Today, I decided to dust off my wife's Oculus Quest 2 headset and try my hand at a bunch of social apps. I tried three apps: 1. AltspaceVR [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltspaceVR] 2. VRChat [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VRChat] 3. Big Screen [https://www.bigscreenvr.com/] The

The powers-that-be are warning that a recession may come. From my perspective, it's already here – it just isn't real yet to the average consumer. Here's the year-to-date performance of the S&P 500. Already, the S&P has lost 18% of its value. The NASDAQ is faring even worse. It's

Once a narrative takes off, it's hard to assess facts with a clear-eyed focus. The story right now is that the market is heading for disaster. Dot-bomb 2.0 is going to happen soon. To be sure, it already has. Definitely, it can fall further. At the same time, nobody

It's hard not to feel a bit of schadenfreude regarding the ongoing collapse of billionaire fortunes. Huge fortunes that were worth GDPs of entire nations have been destroyed in a matter of months. Some examples from Bloomberg [https://finance.yahoo.com/news/crypto-billionaires-vast-wealth-destroyed-183042529.html] : * Brian Armstrong: once worth $13.7

Last week, I finally was able to install Hubzilla on my own domain [https://atomicpoet.org/]. The reason why Hubzilla was high on my bucket list is because it's the only "mainstream" implementation I can find on the Zot protocol. The appeal of Zot is that this is one of

Today, my peerverse.space was down because the disc ran out of space. In order to rectify the problem, I had to upgrade my storage. Because of that, I had to restore my instance from a back-up. And that was rough. I lost a week's worth of data. Part of

Last blog post [https://blog.peerverse.space/why-im-all-in-with-the-fediverse-even-though-i-have-gripes/] , I said that email protocols could be a good building block to base a federated social network upon. Today, I'm going to explore how this works with a real world example – but ultimately why you might also want to pass on that

Today, I stumbled upon this blog post entitled Why the Fediverse is stuck [https://keinpfusch.net/why-the-fediverse-is-stuck/] (warning: SFW post but NSFW elsewhere on the site). This point stuck out at me: > It may seem contradictory that all these 'decentralised' protocols are based on a very centralised structure such as

Due to their earnings report yesterday, there's a lot of doom and gloom coming Netflix's way. This is because whenever there's blood in the water – even from a paper cut – sharks circle about. The typical talking heads have made their rounds. Elon Musk even chimed in [https://www.yahoo.com/

I have a lot of gadgets. It serves me well when doing QA. You need to try something on an aging iPhone? I can do that. I can also test on a Chromebook, ThinkPad, and touchscreen Windows-based AIO. Hell, I can even view your website on a Kindle, if need

During the 90s, I had a Geocities site. I wrote the HTML entirely by hand with neither CSS nor JavaScript. It took me a long time, but after weeks of learning everything I could about web development, I had my nice little corner of the web that hosted photos, poetry,

When I started peerverse.space [https://peerverse.space/], the intent was to test out the efficacy of a brand new Fediverse that's not based on Mastodon. It also helps that I generally agreed with dansup [https://dansup.com/]'s central purpose with Pixelfed, so that's the platform I chose. I

I've long complained that a core problem with the modern Internet is that most developers would rather build apps than protocols. From a pure "1000x your ROI and be a unicorn perspective," that makes sense. Yet if no one's building protocols, how does the web evolve? So I was happy

Meta is dead. Mark Zuckerberg just doesn't know it yet. I'm not saying that Meta won't be an active business concern in the future, or that the site will be suddenly shuttered. That's how neither business nor the Internet work. What I mean is that Meta's cultural relevance is dead.

Lately, I've been ragging on Twitter – for good reason. Twitter is the last mainstream social network I use on a regular basis. I don't talk about Meta-affiliated networks for good reason. Three years ago, I deleted my Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp accounts. I looked at the positives and negatives, and

Dreams are a funny thing rendered all the more surreal when they become true. When I was a high school student, back in 1998, I wanted to be Steve Jobs. The thing that made me want to emulate Steve Jobs was the bondi blue iMac, which was perched upon my

Welp, yesterday's blog post [https://blog.peerverse.space/lets-talk-about-project/] went viral on the Fediverse. On the plus side, this site started off with a bang. But that instant popularity has come at a price: for a good portion of the day, things slowed to a crawl. I've been debating whether

A couple of years ago, Twitter announced that they were working on a decentralized social media protocol. Shortly after that announcement, dead silence. Coincidentally, after Elon Musk buys 9.5% of Twitter, Bluesky pops their head out, announces to the world that they're still alive, and finally detail what they're

So I finally got a Fediverse instance up and running. After lots of internal debate, I went with Pixelfed. The reason is simple. I'm still active on Twitter, and I already have a Mastodon account with a reasonable following. However, I'm not active on Instagram and haven't found a decent

I'm finally doing it. I'm creating a Mastodon instance. Hopefully, I'll have that ready in two months, but in the mean time, I might as well get the creative juices flowing on this new blog. Typically, when I create something new on social media, I make it hyper-focused on a