Big changes in Germany apparently, they are going all far right all of a sudden. That’s that sort of thing that gives brits the ebbie jeebies. You know there was that war a while back and all that. I know it makes me sit up and raise my eyebrows. But is this really what’s going on?

I wonder if this is a bit of a storm in a tea cup blown up by the Guardian to look like some major thing.

I’m suspicious of the current Europe narrative painted in the media because:

1. the choice of image in the article is maybe a bit inflamatory to anti-supremacist sentiment?
2. the way UK political commentators characterise US politics just doesn’t square with much of what I've heard online in podcasts
3. the US right commentators do make some good observations, helpful no matter what side of politics you are on
4. how did UK politics go from being the basket case of Europe to the sensible ones in just a hop, skip and an election? Come on what are the chances?

I’m not hating on the Rest is Politics guys, I like their show, but science has repeatedly demonstrated over the years that the capacity for humans to fool ourselves is practically limitless.

So where can we get a balanced view? Are there moderate german right leaning podcasts out there? I just wish I spoke german.

I’ve continued to follow developments in the Telegram - Pavel Durov arrest story. As I’ve mentioned previously I’m interested to hear about cases of gang stalking that might get revealed. None so far. One thing that’s apparent is the very variable facts presented by the main stream media. It’s quite shocking.

The tech facts are known by the tech community, yet the main stream media continues to get basic facts wrong about the state of the encryption used by Telegram. Saying that it’s fully encrypted is false information. The actual reality is much more nuanced.

It’s crazy to think that such enormous errors could be made across all topics that these big reputable companies report on. You don’t ever think about that but when you see it happen in a domain you happen to know a lot about, it really makes you wonder about how often it must happen in all their reporting.

Wordpress acquired Tumblr in 2019. It seemed like a pretty good fit at the time, both companies have a very web vibe about them, yet a different approach. Like Coke and Pepsi, both are pretty great, except for Wordpress and Tumblr it’s not main stream greatness, it’s more like a two different styles of underground greatness, like a merging of internet cool with open source cool.

So the companies have been operating seperately until now, but Tumblr is loosing money and so the decision has been made to move Tumblr to work on Wordpress backend. I think it’s likely there are probably quite a lot of people worried about the move. After all there are many users on both platforms.

Migration projects are always pretty interesting. You learn a lot about a website when moving it to work on different technologies. But this is extra interesting because not only is it a migration of an entire platform, it’s a platform that is internet scale. The cool thing is that since Wordpress is also used by regular small scale websites there‘s likely going to be lots of improvements for everyone later down the line, as long as they remember they are about the small scale too.

If we end up with a Tumblr built on open source software, and a Wordpress that can be used to build websites as cool as Tumblr, then I think it’s a win for everyone.

I really hope they document as they make the journey. This could be one of the best web development stories of all time. It will likely be difficult in places though, the tricky part will no doubt be how to integrate the development teams. Maybe as part of the process each developer should run a personal blog using the opposite platform, and all write and/or create media of various varieties about it. Also go to meetups of the opposite community and create based on those experiences too. Just an idea.

Also who’s going to pay for it all. Experimentation is great and everything but ultimately bills have got to be paid too. But there might be creative solutions in this aspect too, after all both platforms are used by people to run businesses. Turn it into some web version of a reality TV project, with merch and all that stuff. Just need to make sure not to have a negative impact on the development work.

That’s likely way too complicated as a first approach though.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to reading about how this all plays out.