I'd love if Dave would join the new 500.social instance. He hesitates partly due to the guideline suggesting "Posts about politics and religion should be avoided". I understand, but disagree that "everything today is political". To me, it's more that today, politics are everywhere. Subtle difference, but still different :). I don't believe politics must be everywhere. I have conversations all the time that are nothing to do with politics, and not all of them are "happy talk" in a bubble. There are all sorts of topics we can discuss, both comfortable and not. Dave's thoughtful and can be quite political on his site. No problem there (it helps that I usually agree with him 😁). It would be fun to have him join the discussions somewhere where things can be about something else. It might be a nice respite.

Update: Dave responds. I love his reference to DFW's "This is Water" speech. It could be that I'm just not noticing when politics have entered the conversations. It depends on one's definition of "Politics". Dave frequently posts about political issues, so he probably recognizes political topics more easily. My vision is perhaps narrower, so I don't notice politics everywhere. We also might be thinking of "Community" differently. This has been a helpful discussion. Thanks Dave!

Another Update: Kev follows up.

Every year my extended family (on my mother's side) meets at a campground up north for a reunion. It's a perfect opportunity to make some portraits of family members, especially since many of them are now in or around their 80s.

For portraits, I packed the SL2 with wide and long lenses and also the Hasseblad with six rolls of film. For candids, I packed the Leica MP and a handful of HP5. I even threw the Westcott strobe in the trunk. I was loaded for bear.

I took a dozen photos with the SL2 and an M lens before tiring of manual focus. I put the 85mm on it and took a dozen more, all candid and all from wherever I happened to be sitting.

And that was it. I just didn't feel like being the guy with the giant camera getting up in everyone's space all the time. I didn't like lugging the big camera and I didn't like how it made me feel while using it. I felt intrusive and unnecessary. I didn't make a single film image.

The whole event was a huge disappointment, photographically speaking. It's not that there wasn't anything to photograph. It was that I simply didn't feel like doing the work.

I've been wondering if the problem was partly that I was uncomfortable using the SL2 with the big lens. It felt like I was role-playing a photojournalist. And if you're going to do that, you should go all in and not shoot tentatively from a chair using a long lens.

Anyway, it was a disheartening afternoon and I'll need to think about why.

Kev Quirk has been talking about firing up a small-scale Mastodon instance as a sort of counter to the behemoth that Fosstodon has become. Today, he introduced 500 Social, "The deliberately small online community". I love the idea of smaller communities, so of course I signed up immediately.

I'm @jack on 500.social. I went with @jack because I think it emphasizes the smallness of the instance. Like we're on first-name basis with each other. The handle is a little risky, because of that other @jack that no one likes any more, but he's faded a bit, and no one I want to follow uses his old platform now, anyway.

I don't yet know how I'll use the new account. Maybe I'll migrate from social.lol/@jbaty but that seems like more of the same. What I'm thinking is that I'll keep the new account separate and interact primarily with others on the instance. That feels a bit like going against the federation grain, so we'll see.