feat(article): add the rebound

www/feed/the-rebound/index.md

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+---
+tags:
+  - article
+layout: article
+author: eric
+title: The Rebound
+subhead: >-
+  I’m rebuilding limulus.net. It’s way past time to have a website again.
+date: 2024-11-24 11:35:00 -07:00
+hero:
+  type: pho
+  id: __2_jhqG
+---
+
+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.
+
+[410ed]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/410
+
+{% renderTemplate 'webc' %}
+<article-photo id="YZKnYR16" placement="right"></article-photo>
+{% endrenderTemplate %}
+
+## 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].
+
+[laurentide ice sheet]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurentide_ice_sheet
+[fell 120 meters]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Post-glacial_rebound&oldid=1257075757#Global_sea_levels
+
+## 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.
+
+{% renderTemplate 'webc' %}
+<article-photo id="vz6BJKDO" placement="left"></article-photo>
+{% endrenderTemplate %}
+
+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][fedi profile]!)
+
+[web standard]: https://activitypub.rocks/
+[mastodon]: https://joinmastodon.org/
+[mastodon.limulus.net]: https://mastodon.limulus.net/
+[fedi profile]: https://limulus.net/@eric
+
+## 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.
+
+[14,000 years ago]: https://experts.illinois.edu/en/publications/evidence-for-a-late-glacial-advance-near-the-beginning-of-the-you
+
+## 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.
+
+[outsized influence]: https://newrepublic.com/post/188197/trump-media-information-landscape-fox
+[largest contributors]: https://wapo.st/412xKmy
+[away from free-speech principles]: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:c7ozmxoc5b2ky4iam2o36uic/post/3lb3bewyxj22p
+[freedom and democracy are incompatible]: https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian/
+[early contributor]: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/07/peter-thiel-donald-trump-vance-hulk-hogan/
+[right-wing entertainment machine]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_News_Corp
+
+{% renderTemplate 'webc' %}
+<article-photo id="nSzUcPUP" placement="right"></article-photo>
+{% endrenderTemplate %}
+
+## 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].
+
+[rebounded]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-glacial_rebound
+[our own dear genesee]: https://rbscp.lib.rochester.edu/1816
+
+## 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 something of a capitalism-induced ice-age.
+
+[web feeds]: https://aboutfeeds.com/
+[a substack]: https://www.anildash.com/2024/11/19/dont-call-it-a-substack/
+[posse]: https://indieweb.org/POSSE
+[indieweb]: https://indieweb.org
+[eleventy]: https://11ty.dev/