Blog 4.0

I was a Twitter user for over a decade, not because I truly loved the site, but because as far as social media went, it kind of felt like the best of a bad bunch to me. It still allowed you to just see a chronological feed simply containing the posts of people you followed (if grudgingly), it focused on text (even if images and videos were available) and it had a clean layout that wasn't cluttered with ads, games or other "features" I didn't give a damn about. Then Elon Musk came in and things degraded rapidly. An acquaintance gave me an invite code to Bluesky in July last year. It felt more like the Twitter of old again, but was very quiet. Still, I persisted and continued to post there, even if I was still checking Twitter as well. About three months ago, my Twitter account got locked down for not having a birth date tied to it, and since I was already annoyed with the site, I didn't bother to unlock it and switched to posting on Bluesky exclusively. There were...

I got an email this morning, notifying me that the website sms.at will be shutting down at the end of the year. The title stated that it was "the end of an era" (in German) and that certainly seemed apt. My profile on sms.at was one of the very first online accounts I ever created, all the way back in October 2001. That's 22 years ago now, when I had only just turned 18! I used the site both to send free text messages (something that seems very quaint now in the age of many "unlimited texts" plans, but back then it was useful) and for its free webmail. I had my "official" email account provided by my ISP, and the sms.at webmail for more frivolous purposes such as registering for random websites. I can't say I'm surprised that they're shutting down; to be honest I'm surprised they lasted as long as they did, considering they didn't seem to have much of a business model. I also effectively stopped using the site several years ago, as ...

I created an online savings account with the Post Office this morning. Somewhat to my surprise, they didn't even send me any sort of "thanks for signing up with us" confirmation email. My user ID was a randomly generated number, and I found myself getting logged out of my very first session unexpectedly. When I tried to log in again, it became evident that my browser had not saved my login details, and I had no other record of them, meaning that I had to ring up their support hotline a mere ten minutes after account creation to ask them what my user ID was. Also, when I tried to put some money into the new account via my regular provider's banking app, it popped up with something like three different fraud warnings ( Are you sure this person is who they say they are? Well, it's me...), to the point that it made me feel insecure about sending money to myself . Not as smooth a process as I had hoped.