Echoes of Flavio's Ghost Dreaming

Hadn't been around here for perhaps a week or so, maybe a little more. On opening my reading page I find quite a bit more activity from friends. Wondering whether this is related to people's disenchantment with FB, compounded by the recent changes in it... the flight to BlueSky, etc. Now, neither BSky nor DW are a direct replacement for FB. For me, that would mean events, pages, groups and, most of all, reach. My friends and family in three continents are on FB. They are not here on DW and not either in BSky. There have been attempts at a more direct replacement for FB in the past but... alas, again, the problem has been reach. I'm told there are a couple of efforts by people to develop something that more closely resembles those aspects of FB that I mentioned but the main problem would still be reach: are my sister, my family, my friends and colleagues in three continents going to be in it? I do hope it gets to happen.

In the meantime, I'm glad there is more activity in my little corner of DW.

I am not a photographer. I do take pictures and normally I have a clear idea of what I want to get, in terms of composition, etc -but I seldom get it without some effort, hence I often shoot lots of takes of the same scene.

Had set up a page in freeimagehost here: https://freeimage.host/fflavio but it is a bit limited and I have a few questions about the platform itself. Cannot justify setting up a page on Smugmug and paying every month for that as well as all the other stuff, so decided to set up a site with Wix, where I already have my guitar page (for which I do pay). There are many possible issues and this would be a hobbyist's page and I don't expect it to become any sort of revenue source. There are also many possible issues regarding use of images of places and people but I'll deal with those as and when. As I said, it is going to be a hobbyist's page and it in all probability will have very very limited traffic, judging from the response to my photographic entries in Instagram, FB and the rest.

In any event, if you feel like having a look there, the site will be at:

https://flaviomatani.wixsite.com/photos

There isn't a lot of content in there as yet -but there is some.

Oh, TikTok.

I hated it with a vengeance -but I still opened an account in it and put a few videos of me playing. Couldn't figure out how one or two of them would be nine hundred views and others just one or two. Still can't figure it out -I feel there should be a pattern that one should be able to find out but I cannot see one.

Most of the content that TT was offering me seems to be attractive women dancing suggestively with very little clothing on. Now, I'm not averse to see a beautiful woman dancing with little clothing on but it soon gets annoying. Then I found that I'd been missing the whole thing between 'Following' and 'FYP' views -as I started to follow things I was more interested in and switching from the 'For You' to the 'Following' view then lo, lots of things about space science, palaeontology, things like that started to appear. And I found that I had accidentally followed some of the women with little clothing on (it was accidentally, I promise, Your Honour) but most of them just disappeared.

I still can't figure out why some videos get hundreds of views and quite a few likes (alas, never hundreds) whilst others get almost none of either. And I'm yet to get either a pupil or a gig offer out of those views or even a sensible comment. But, I suspect, that is the nature of the beast. So now I still kind of hate it but more like half-heartedly.