Another push to get people off #substack is prompting IT professionals to write posts about how easy it is to set up your own site.

Michael Newton

@SJohnRoss@dice.camp @Taskerland@dice.camp I cringed this morning when I saw somebody saying 'oh, I'd love to set up my own blog but I'm not sure how' because I'm sure that at least 15 helpful IT professionals have now convinced them it is impossible.

(Although also, hats off to people like @_elena@mastodon.social who are actually doing the hard work of writing guides that make sense to the rest of the population)

Elena Rossini ⁂

@mavnn aw I totally understand! when I wrote on here in the winter of 2024 that I planned to set up my own self-hosted Fedi instance, I was met with an avalanche of posts warning me about security... which made me scared to announce what my new self-hosted account was.

For blogging, most hosting providers allow for one-click installations of Wordpress. I would recommend that, it's super easy (and you can federate a WP blog with @pfefferle's plugin ActivityPub for WP)

@SJohnRoss @Taskerland

Will Ellwood

@Taskerland Tellingly James is a designer and artist as much as a tech person.

ティージェーグレェ

It's one of the challenges when you find others with whom there is mutual intelligibility!

I am grateful when I speak with others, who tell me things such as: "grey, I didn't understand about 60% of the technobabble you just said."

Alas, not many individuals ever remind me of how confusing I may sound to others.

My ex-wife would get furious with me when I would use words she didn't understand. I grew up in a house hold where we had a full OED set and would spend a lot of time just flipping through the pages when I was a kid. So to me, looking up unknown terms in a lexicon or dictionary or whatever is just second nature. I am a polyglot and do such things constantly.

Yet, I do desire to be understood, just as I strive to understand others. I tend to accept the onus of doing my best to learn more; but attempting to adjust my own expressions so as to be better understood? Feels a lot more challenging.

I've also worked as a chef professionally, though I am vegan, so a little more niche. Having written as much, I have encountered some coworkers on occasion, who wouldn't document recipes with ingredient amounts. It's one thing if you're watching a YouTube video of comedian Nigel Ng playing his Uncle Roger character saying to cook: "with feeling" but if you're in a kitchen, shared by others, with customers, who expect some level of consistency? That doesn't do for a recipe that can be repeated. Such things are more like a magician's notes than particularly helpful.

I also find that "well paid" is rarely, if ever true when it comes to IT. I've had more than one job, where I was effectively making less than the minimum wage and on call 24x7. A horrid combination. I'm 50, and have never known a livable wage no more than 40 hour work week.

There's a term in Japanese ブラック企業「burakku kigyou」which loosely translates to: "Black Company" but is more or less representative of illegal business practices. That encompasses, almost the entirety of my employers throughout my career history. Though there have been, rarely, exceptions. Once I even worked for a place where I was part of a union! Once that job lasted a few months.

Out of decades of working. I was forced to work, unpaid, as a minor as well. Writing Excel macros and similar BS for my dad under threat of not having a roof over my head if I didn't do his bidding.

"well paid"? Maybe Bill Gates broligarch billionaires who plagiarize others' creations? But I wouldn't really call that honest.

But gosh, can I ever do some things in IT that most cannot comprehend with our "Martian" as you phrase it. ;-/

CC: @Taskerland@dice.camp

S. John Ross

@Taskerland I will add, though, that the IT people aren't the only ones.

Gearheads.

And I don't mean gamers who like mecha. I mean the people who can't comprehend how anyone goes through life without disassembling a carburetor. They're the redneck IT crowd.

Michael Newton

@SJohnRoss@dice.camp @Taskerland@dice.camp I needed to speak to a plumber about irrigation for a large garden a few years ago, and yeah. Whole new world of plumbing knowledge and terminology I didn't understand layered on top of horticultural terminology I didn't understand.

Moreau Vazh

@SJohnRoss It took me until comparatively recently to know what a carburetor even was.

Roger BW 😷

@Taskerland @SJohnRoss "It's a thing grandad's car had. Why are you crying?"

S. John Ross

@RogerBW @Taskerland

It's the thing that berates the car.

When it misbehaves.

Kichae

S. John Ross Indeed. There is, of course, a relevant XKCD for this.

Green screen background

@Taskerland pinned/evergreen post

DThoris

@SJohnRoss @Taskerland
I'm an IT person who never learned to speak Martian well. It's a weird spot to be in. I can do the work. I can explain it in mostly lay terms. I can't explain it in Martian. Thank cats people are willing to listen to me to realize I do know it.

Sin Vega

@Taskerland @vdonnut I hosted and did my own blog (wordpress, not from scratch) for a couple of years in 2011 and even I have no idea what the hell these kind of posts are talking about within a couple of sentences

Sharp Cheddar Goblin

@Taskerland 100%. I'm an IT professional and could host a lot of things myself but the last thing I want to do is more work in my off time. No way I'm going to try and convince anyone outside of the field to do that shit.

Moreau Vazh

@sinvega @vdonnut I looked at one and the only think I could understand is that you are better off having a plug-in HD rather than using cloud storage. The rest of it was nothing but subscription services whose purpose was unclear.

You can see why technical writing is a discipline in its own right.

Wandering Adventure Party

Another push to get people off #substack is prompting IT professionals to write posts about how easy it is to set up your own site.