With sites like Elon Musk’s Twitter, Spez’s Reddit, and Stanislav Vishnevskiy’s Discord falling apart bit by bit, it’s time to guide my community elsewhere.

If you just want to read about the Stream Schedule bit, click here

Recent Events

Life’s been pretty good online the past decade. We’ve all been able to come together, socialize, discover new people, all thanks to the centralization of online communities. Things like finding people with similar interests via shared Discord servers, Twitter hashtags, or subreddits dedicated to a topic have all helped to make connecting to each other simpler and easier.

Now, however, the owners of these centralized services are doing something that you should never do as a business. They are making changes that are actively at odds with their users and/or blatantly ignoring feedback. For example: yesterday, I found out that Twitter had closed off public access and, further more, has started rate limiting the amount of posts that normal users can see in a day.

To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits:

- Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day
- Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day
- New unverified accounts to 300/day

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023

Elon Musk @elonmusk To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits:

• Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day
• Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day
• New unverified accounts to 300/day

Such an action will drive users away from the platform. In Reddit’s case, their team has actively lied to their community, been hostile towards 3rd party devs, and killed off all 3rd party tools. Before they were able to do so, however, Reddit users and communities opted to protest the change by staging a blackout. In retaliation, Reddit started removing moderators of communities if they wouldn’t open their subreddits back up.

Discord’s in a similar, but less harmful boat. Discord’s change involved getting rid of discriminators/username tags as part of their usernames, force everyone to use Latin character + numbers, and force all usernames to be unique. This caused many to not get the username that they wanted due to others taking them before they could get to them. The community warned them against this, and the guy who made the blogpost got downvoted to oblivion on Reddit while trying to defend their point.

Discord’s and Reddit’s actions just go to prove that we as users have absolutely no control or power, so long as we continue to use their service. The only power that we have, is to leave the platform.

And this is why I’ve been moving to things that I am in control of, such as my website. I find it kind of funny that last year I had the idea to re-design my entire website and include a blog as part of it’s functionality. Turns out, this was a smart move as Addie from EposVox expressed a desire for people to move back to blogs and information websites. Overall, I think that this is a fantastic idea as it puts content creators back in control over their content. No longer do they have to rely upon and worry if a platform is going to be here tomorrow or not.

Who knows if Twitch, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or many other social media platforms will be here tomorrow or next year. But one thing is for certain. My website will remain up for as long as I can afford it, and for as long as I keep it up. It will never go away due to some rich, greedy, billionaire’s whims. With my own website, I am in control and I’ll do my best to listen to feedback to make things better for those who are a part of my community.

Automatic Schedule

Oh yeah, I almost forgot while ranting about Twitter and Discord. Since those platforms have become unreliable as to their discoverability and their reach, I have decided to make my automatic stream schedule system public, right here on my very own website. This schedule automatically updates daily at midnight, Utah time. Realistically, changes will only occur Sunday night, though it is technically possible for me to make changes anytime throughout the week.

Hope this schedule helps everyone to catch streams! I’ll look into a way to make the text-based times automatically sync to your current timezone.