My multi-year experiment with Reddit is drawing to a close. I should have started with a blog in the first place.

Reddit has failed on several points:

The technical capabilities are increasingly crippling.

Technical progress has been in directions at odds with my needs and interests.

The focus on advertising, tracking, away from Free Software, and toward toxic content is particularly disappointing.

Reddit never proved capable of providing or promoting the discussion I cared to see.

The site redesign is absolutely hostile, and interferes not only with reading but in composing and creating on the site.

I'm hoping a more traditional blog will prove more useful.

Mastodon has proved interesting and useful. My primary instance there is https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius.

I'm in the process of archiving off (and eventually migrating) my Dreddit posts here, as well as becoming re-acquainted with LiveJournal, exploring possible shell tools for assistance (though I'm happy to find that console browsers work for editing content), organisation of tags, pages, etc.

I'll also be tweaking various blog settings as I get familiarised with Dreamwidth, its LiveJournal capabilities, and what I hope to get from it. Pardon our dust.

I may or may not consider comments or suggestions, though you're welcome to leave them.

Administrivia Issues

I'm trying to sort a number of issues and considerations.

Search. This appears to be a showstopper. I live and die by my ability to search my own posts, and want for others to be able to do likewise. This is a limited, paid feature on Dreamwidth so far as I can tell. This blog likely won't happen. Tags. These seem to be almost entirely unstructured, though I'd like to create a set similar to what graced the Dreddit. TODO: list primary tags. Archives. I have ~565 Reddit posts, many of which I'd like to re-home here. HTML vs. Markdown. It's interesting writing fully-tagged HTML again. I plan to largely compose in Markdown and convert via Pandoc, though composed-in-place posts, such as this, are also possible.... CSS. I'm looking at what if any stylesheet changes might be necessary. The Dreddit styling was actually based on this Dreamwidth style, though I did modify that fairly extensively. Data liberation / extraction. I need to look into LJ's API and available tools. I've found gnome-blogger, but would prefer CLI tools, generally. Static pages / Wiki. A quick glance suggests these are not directly supported. In past I've bootstrapped this on various platforms by simply declaring page intent. I need to find the home / about page for this blog, if it exists, and build from there. The idea is to have a set of non-temporal pages, typical of many blogs. Content syndication. There is RSS. A Mastodon plugin or bot would be useful. Image hosting. I suspect Imgur is the principle option, though I'm looking at / for others. Patreon funding and hosting within Dreamwidth is another possibility.

Comment: the ability to hop into an article and just edit / extend it is ... fun ;-)