretty outdated but appears to handle rich text, polls,tags, tables and embedding HTML if you want it. The only downside I see so far after 15 min of fooling around is that image management is a bit complicated; this needs a bit more investigating.