A poisonous octopus with 3 hearts and 9 ‘brains’.

This Blondie video appeared in my Diaspora feed yesterday. It was in one of several posts from channels I’d not come across before and that was puzzling because there hasn’t been much traffic over there since I signed up two months ago. Still, I’m always happy to meet new online friends that share my taste in music.

The song is a cover of Poison Heart by The Ramones. According to the information accompanying the video this performance was recorded at the CBGB club in New York City in 2006 but it looks and sounds as though it is from much earlier. I’d have said it must have been from sometime before the release of the Plastic Letters album in 1978 and certainly before the band had achieved world-wide fame. Debbie Harry is demure, the guitarists are relaxed and the audience is quietly appreciative. It feels like one of those serendipitous moments that we can look back on and say, “I was there and I knew they were going to be huge one day”.

The sudden rash of new characters in my social media stream is probably explained by a small configuration change that I made. Although I had followed the sign-up instructions for Diaspora, I found myself in pages carrying the Hubzilla title and there was no obvious connection with anything called Diaspora. Well, no matter, it was a great improvement on that horrible Facebook thing and it seemed to attract a far better class of people – people who had interesting things to say, artistic pictures to show and melodious sounds to hear.

Hubzilla knocks Facebook into a cocked hat. It works, it looks nicer, it’s easier to navigate and it’s completely free of those infuriating advertisements. It’s also distributed across a network of independent hubs; no one organisation has control. Having tried Hubzilla for a couple of months I deleted my FB account on 31st July 2020.

Then I remembered that my home hub on Hubzilla has an extensive collection of installable apps, one of which is called Diaspora Protocol. It was time to install it and see what, if anything, changes … and now the social media tide is high and washing all sorts of intriguing flotsam onto my private Diaspora beach. It will be fun to see what turns up there.