# Weechat, Mastodon and Memories
## Fri 03 Feb 2023 09:32:56 AM EST
So, I made just a quick note last night in case I forgot to write something this morning about the ways in which I wasted time yesterday. Guess I’ll touch on that now;
# Fighting Weechat:
I’m not sure what I was doing or thinking, but I realized that it was possible for me to try and use Weechat outside of MobaXterm on my Windows machine, as MobaXterm is providing Cygwin. […and I just remembered what brought me to Weechat; the other day I was playing with ZNC, and moved on to changing my laptop’s Weechat settings to reflect that.]
Anyway, that was an awesomely frustrating adventure; I discovered that I had to make a number of changes to my Weechat configuration in order to get things to display at least partially correct–the customizations I’d made to make it look all nice and pretty on my Linux machines didn’t translate well on the win-box. At any rate, I finally have something usuable. Unfortunately, I discovered that I can’t run it through a Windows terminal and then decide to launch MobaXterm without killing it; I can, however, launch MobaXterm and then start an instance of Weechat in Windows Terminal or through the regular ol’ command prompt.
Honestly, though, I’m better off visually firing up an instance of Weechat on one of the other machines.
# Mastodon:
So, while I was playing with Weechat my eyes caught a glimpse of a random tweet about Twitter killing free access to the API. I couldn’t believe it. Okay, yeah, I could. But it upset me; to think that the API was going to become paywalled after having been freely accessible for all the years. Sure, I’m not a programmer or scripter, nor am I any influential person with a need to stay on top and connected to social media; but I am someone that has made use of the API through tools and scripts created by several talented individuals. Something like eight years ago, I had managed the online media accounts for the local emergency management agency–in fact, I had created the presence nearly twenty years ago. [Dear God, has it really been that long? Is the Internet *really* that old?]
Anyway, when Twitter rolled around, I saw a great opportunity for something to be done locally–and I saw that I wasn’t the only one. Some of the first “bots” were sharing information that was important to some–if not many–users of the service; out in California people were able to get information on fires, earthquakes, road hazards and so on–so why not bring that to a sleepy little town in Kentucky? And, it turned out, I was smart in doing so. I gained a small following on twitter–and back then, part of my sell was that people could use it to sign up for SMS alerts from the EM. Sadly, the SMS gateway was eventually shut down, but by then a dozen Twitter clients were around, and even the offical Twitter app worked fairly well. Around that time also came the advancement of Facebook Pages, which initially had “official” hooks to the Twitter API; I was in heaven–two major rising social media platforms with ways to connect and share information with the public at zero cost! [Of course, Facebook began to close off some of those hooks and wall things up–but it was kind of expected, as Facebook had never been as open as Twitter was. And then came Facebook turning their nose up to Google, Twitter, and pretty much everyone that was somehow competing in the social media space.]
…so, to try and bring myself back to the point I think I’m trying to make, I took advantage of the free access to the Twitter API; I created hooks to the EM’s main site and to the EM’s Facebook Page thanks to Twitter’s API. I shared articles on varying disaster and safety topics, posted weather bulletins and alerts; I did my part to try and help make my little part of the world a safer place–and I couldn’t have done it so damned well without my free access to the API.
…and what pisses me off, to be quite frank, is that despite the (questionably) necessary reaping of bots from Twitter, I thought that what I just expressed–that safe hometown information sharing–was part of Musk’s vision of Twitter. And now, I learn that, no, money is unfortunately more important.
*sigh*
At the same time that I was messing around with Weechat, I was listening to The Best Podcast in the Universe(tm) a.k.a. No Agenda. Still internally fuming at the thoughts of my future inability to do what I’d once done–which doesn’t really matter to me, as I don’t do it anymore, but still–I hear Adam plug NoAgendaSocial.com, and I figure, yeah, sure, let’s check out Mastodon. See, while I have unplugged myself from the Internet for several years, now–at least compared to the ways in which I had been active–I knew of Mastodon, and knew that while the servers are individual and decentralized, they are also still connected. I knew that I could claim one server as a home, and explore the universe from there. I’d just not taken the time to check it out.
…so, I’m now on Mastadon and presently residing at the NAS server.
I just wonder if I’ll be able to get the same level of information I once had via Twitter in this universe. Already, I can see that it’s very splintered and untamed–untamed depending upon which server you call home. I don’t think that I will be sharing some of the things I once shared on Twitter over here–at least not yet. So, I guess my previously stated ideas of becoming more active with my personally served stuff may come to fruition.
# Emergency Management:
Okay, since I’d mentioned it… Twitter had killed the EM’s account I don’t know how long ago. I remember hearing that there had been a purge or two of dormant accounts years ago; apparently @harrisonema fell victim to one of those purges. I never saved any of the tweets–never saw a point in it as the bulk of them were links to HarrisonEMA.com posts or NWS-LMK products. If you’re curious, you can google for a Russian or Czech archive of Twitter and see if you can find @harrisonema; I’ve done it, though I can’t remember who’s Twitter archive I’d used. You can also find HarrisonEMA.com in the Wayback Machine, but it’s archive is very incomplete. At some point I moved away from static HTML and went to WordPress–which 1.) made things a lot easier to manage, and 2.) provided me with access to calling Twitter via various plugins.
…and if you’re really into Internet archaeology, one of the GeoCities archives has the pre- .com version of the site; sorry, I can’t remember which archive has it, nor can I remember the exact username or the location. I think the username was HarrisonEM (if not, add an A); if you need to browse by community, I think it was in Andes-something.
# Nonsensical and Pointless Ramblings:
…yeah, this post is definitely filled with those. Apologies for that. But, if you’re here, hopefully you expected that.
Honestly, I kind of amazed at how much I’ve written. I guess I still have it in me, whatever it is.
Thanks for reading;
–J
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