Great post by Ben Werdmuller about Bluesky’s popularity and the fediverse. To his list of what works well at Bluesky, I would add this: Bluesky usernames are domain names and millions of people are cool with it. I consider that a win for the IndieWeb.
People and blogs involved with and about the IndieWeb community, the fediverse, and/or the open web in general.
I’ve been in a foul mood for a week. Ignoring the news, trying to keep my head down with work. But right now, feeling actual joy reading this post from the Onion about acquiring InfoWars. Amazing.
I've been having a one-sided discussion with Bluesky asking they make their product less vulnerable to takeover by tech bros, and I can't tell if they're doing anything about it. They must be conflicted, on the one hand, they clearly could sell there service now for a lot of money, but when they do that they must know they're selling us out.
More Bluesky improvements! Fixed a couple bugs and added support for alt text for manually cross-posted blog posts. It gets the text from your blog post, of course. Here’s a screenshot of the new preview.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
Bluesky, the Fediverse, and the future of social media
I care a lot about the future of social media. It’s how many of us learn about the world and connect to each other; putting something so important in the hands of a handful of centralized corporations has repeatedly proven itself to be harmful. That’s why I’m so excited abo...
BTW, start thinking of WordPress as a highly networked, deployed, debugged, widely supported network operating system. It meets all the criteria. It also has storage. And can publish. And unlike other social web systems, it is textcasting-ready since it comes from the world of blogging where we competed to give writers the features they needed. We can build lots of apps on this foundation.
Lunching and talking design with Daniel and Chris.
Lunching and talking design with Daniel and Chris.
A few days ago I saw Donald Fagen at a local supermarket. I had heard he lives in the area. I didn't bother him, I imagine a star like that enjoys moments as an ordinary person, but he's anything but. I'm listening to Haitian Divorce this morning, grinning from ear to ear as I sing along.
Today's song: Who's this kinky so and so.
We're going to open testing for WordLand shortly. At first I only want developers who know write great bug reports. My goal is to speed up development and reduce wear and tear on me. Once we're confident it really works as advertised, we'll open up the testing further. There will be a form you can fill out to get in the queue. The choice of the first testers will be highly subjective.
Last year on this day: We have too many modes of writing. I just wrote a blog post that's also a tweet. Why didn't it go to my followers on all the social nets I'm on? Why do I have to use a different editor to post to each of the services? That's the point of Textcasting, btw.
Long walk this morning to Civil Goat on Manor. ☕️
I have a major character flaw. Whenever I see an old abandoned building, graffiti everywhere, weeds overgrown, a for-sale sign that’s been there for an unknown number of years, I think… With a little care, that could be a beautiful bookstore.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
The Onion acquires Infowars
I literally had to check to see if this was real:
"The Onion has successfully acquired Infowars.
The satirical news outlet purchased Alex Jones' right-wing conspiracy empire at a court-ordered auction, the families of the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting announced Thursday."
I cannot think of a more fitting end for such a toxic, falsehood-filled media outlet. Of course The Onion should own it. Where better than the original home of fake news?
Clearly the Sandy Hook families felt the same way: they actually decided to forgo part of the money owed to them in order to make this happen.
"While Jones will no longer own Infowars, he has indicated that he will continue to broadcast after losing control of the media company."
May he lose that one too.
[Link]
With Bluesky hitting 15 million users, I turned my attention back to Bluesky improvements in Micro.blog today. More reliable to reply from within Micro.blog to Bluesky @-mentions, and on your Replies page it will now include a Bluesky logo link to reference the copy of your reply on Bluesky. 🦋
There isn’t a single social web network that I like pouring my creativity into. I feel like I’m being used not appreciated. There’s nothing in it for me. I had a similar feeling for Twitter, but they were the only one. Now there are a bunch, and I honestly don't care about any of them, esp now that the election is over. I think this whole idea of feeding the greed of a bunch of tech people is over. If there's a good place to gather, with a small number of people I relate to as people, then I'm up for that, but none of these services meet that need.
Wednesday session
Wednesday session
Are you the nerd of the year??
Whenever you ask for something with Bluesky they tell you about how a user account is like a website, you just have to make it work a certain way, that some devs have mastered, and I guess I could too, but right now all my attention is focused on WordPress and getting it to ...
I am working on a text editor for WordPress using MediumEditor, but I save the text in Markdown and when I reload the Markdown text I regenerate the HTML for MediumEditor. I think the social web should exchange Markdown as the canonical form of web text. It has the right set of features, it's Just Enough HTML.
ChatGPT can't remember my coding conventions. It always falls back to using features of JavaScript I told it not to use. I indent my code according to the way it works in an outliner, so I can't use their code without having to manually modify it. I haven't forgotten that I'm the human and it's the computer. Its memory is supposed to be perfect. And I am a paying customer, btw.