As an analogue to my "local businesses, nonprofits, and community groups please use RSS instead of exclusively posting to Instagram" rant, please consider "please if you have an event calendar, make it a ***calendar*** and not an image on Instagram."

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in reply to Cassandra has had an adventure

I am begging people, please just make *websites*. Not Instagram feeds, not X posts, not Squarespace slop, not e-mail newsletters, *websites*.

You know, those things that I can view without needing an account, a specialized app, shittons of spyware, etc.

(Yes, this is too salty, sorry.)

Jon Sharp reshared this.

in reply to lobingera

@lobingera I don't really agree; so much of what I see is people bending over backwards working around whatever patterns some corporate middle manager thinks is good for engagement.

There's a lot of invisible effort that goes into making corporate social media do anything even remotely useful as an outreach tool.

in reply to Cassandra has had an adventure

Hard agree, having done stuff in a research group doing routine insta posts. It's a grind, with few tangible results and the ever present risk of being stuck at a nazi bar. An institution hosted blog would have been /would be far better - for both comms reach and building a useful institutional record.

@lobingera

in reply to Cassandra has had an adventure

Agree, my reaction was to the boosted comment and i was missing the start of the thread ...

... from around here (i'm loosely connected to research projects) the expectation is to have public info "visible" in "established social media" and this is an (imho) result of "search engines have degraded ..."

in reply to Cassandra has had an adventure

agreed! I just made this website and it has felt far more rewarding than any quick thing.

echtorff.org

in reply to Cassandra has had an adventure

Done. All statically generated with no cookies and no JS too.

buschnick.net/

in reply to Cassandra has had an adventure

this is not salty this is being so fucking tired and we all are and that people won't put the effort cuz they are also fucking tired and so done with everything and why aren't we either manslaughtering peope who own a billion of anything or comminiting mass suicide is completely out of how anyone should expect the world to be we are all beyond insanity at this point
in reply to Cassandra has had an adventure

I totally get and agree with the spirit of this post, but what if you don't know how to make a website and can't afford to commission someone to make it for you? Also, having made the website, how, especially with Google favouring large businesses with their algorithms, do you get news of it out there if not by social media?
in reply to Cassandra has had an adventure

A bit off topic but not really, the abuse of Discord everywhere for everything made me mad
The most stupid thing that I see pretty often is for an open source project putting all the resources in Discord (changelog or guide for ex). And of course these things aren't accessible somewhere else (for example, the fucking git where the files are !!! )
It's very rare to see this bad behavior for solid projects, but for "little" thing like game mods, it's very common
This entry was edited (Tuesday, September 1, 2026, 4:21 PM)
in reply to Cassandra has had an adventure

see nicolas-zahn.ghost.io/white-mi…
in reply to Cassandra has had an adventure

Yes! I used to work at a public library. There was a server crash or something and the central 'local history' site that area library's used to make their photos etc. available crashed. So the director set up ours on a Facebook site. I had a fit. Why should our patrons, whose taxes pay for library access, be forced to sign up for a proven predatory platform in order to take advantage of that access?!!!??!!!!! That's the antithesis of what a public library is! (Fortunately the director who replaced him agreed with me and changed this.)

My husband and I have just decided that, if your menu or company information requires me to go onto Facebook/X/whatever, you don't get my business.

in reply to Cassandra has had an adventure

As a part of my due diligence as "owner of a nightclub" one of the questions I often ask is, "what are other venues up to these days?" In order to answer that question, I wanted to assemble a calendar listing with all of the events happening at my town's other venues with capacities of our size or smaller.

Surely they all provide ICS or RSS feeds. Surely.

Ho ho ho, I had to write 2k+ lines of code, with custom scrapers for 112 web sites.

in reply to Cassandra has had an adventure

Ottawa has an app called "Collection" where you can check what kind of trash is supposed to go in what kind of bin, and get a schedule tailored to your home address that will notify you when it's time to put your bins out or when your pickup will be affected by a holiday. It's great, albeit, an app when I'd prefer less of those in my life.

But ... in the last 6 months or so (probably around when the recycling pickup was outsourced and some people's schedule changed) people were upset about missing pickups in my neighbourhood facebook group, so now someone posts a screenshot of what the next day's pickup will be in the facebook group each week, which by nature of facebook, appears in my feed some time in the several days following when the pickup has already happened....

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