Social Media Isn't In My Wheelhouse

And I won't lie - I'm a cynical yet addicted social media overconsumer. At last count my passwords file contained well over a thousand entries. (It's a password file that I've had for a VERY long time. . .)

And yes, some of those passwords are for local net logins on various network things like the broadband router and stuff like that, or purely functional sites online like accounts with stockists and suppliers, news and media subscriptions, etc. 

I guess that over half are defunct by now, lost to the bitmist of time, bad decisions by management, and so forth.

Notstalgia

But a lot (200 at least) are for still-active social media and messaging sites. On almost all of those sites, I have a main account, an alt account, and sometimes a persona account on. Without that file, life would get awkward pretty quickly - and it occasionally has, when I realised that I might maybe possibly perhapsly have forgotten to update a changed password or record a newly-created account. 

Password changes happen regularly on important accounts and sporadically on less important ones, but  I domake sure to update those as well. (Mostly... Don't ask...)

I never remove defunct and deactivated sites, nor sites I've abandoned when they weren't of use, either because of vaporware, freemium limitations, and the like. Nor just because some sites were execrable from the get-go, or became so after a few years when they lost their way - what Cory Doctorow calls "enshittification" - even if I'd deleted my account(s) there. 

Because one day some digital data anthropologist will be going over the petabytes of data amassed by primitive Netizens like me or you and marvel at how we put up with the amounts of corporate social media encrapification that we put up with.

Look at my record, for example: I have accounts on things like Powwow and Odigo and a few dozen more I can't even remember, that came along and were shit from the get-go or became enshittified quite quickly, or just died from lack of engagement. Some, like Plurk, are still limping along, some, like the one that had a name something like "jetify" or something, have vanished without a trace online, and believe me I've tried finding them. 

Why Aren't They Now?

Why aren't many of those services around any more? What about Yammer, Plerb, Hictu? Jaiku, Pownce? Why?

I think I figured it out. There's always been these grim attempts by social and microblogging and messaging services to grow their userbase - and then brick them in. Wall them off from all the other services. Mine! Mine, all mine! There's nothing outside my walled garden, user! Keep all your rvenue potential with meeeee! 

That stubborn lure 'em in, fence 'em in,. keep 'em in behaviour has completely effed social anything. Each service I can think of started off free, they listened to what their users felt would be good features, and were responsive. Until they weren't. Usually that happened when their backers started wanting a return on their investment, or in some cases, when the lone wolf developer decided they needed to start making *real* money, or were bought out by already-established already-encrappified companies. 

And people stay with a particular platform because they don't keep a password file. Because setting up a new app or online account's really hard for many people, and is a big issue for many. Social medias of all sorts have lost sight of the fact that there's still a large sector of their potential users out there that are old and not computer-and-Internet-literate. I've found out that I'm quite firmly in the miniority among my age group, many of my contemporaries still have just one email account (generally on Google or Hotmail - and don't get them started on this new "outlook site thingie" if you value your last nerve) and an account on Facebook and that's that.

And yet with a bit of deshittification, other social media companies could totally have all those users. 

Things I Love, Things I Hate

I love that in the Federated Fediverse that Mastodon paddles around in, a protocol called ActivityPub allows me on Mastodon to get all the posts of someone who has their account on Lemmy or Peertube or Misskey, which are each different in function but can communicate thanks to AP. I love that. 

What I don't love is that in order to find those people on Lemmy or Peertube or Misskey, I have to go and create an account on Lemmy or Peertube or Misskey so that I can find those people in the first place.

ActivityPub creates a really brilliant and engaging system where my social horizons can expand beyond the platform I've created my account on. And then the lack of a directory where my social profile can be used on all the other federated sites means that while I'm dimly aware there are those other sites on the horizon, I can't get to there from here as it were.

And just like walling-in the individual social media sites killed  their opportunity to share users across multiple platforms, now there's all these grimly competing federating schemas out there. And ActivityPub doesn't really work with BlueSky's "decentralised" structure. And MeWe has hooked up to another federated network via SocialWeb and Amplica and . . . - *screams silently*  you get the point

You'd think they'd have bloody well learned interoperability by now wouldn't you, and designed such multi-federation in? Imagine logging into Mastodon, then opening MeWe and it uses your same account with a two factor checksum, then going to BlueSky and still using that same account. But no - AP is the best federation protocol! Don't connect to SW! 

To make matters worse, there are things like Mastodon clones out there that use ActivityPub but don't connect to the Fediverse... Their idea of "federated" means they used a protocol that's designed to create a huge social network to - wall their users into only their servers ... 

I sincerely hope there are people out there who are writing "connector" services that will interconnect all these competing federation schemes and user directories and allow me to opt-in to using one account and maybe some two-factor authentication scheme to streamline my online social media. I wish I was smart enough to create it. 

Epilogue

Hi. My name's Ted. I'm social-network-overbooked...  And I know there are many good federation schemes out there - but will MeWe (for example) ever add ActivityPub federation? Or is there some third party connector I can already use? It would simplify things for me - and presumably hundreds of thousands of other social media users if we could start getting our social media the way we want rather than be dictated by ten different platforms controlled by a dozen different corporations fighting to exploit us for their gain. Isn't it time that social media became actually social rather than parochial, antisocial, secretive, and controlling?

Is Everyone Talking About MHD?

It just seems that there's a lot of buzz around the subject of "just one moving part and that's water" technology. Ricky explains. 

That's the presenter of 2 Bit da Vinci talking about MHD (MagnetoHydroDynamics) in an over-simplified "explainer" kind of way. And, as always, dumping a bit on DIYers (and yeah they were the "Fabulous Fakes" that always seem to want to promulgate bullshit for the few pennies in views but there are also a few ) and urging us to leave it to the "experts" aka corporately-financed projects. 

Here's a video of a con artist doing nothing like MHD, for several reasons. And just for balance, here's a video of a citizen scientist showing the right way a very basic MHD drive can be made

Concept (and Concerns): 

Electric motors work a conductor carrying a current, and placed in a magnetic field that's at right angles to the current flowing in theconductor, expeiences a force in the third right angle direction. In an electric motor we generally arrange things so that the force the conductor experiences acts to turn the armature of the motor around the axle in a circular motion. But you can also lay the wires of a motor flat and place the magnet on top and then the magnet will move along in a straight line over the conductors. 

Or, you could use water (which unless it's perfectly pure, contains impurities that allow it to conduct current) and apply a magnetic field horizontally - say, from left to right, pass an electric current through it verticallv (i.e. at right angles to the magnetic field) and the water itself will experience a force in the direction fore or aft and start pushing along in that direction. Or, to put that another way, the arrangement of current injecting plates and magnets will move in the opposite direction to the water.

If you attach the magnetic and electric bits to the underside of a boat, the boat will start moving one way while the water will move the other way. You get "water jet" propulsion, at a rate determined by the voltage applied, magnetic field, and how much current is able to pass through the water.

Do this in distilled pure water and you get - nothing. Introduce some conductive impurities (such as salt) and you get some oxygen bubbling off one electrode, hydrogen off the other, and some chlorine. But you get movement, too. 

So that's the principle of MHD. But you also get some other things:

As anyone that's ever done an electroplating experiment knows, metal will be expelled off the anode and deposited onto the cathode. And if you've ever done that experiment, you'll also remember that a load of "crud" falls down, too. I'm not too familiar with the exact chemistry and anyway I believe it depends on the electrolyte (the water and whatever impurities are in it) and the metals used. The point to me isn't so much what it is as that there IS some crud produced. Where does it go? Into the water that you're travelling through. And from there, into the creatures living in that water. 

If you're the only ship on the ocean using a powerful MHD drive, the effects would probably be negligible. But there are already thousands of ship movements across the oceans every day, and the effects would soon add up. 

On top of that there'd be an electric and magnetic field generated, and quite large ones at that. These might begin to affect marine life that uses electric and magnetic fields to navigate or perhaps even communicate. So yay us. We stop polluting the air and oceans with fossil fuel burning and carbon particles dropping and the noise of the engines disturbing animal communication and senses, and instead pollute the oceans with electrolysis crud and huge warps in the natural magnetic and electric fields.

Could It Be Done Though?

Yes. Sort of. Instead of permanent magnets, let's put electromagnets either side of the drive channel. Now we can reverse the direction of the magnetic field and the electric current really really quickly, maybe thousands of times a second. The overall effects of the magnetic field cancel out and won't be felt as far away. There'll still be a very loud and annoying howl in the magnetosphere and electrosphere around the craft, which will maybe cancel out.

But more importantly, think about the metal ablation from the electrodes. With a high enough frequency there's a chance that the particles won't be able to travel far from the electrode before the next current reversal drags them back onto the electrode. There may well be some particles lost and floating away into the sea but it would be a lot less than if direct current was used. 

Because the magnetic field and the electric fields will both reverse at the same time, the physical force on the water will remain going in the same direction all the time, so the one thing we want from an MHD drive will still take place and the boat will move in one direction consistently. By properly designing the way the drive works, it may be possible to confine much of the electric and magnetic mayhem inside some kind of "drive tunnel" under the hull, and by providing a place for electroplating crud to attach to (some kind of sacrificial material the length of the drive tunnel) one could probably also prevent most of the chemical byproducts from escaping.

For use in freshwater, one could perhaps use a continuous chain arrangement to add some ionising agent to the water at the beginning of the drive tunnel and extract most of it again at the other end somehow before recirculating it. 

Things like this might minimise the pollution and damage that even something as clean-running as an MHD drive. But...

One additional problem would be that it'll require a lot of electricity to move a larger ship, and it would probably be impossible to store enough energy in batteries for any kind of useful shipping range. So you'd need to generate power on board somehow, and that would mean a fossil fuel or nuclear  generator.