Bluesky and Enshittification

2024-11-04 2 min read

Two days ago, Cory Doctorow’s daily Pluralistic post showed up in my RSS reader, and the title caught my attention: Bluesky and enshittification. I’ve read a number of his previous posts regarding “enshittification”, a term he coined to refer to a pattern in which online products and services decline in quality, and so I started skimming this article to see what Bluesky had done to catch his attention.

The details are probably not ultimately important for this blog post, but the short version is that Bluesky raised $15M in a series A funding round, led by venture capital fund Blockchain Capital. Many in the fediverse are concerned by the effects venture capital can have on platforms, and are especially skeptical of anyone involved with blockchains (see this article on The Fediverse Report for more details).

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2024-11-03

I’ve commented on this to coworkers before, but I’ve once again found a case where my past self spent a little extra time designing an abstraction that is allowing my current self to very quickly and easily make some software changes to support a new hardware revision. Thanks, younger Justin! 🎉

2024-11-03

The conversion of my site to the Bilberry theme is complete! And I once again have favicon support! I forgot to finish that work last night, and only realized once I pushed and merged my changes… Oops!

Site Redesign

2024-11-03 2 min read

After weeks (or maybe even months) of considerations and playing around with various themes, I’ve decided to migrate from the venerable Hugo-Coder theme to a custom fork of the Bilberry Hugo Theme.

Why? For a couple of reasons.

First off all, every time I work on my website, I’ve felt that the design was getting a bit long in the tooth, and that it was time for either a platform change (migrating to a different static site generator), or at least a theme change. I’ve yet to find a different SSG that I’m ready to dive into yet, and so investigating alternate themes has been my primary focus.

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2024-11-02

I migrated this site to use the Bilberry theme, which includes support for statuses. And so, this is my obligatory test of that feature! :)

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