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A lot of things happened since my last proper gemlog entry and, luckily perhaps, this one won't deal with entomology or the like.
I quietly removed some of my contact options but didn't explain the reasons behind it. The first one is less concerning than the latter: I wiped my Matrix account entirely after learning about the project's new paid features, which are as opaque as a turquoise. No pricing have been made public, however the storage limit will encompass files a user RECEIVES, meaning that any shots and videos I share and also those those shared by my chat partner will be counted – and videos in particular naturally are the heaviest media format. I'm not gonna invest money into a subscription for a service that constantly eats messages and spits them back out after several days. There are better IM services out there.
The second "contacts" removal deals with what I listed on my Mastodon profile. I don't want to get into all of the nasty details but some of my relatives with past incidents of monitoring each other's social media activities came across my long-abandoned profile on mastodon.social and pretty much started to use a single thread against me for no other reason than to simply not admit that they don't understand computers as much as they claim (yet still will not do anything to resolve the flawed opinions of other, "tech illiterate" relatives who blindly count on their supposed expertise even after multiple, easily preventable incidents). They ended up using the rather subtle "bread crumbs" I left for old mutuals of mine who may want to reach out to me after I dumped every popular social media site, though another relative did snoop on my now-deactivated Instagram all the way back to 2017, only catching her after she accidentally watched one of my Stories with her main account without ever following my account. My "Contacts" page will stay up for now and only my "new" Mastodon profile no longer links to them. While this account is fully private, with only a fraction of my posts being set to "public", I'm getting frustrated to the point of wanting to let them know that I'm fully aware of all of their silly stalking habits and how I won't suck it up (or even imitate it) like other relatives, especially if it results in "I thought about getting her a (better) job but she was being mean about me online" or "she abuses children by yelling at them after losing a game of UNO" BEHIND MY BACK FOR YEARS. The latter rumor is particularly bad because it never happened and it can be easily disproved by asking my ex-colleagues, parents and the kids themselves.
Since trying to fight against this nonsense in a rational manner continues to be unsuccessful, I already distanced myself from them and "escaped" to niche sites and a bunch of pseudonyms where I finally could get my peace from them without losing all of my online contacts that have been keeping me relatively sane and supported me (on a mutual basis, of course) throughout such antics. There's WAY more to this but right now I'm not in the position to make all of it public and would rather not to, lest it ends up making matters even worse and on top may attract some kind of pity (which already is borderline insufferable when my friends express it because it doesn't do anything to stop my relatives from being, well, a dysfunctional bunch).
On a positive note, they do not seem to be all too interested in my IM activities and only focus on what I post publicly. While this forces me to significantly reduce my public activities, including my tech-related blog on WriteFreely, all of my remaining IM options and my public email remain available for everyone, just not actively promoted on the HTTP web anymore. I don't know how far their snooping goes in terms of my capsule since only my Vernissage profile links to my "Ecological Observations" sub-capsule – a topic they luckily have no interest in whatsoever – via MOZZ.US, though. Nevertheless, if they go all the way to keep taps on my lousy Geminispace capsule, this note should be a sign that they need serious help.