Chores, Pastimes, and the Fediverse
After going to bed somewhat early last night, you might think I would have woken early this morning – and you would have been wrong. I slept like an absolute log for about eight hours, and struggled to wake up when I finally did scrape myself out of bed.
After a shower, a shave, and pulling on some clean clothes, I've been pottering around the house all day doing chores – throwing clothes through the washing machine, folding dry clothes, and picking up after the rest of the family. The task was quite easy earlier – they were out watching a rugby match in the howling wind and rain. It's not so easy now – they have returned.
The pandemic has turned me into SUCH a homebody. There's nothing I like better on a weekend now than staying in the warm and catching up with chores, talking to friends, watching movies, or jumping down internet rabbit holes. I guess it doesn't help that the past week has been pretty full-on at work, and I know next week will be worse. I've come to value “down time”.
While messing around on the flight simulator for an hour at lunchtime, a friend asked what I would spend my time doing if I wasn't messing around with pretend aeroplanes. Without hesitation, I said “reading books, and writing”. I think the writing came as something of a surprise to him – outside of the circle of friends I have made over the years through the blog, nobody in my “real world” circle really knows about it. They used to – but I don't advertise it's existence on Facebook any more, and for many people it seems if somebody didn't post about it on Facebook, then it didn't happen.
While I sit on the edge of the various social networks – watching goings-on from a distance – I've become increasingly interested in the “Fediverse”. If you're wondering what on earth I'm talking about, it's the slow growth of social network that have no centralised server – they are “decentralised” by design – “federated”.
I'm a member of instances of Mastodon (similar to Twitter), Pixelfed (similar to Instagram), and Writefreely (similar to Wordpress).
I suppose the main reason I keep a copy of the blog outside of the big social platforms is just in case they ever pull the plug. It's my writing, after all. While I post to Substack and advertise it as the “place to find me” at the moment, it's mostly to take advantage of their wonderful email subscription functionality.
I think in the longer run there's a good chance I will end up hosting my own blog – much as I did twenty years ago. It's funny how the universe takes us on circular journeys, isn't it?