The Rebound
I’m rebuilding limulus.net. It’s way past time to have a website again.
This used to be a proper website.
It had a blog where I would write on politics. It had a page for a small bit of open source software I maintained. At one point it even had a photo gallery.
Over the years it moved from Movable Type, to Wordpress, to some custom PHP. And then bit by bit it became a chore to maintain. “Platforms” like Twitter and Facebook grabbed my attention and made posting easy.
So limulus.net languished. I deleted it piece by piece. Until all that remained was a single little homepage with some hand-written HTML. I even 410ed my blog.
The Last Glacial Period
The Laurentide Ice Sheet once covered much of North America. Over tens of thousands of years it accumulated frozen water, spreading further south. It didn’t simply cover land as its glaciers rolled forward — it scraped, crushed, and ground the earth under enormous pressure. It and its sibling ice sheets of the period sequestered so much of the planet’s water that sea levels fell 120 meters.
Elon Musk’s Personal Homepage on the World Wide Web
The reality of the online world that we built didn’t really make itself fully apparent to me until Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter. The company was flawed before his ownership but his gross public treatment of Twitter’s engineers — now his own employees! — prompted me to swear to myself that I would never work for a company of his nor would I ever purchase a product from one of his companies given a choice.
Prior to this — like many others — I had scaled back my usage of Facebook after the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. Seeing the under-informed and often outright racist opinions of distant family members and high school friends put me off using it. At some point Facebook started down-ranking political posts in their feed algorithm both to avoid a perception of political bias but also because it was clearly turning off users. Paradoxically this decreased Facebook’s relevancy to me — what good is it if my posts won’t be seen by people?
I stayed on Twitter for a number of months after the purchase, but when it became apparent that my values could not abide staying on Twitter I began my exit to decentralized social media. I’ll be honest, I was surprised such a thing existed or even could exist. My assumption had always been that social media at a large scale would require centralization. But I was wrong. It turned out this entire time folks had been working on a web standard to make decentralization work and open-source social media server software like Mastodon was proving it out.
Getting on Mastodon awakened in me a renewed enthusiasm for the web and having a place of my own. After a too-brief period on an instance named mastodon.lol, I migrated my account to my own Mastodon instance at mastodon.limulus.net. (Go follow me at eric@limulus.net!)
The Glaciers of New York
As Earth started to warm about 20,000 years ago the Laurentide Ice Sheet began its recession. But it was not a linear process. Some 14,000 years ago a glacier flowed south from current-day Rochester, New York. It covered an area almost as far south as the Pennsylvania state line. The glaciers were not yet done transforming the land.
Billionaires Only Want One Thing and It’s Disgusting
As I write this it is a little over a week after Donald Trump’s second presidential election win. It seems I am not alone in looking at how things have turned out and being dismayed at the outsized influence billionaires have on us. Trump himself is a billionaire. Musk became one of Trump’s largest contributors and has been warping Twitter further and further right-wing and away from free-speech principles. Peter Thiel, a billionaire early investor of Meta, believes that freedom and democracy are incompatible, and is also an early contributor to Vice President-elect J.D. Vance. Rupert Murdoch is a billionaire that owns a right-wing entertainment machine that has done more to create disturbing information silos than any other entity.
I doubt these people get together to conspire. Surely their egos can only stand each other’s company for a short time. But they all individually want the same thing: to further cement their status as oligarchs. The only thing that stands in their way is a well informed populace with an agreement on basic facts — so they seek to destroy even that.
A Fair and Famous Stream
Finally the glaciers receded. The land, no longer being crushed by heavy ice sheets, rebounded. New valleys were revealed. The Genesee River — which flows north towards Rochester and drains into Lake Ontario — found a new route. Over thousands of years this new route carved Letchworth Gorge, home to a number of impressive waterfalls. This is still new territory for our own dear Genesee.
Rebuilding limulus.net
What can I do in the face of this threat to my values? Well, there is only so much any one of us can do to solve the problems of the world. But one small thing I think I can do is rebuild this space and start regularly creating things to put on it. My hope here is to help find ways to make “platforms” less necessary, while also promoting ideas like subscribing to web feeds instead of following on LinkedIn, subscribing to a YouTube channel, or subscribing to a Substack. Part of this will — somewhat ironically — involve posting limulus.net links to some of these platforms.
This is not an approach that I came up with, nor is it even a new idea. It’s known as POSSE: “Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.” Shamefully, I have only recently come to know about the IndieWeb movement that has been championing this approach.
A more technical article about how I am building this site with Eleventy and other tools will inevitably come later. But working on this article and working through some of the remaining technical challenges has helped alleviate some of my election-outcome despair. I am back to feeling like there is some hope. A lot of that hope is coming from the potential the web has to make a rebound after a capitalism-induced ice-age.