For what I am using it for, I recently wrote a little web app called Afterfeed [0] that lets you view backups from social media websites as a single unified timeline.
To put this into perspective, I was a voracious social media user for decades. For me, this is 25 years of data, close to 100,000 posts, spanning everything from LiveJournal in 2001 to Mastodon in 2026. But when put together, it is a timeline of my life.
As kind of a last minute idea, I added an MCP server because why not? Once I wired an LLM up to it, I could ask introspective questions and find new ways of looking at myself and my own history. Simple things like "what was I doing 10 years ago around this time?" to more complex things like researching past thought patterns.
Interesting idea. I left social media over half a decade ago and just nuked my accounts. Something like this could have been useful. Like a personal archive
Grievances against big tech - over issues like the stupendous amount of money being created for very few, and the damage being inflicted among many other things - have been building for years. Whether you view those complaints as legitimate or not very much depends on your point of view, but the anger is there, it is real, and it is palpable.
AI was the tipping point for a lot people, especially younger people. My teenager refuses to use it. Then, Elon Musk went to Memphis and threw gas on the fire, providing a perfect illustration of why people are so upset.
Data centers are an avatar right now of all of that because they are a physical manifestation of what people can't otherwise fight.
Conversely, I once had a very large yard for a suburban home, about a third of an acre. I sectioned my yard into about 5 sections, but I mowed pretty much the same way: whatever lines are longest without stopping.
The less time I spent in Alabama heat, the better.
This. I just went and cancelled a bunch of vampire subscriptions that had accrued in my life (both in and out of the Apple ecosystem) and ended up saving somewhere in the range of $60 a month.
I get that people have bills to pay and building and maintaining software costs money, but when everyone wants money from me for every little thing, eventually I have to decide who gets what cut from an increasingly limited sized pie.
Apps like this that, while beautiful, replicate functionality that is "good enough" that I can get for free are the first thing to be cut.
Going even further off topic, one of the things I love with Apple is having all your subscriptions in one place, and being able to cancel them easily.
The few zombie subscriptions I've had have all existed outside of the App store, one that I didn't even sign up for (looking at you Masterclass). I bought a one year gift subscription for someone else, and because it came with a "free" subscription for me (that I didn't use), I git hit with annual renewals until I noticed it on my credit card statement and cancelled.
Yes, I should check those more frequently, but who has time for that?
It rankles that you can can cancel a free trial before it's over with every app exept Apple's. I like the feature, but the double standard grates.
To add on to this: if you're a "guy" still trying to feel out some really confusing feelings, playing a vixen online allows you to explore those feelings without it impacting your real life. It's the same reason it's pretty common for trans people to report preferring to play characters of their true gender in video games. It gives you a safe, low-stakes way to explore gender.
With furry especially, that particular fandom has for decades been openly and loudly supportive of LGBTQ+ people and a very very significant percentage are queer. It's a very, very safe place for exploration.
If you experience gender dysmorphia, being forced to adopt the norms of the disconnected gender is far more psychologically damaging than exploration of something else.
Cognitive restructuring, aka adopting a new norm, is the DSM recommendation, because it usually works. Exploration is healthy.
I mean, it’s quite obviously not to anyone with even a tiny modicum of common sense, and I say this as a trans person (although not a furry).
Modern psychology has built up an incredible memeplex that is accepted unquestioningly despite being an enormous load of bullshit / giant house of cards.
All relativist extremists fall back on it and use it to justify their detachments from and disdain for the shared reality we all inhabit together. Sad to witness, and only growing stronger, it seems.
Nest started out great for me as an early adopter.
The recent iterations are just frustrating. The apps are laggy. It’s always prompting me to join an energy savings program no matter how many times I say no. We had to disable the home/away detection because it went from working well to thinking we were away 5 times per day.
Nest stands as my example of a product that went from great to terrible through complete mismanagement and customer neglect.
Yep. I have an Ecobee currently and have had a Nest previously. Am totally perplexed why people like these things. Just opened the Ecobee app and literally at the top is an ad saying "The Holiday sale is here. Shop now." Irritates me to no end.
the worst is that it doesn’t show up immediately, but after a second and it’s location is where I just went to tap to enter my thermostat, forcing me to exit back. I now try and just use the app via Apple Home for a better experience.
My Nest works great other than the app trying me to get to change my account to Google, which I just close out of every-time. Basic functional UI and works as billed. The unit itself has a nice sturdy feel to it with a very intuitive wheel-and-click interface. It's the only smarthome thing I have besides Hue lightbulbs
> I've known I was gay since high school, probably even earlier, but I kept choosing whatever seemed like the easiest path.
Just so you know, you're not alone here. Mine was a bit different (gender related) but the causes are essentially the same: I just kept choosing whatever path was easiest instead of facing what I was actually feeling. It made me fabulously "successful" at life and I had everything that you would expect to come along: wife, kid, big house, fancy job. It's a hard feeling to reconcile - being so successful in what most of society would say you should be ... and yet still so miserable.
I'll add my voice to others here that this is a huge problem especially for small hobbyist websites.
I help administer a somewhat popular railroading forum. We've had some of these AI crawlers hammering the site to the point that it became unusable to actual human beings. You design your architecture around certain assumptions, and one of those was definitely not "traffic quintuples."
We've ended up blocking lots of them, but it's a neverending game of whack-a-mole.
> one of those was definitely not "traffic quintuples."
O, it was... People warned about the mass usage of WordPress because of its performance issues.
The internet usage kept growing, even without LLM scraping in mass. Everybody wants more and more up to date info, recent price checks, and so many other features. This trend has been going on for over 10+ years.
Its just now, that bot scraping for LLMs has pushed some sites over the edge.
> We've ended up blocking lots of them, but it's a neverending game of whack-a-mole.
And unless you block every IP, you can not stop them. Its really easy to hide scrapers, especially if you use a slow scrap rate.
The issue comes when you have like one of the posters here, a setup where a DB call takes up to 1s for some product pages that are not in cache. Those sites already lived on borrowed time.
Ironically, better software on their site (like not using WP), will allow them to handle easily 1000x the volume for the same resources. And do not get me started in how badly configured a lot of sites are in the backend.
People are kind of blaming the wrong issue. Our needs for up to date, data, has been growing for over the last 10 years. Its just that people considered website that took 400ms to generate a webpage as ok. (when in reality they are wasting tons of resource or are limited in the backend)
To put this into perspective, I was a voracious social media user for decades. For me, this is 25 years of data, close to 100,000 posts, spanning everything from LiveJournal in 2001 to Mastodon in 2026. But when put together, it is a timeline of my life.
As kind of a last minute idea, I added an MCP server because why not? Once I wired an LLM up to it, I could ask introspective questions and find new ways of looking at myself and my own history. Simple things like "what was I doing 10 years ago around this time?" to more complex things like researching past thought patterns.
[0] https://github.com/rebeccathedev/afterfeed/
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