happy new year to my fellow "pubizens". it has been 3 years since i've stepped into this cozy pub for the first time.
~bartender, can i have a vodka/sprite neat please? just a good time to reflect.
i am glad for the first time i walked into the pub for the first time. i have made some good new community friends, and a fun place to write about whatever is on my mind at the moment. i am always happy to throw my thoughts out there and see what folks are thinking.
since the last time i stepped into the pub, i have been working on some projects, between software, music, and homesteading stuff. each of these has been going well, i am happy to report. all of this while working on my 'digital garden' (aka my wiki) and porting my main website over to gemini.
the nature of the internet continuously changes as we speak, of course. with all the AI stuff going on, we see more and more people going around to the "main" social spaces online such as twitter/fb/etc and posting whatever is on their minds while being inundated by the AI slop that is on those platforms. i get questions all the time from friends on those platforms. whether something (usually political) or not is real, etc. and all i can think is "how are people still on these platforms". it is yet another reason to think about building your own space online, through your own website, through the fediverse, nostr, or any other space that is truly decentralized and out of the control of some of these big companies.
in 2026, as big-corpo companies continue to try to dominate the computing space by shoving their AI 'assistants' in every app (such as windows), as well as online platforms becoming more and more user-hostile, i expect to see people beginning to shift to the smallweb, the self-owned computing space, switching to linux, all that good stuff. we will see if i am right or not, but i see a lot of people, especially people in my own life, beginning to try to make the switch.
over the last year or so, i have brought my 76 year old mother in law to this side of computing after she got tired of the corpo-computing scheme (she is now running debian 13+gnome). anyone else?
i myself havent run mac/windows since win8/mac snow leopard back in the day, and currently run debian with a custom tiling window manager config. it has been a long time since the 'corpo' web has run my life. have you had success in moving people over in this new year? especially as the big platforms become even more user-hostile, forcing people into cloud silos (win11 with MS login, for example). would love to hear your stories.
thanks, ~bartender. great drink, and ready to see what fellow pubbers have to say in this new year!