Paul Wilde :: My site of stuff   🗺 🗪

Why I have turned off my BirdsiteLIVE instance

Hello. How are you? I am fine.

You may know me from a few places, but likely on the Fediverse as the person that maintains a BirdsiteLIVE instance with the url birdsite.wilde.cloud.

Why?

Due to the recent influx of people from the corporately owned microblogging platform, the use of many BirdsiteLIVE instances has become massive. Added to this, I have received many requests from users to block access to block their posts from the other place via BirdsiteLIVE - which I have happily done for them, but some people are do not ask nicely and instead resort to claims of attacks on their privacy (I know, right‽ it’s a clear misunderstanding of how the internet works…). I’ve also been witness to some pretty brutal comments made towards BirdsiteLIVE’s creator.
I simply don’t feel comfortable with this.

Added to this, the instance has become so saturated (over 1000%) that posts from the other place only turn up sporadically and normally in a flurry that clutters home timelines.
This really isn’t nice to see when you’re trying to interact with many other people on the fediverse, only to have a huge block on nonsense posts in the middle of it all.

Offline

So, I’ve been considering doing this for some time, but as from today, December 21st 2022, my BirdsiteLIVE instance is offline. I may start a new one up at some point in the future but with a new database, no old follows will remain.
I will continue to run my BirdsiteLIVE Instance List which appears to be fairly web search-able to help people out - my original BSL instance URL will now redirect to this site.

What else can I do?

Well, to put it bluntly, forget about the other place. Use of the Fediverse has skyrocketed since the other place’s recent ownership changed. You’ll find most of the people you want to see postsby are on the Fediverse already! Who needs content from the other place?

If you do need content from the other place, why not try using something like Nitter or one of it’s many instances. You can even put /rss at the end of the URL to get that content as a lovely RSS feed to put into your favorite RSS reader (you are using RSS, right‽).

Sign off

Anyway, if you managed to get this far, thank you. I don’t blog normally, but I felt I needed to put some kind of statement up, even if it is poorly written and slightly opinionated. Thanks for reading anyway.