People and blogs involved with and about the IndieWeb community, the fediverse, and/or the open web in general.
Sunday session
Something has changed in the twitterverse, it's grown new centers, for me, Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads and Twitter is still here, but I use it a lot less than I used to. Each of them acts as if they are alone, except for ActivityPub but that's more complicated than it may seem. As often is the case, the tech industry is depending on confusion. This may be a strategic mistake. I could cite a few examples where this didn't work, when an open ecosystem whose benefits were by then obvious to users, completely erased the ecosystem that came before, often with remarkable speed. Each of them is playing for all of it, wanting to control their users, make it so they only post to one system. And some people do. I think it's better if we, as users, remain diversified.
You'll never see an article in the NYT saying how wrong polls have been in every presidential election because then they'd have to fire half their political reporters.
If you want a better idea of how it's going, look at where the ad dollars are going, and where the candidates are campaigning.
And make sure all your friends know that you're voting and who you're voting for. I think that makes a difference.
I'm voting straight Democratic party line.
I find that a lot of my posts here on my blog are just like the tweets I post on Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads and Twitter. I used to have an icon in my outliner that tweeted the text of the bar cursor headline. I could make it work once again, but it would be wasted if I couldn't send it to all four of the services I use regularly. Something has changed in the twitterverse, it's grown new centers. But each of them is acting as if they are alone. This is a mistake, for sure for the open web, but I think it may be a strategic mistake for each of them. I could cite lots of examples where this didn't work, when an open ecosystem whose benefits were by then obvious to users, completely erased the ecosystem that had existed before, and with remarkable speed. None of them are strong enough to try to dominate.
If ChatGPT had a simple, non-AI scrapbook, like the old Mac OS had, where you could just throw something over your shoulder so you can find it later with a text search, that would make it a lot more useful for retaining practices that work. It's a shame to work something out, come up with the answer that worked, and then to have to do it all over again 23 months later when you encounter the same problem.
Since the early days of the web, large corporations have seemingly always wanted more than the web platform or web standards could offer at any given moment. Whether they were aiming for cross-platform-compatibility, more advanced capabilities, or just to be the one runtime/framework/language to rule them all, there’s always been a company that believes they can “fix” it or “own” it.
Applets. ActiveX. Flash. Flex. Silverlight. Angular. React.
Sean Tilley has a great live blog of FediForum over at We Distribute. Also includes my demo if you scroll back to yesterday’s coverage.
I got a lot out of FediForum this week. Mostly lurking this morning, can’t really participate. Some fantastic sessions yesterday. I helped lead a discussion on adapting client APIs for different platforms, with great points from folks on ActivityPub C2S and how to go beyond the Mastodon API.
I hadn’t checked out Lillihub in a while. It’s so nice. Some unique ideas around conversations in Micro.blog.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
For something completely new today, I’m revisiting Nostr support in Micro.blog. Making a few tweaks, and support for custom relays.
BTW the Wikipedia page for the MetaWeblog positions it as a replacement for the Blogger API, but it's an extension of it. You could use MetaWeblog to publish to Blogger sites, but it also supported features that Blogger didn't have, that were in our blogging software, Manila.
Could we agree that ChatGPT can ingest everything that's in Wikipedia? I particularly want the images. I'd like to ask for a picture of Chuck Berry, and get something nice and be able to put him in a scene with the Wordle Kitty. That seems pretty harmless. And the news industry could hardly object, they didn't invent Chuck Berry, or own the copyright of the picture of him in Wikipedia.
I'm searching for some common ground between the twitter-like systems, a basis for interop, a common API even. We had that for the blogging layer of this onion, something called the MetaWeblog API. All the popular blogging software supported it. And that meant you could write once and publish to many places. And you could write the script that did that in an afternoon or two. We started out with simple systems and the best of intentions. There's no technical barrier. And we could do it in a few weeks at most if there was a will to do it
Hecklers at last night's rally in Greensboro, couldn't hear what they were angry about, but it had something to do with Gaza.
The US isn't doing the killing there, the issue is with Netanyahu who is part of the same political party as Trump. So you can be pretty sure the killing won't stop there at least until after our election. One way to be sure the killing continues is to elect Trump.
It's wonderful that we're laughing at Trump now.
What a joke to think that after all he took us through, there are 47% of the people in the country who want more of that!
OMG we must be crazy. What else are you going to do but laugh.
Learning about Fediverse Discovery Providers at FediForum. Interesting solution to get search and discovery across instances.
