2024 Tech CRUD

The start of a new year is always a good time to evaluate some of the tech and services I use. In APIs, there's an acronym CRUD - create, read, update, delete - and for me, that means I added something new (create), thought about something I am using and stuck with it (read), changed from one thing to another (update), or stopped using something (delete). Here's some of the CRUD done over the last few weeks:

Social:

• update: I moved my Mastodon account from the main mastodon.social instance to social.lol. Why? I like what Adam is doing with omg.lol and what I will call the lol network of services.
• delete: I basically stopped using Instagram. Some recent changes to the app really wrecked it for me. I deleted the app from my phone and logged out everywhere but retained the accounts.
• delete: Same for Threads. Maybe if the federation efforts continue, I'll be able to follow more Threads users on Mastodon, but until then, the app is gone, I'm logged out and I'm not going to bother with it. Like with Instagram, I kept my account for now.
• delete: With all the crap around Substack and their willingness to host certain content, I exported and delete content for a newsletter I had there and also deleted my account.

Services:

• read: I'll be sticking with omg.lol for my homepage and also weblog.lol for my blog. I quite like the service and added a year to my subscription a couple of months back when it was on sale.
• update: GoodReads is out and BookWyrm is in. I don't use the social features of GoodReads, and I hate that Amazon owns it and does nothing to improve it. Thanks to BookWyrm's import feature, I can move over pretty easily.
• create: I actually subscribed to Super Duolingo as I continue my efforts to at least get a decent handle on Dutch. I have a 54-day streak going and I'm seeing progress so when they had an end-of-year sale, I decided to give it a go.
• delete: I stopped using Day One to journal. In fact, I stopped journalling altogether. I was finding myself missing days and not really putting any effort into it.
• read: An audit of entertainment/streaming subscriptions resulted in no real changes. I'll stick with YouTube Premium, Spotify, Netflix, Disney+ and AppleTV+ for another year.

Other:

• read: I'm continuing with Arc as my browser despite some concerns about battery life. I tried both Orion and Brave over the last couple of weeks, but didn't find either to be a suitable alternative.
• read: Fastmail continues to be my email service of choice. I gave Protonmail a peek again since I had about a year's worth of credit, but Fastmail's aliases and a few other features keep me there year after year.

App Defaults

I made an "app defaults" list as well which lists some of the apps and services I use. That's on my omg.lol-powered homepage if you want to check it out.