Tuesday, 13 October 2026

I'm listening to a "podcast" (MP3 file)11 Backup link here. of Dave Winer giving "a tutorial on the meaning of the at-sign in Twitter" (Xwitter). It was recorded on December 31, 2007. And it's interesting that the word "tweet" doesn't seem to have been invented at that point yet. He calls them "twits" or "posts".#

I saw some videos on TikTok today of people smugly saying "Xwitter/TikTok sure is quiet since a Ukrainian drone blew up a Russian data center that runs disinformation bots". And they showed this chart/tweet:#

#

And I thought it odd that a few drones could do such a thing. Mainly from a tech perspective. If all these bots are based in one data centre, surely it would be very easy for social media networks to block them?#

Also, enough time hadn't passed for a person to actually notice a decline in misinformation or far-right comments.#

Well, it looks like it was all nonsense. PixelEnvy has a good summary.#

Yandex – Russia's Google – has had its servers blown up by Ukrainian drones and a lot of its "bots" are offline. But these are just search engine web crawlers. They're not bots that comment on social media. And I think that's where people have got confused, or jumped on this false narrative.#

Actual Russian bot activity appears to be the same as usual according to Cloudflare11 Cloudflare was the "source" a lot of people were using to show that Russian disinformation bots were offline.:#

#

(Found via @antibot4navalny.bsky.social on BlueSky)#

It's ironic that we've got misinformation about disinformation.#

I've been a paying user of the RSS feed reader service NewsBlur for 11 years11 I used the free plan at first. First signing up on January 25, 2013. and it's done its job well.#

And whilst it has some nifty features I'm sure,22 I noticed quite a few new ones when I checked last week. Mainly AI-based stuff. I've always just used it for syncing the read/unread status of my feed subscriptions so NetNewsWire is in sync on my Mac and iPhone.#

Each year when it was due for renewal I'd look at its competitors and they were always similarly priced. And then I'd look at the self-hosted options, which there were always quite a few. But they were either not supported by NetNewsWire or looked like a faff to install and maintain. So I just let NewsBlur renew.#

But this year AI is a powerful tool. So when I noticed NetNewsWire supports the self-hosted FreshRSS I just asked Claude Code to install it on my Linode VPS. Forty minutes later it was up and running.33 I went overkill and used Claude Fable 5.1 on the task. Forty minutes is a long time. But it did a bunch of tests and it went away and even freed up storage on my Linode VPS.#

I'm happier self-hosting an RSS syncing service than most other things because it's so easy to backup. I just need to export the OPML file and I can easily move to another platform if FreshRSS doesn't work out.#

#

I feel a bit bad for leaving NewsBlur. It's just run by a guy and his dog. And for years he would try and convince you to sign up to the premium plan by saying that it would "feed his dog" Shiloh. It was cute. Sadly it looks like Shiloh has died.44 And it looks like he has a new dog now, called Lyric. But I like to think he got his money's worth out of me.55 It started at $24/yr in 2015. Now it looks like it's $36/yr. And who knows, maybe I'll be back when my Linode server blows up (I hope not – it's the same server that powers this blog).#

I’ve never thought I’d do well in an eating contest. But now that I think about it, I’d dominate a crisp eating contest for sure.11 Not sure if such a thing exists. I hope not, for my health.#