FeedCity

[Christine Lemmer-Webber] Christine Lemmer-Webber has written a superb post that sets out to ask how decentralized Bluesky is but goes far deeper into the different models at play in decentralized social networking. It's required reading for anyone who cares...

Cozumel. 🏖️

Given that the conversation has rightly turned to billionaire-proofness of Bluesky, if they allow devs to build on Bluesky with RSS in and out, that's enough to alleviate the concern about it being billionaire-proof.

They already support outbound RSS. Now just let us get into the system with just RSS. Yes, I know it's a "third party opportunity" but something like this, to have the required value, has to be a fully supported and maintained feature of the platform.

Let's do this right, and we can spread this into Masto-Land and Threads-Land and then we can thank Elon Musk for helping us not just bridge these systems, but make them all part of the same freaking system.

We can do this.

We stopped using Basecamp recently, and one thing I really miss is the weekly question, asking folks what they want to work on. I found this useful even for my own planning. Something about it was better than a simple note file or to-do list.

I just realized that there's another kind of enshitification that we're experiencing now because the twitter-verse has split into so many forks. Bluesky is hot now, but this isn't over yet. Developers are deliberately locking their users in by creating new APIs that are not ...

I just realized that there's another kind of enshitification that we're experiencing now because the twitter-verse has split into so many forks. Bluesky is hot now, but this isn't over yet. Developers are deliberately locking their users in by creating new APIs that are not ...

I started a feature list on the About WordLand page.

[Annalee Newitz at The Believer] Boots Riley is a national treasure. I loved this interview with him in The Believer: "BLVR: Do you think that all expression is propaganda? BR: The word propaganda got popularized in different ways at different times. But ou...

Ayn Rand, Rand Paul and Paul Ryan walk into a bar. The bartender serves them tainted alcohol because there are no regulations. They die.

I’ve been down in an audio plugin rabbit hole lately. More on that in a later blog post. But I just stumbled upon a set of free plugins that might be of interest to you, if you are doing voice recordings of any kind – be it a podcast, voice over, or, let’s say, video tutoria...

As announced by Automattic and covered by TechCrunch, I want to take a moment to welcome Elijah Potter and Harper to join Automattic. Harper is a super-fast (way faster than LanguageTool and Grammerly), local English grammar checker. The technology is nascent, but I’m very excited to embed this throughout all of Automattic’s products, and then … Continue reading Welcoming Harper →

In the Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin discusses my workplace, the journalism it undertakes, and why it's important (gift link). I lead technology, and while I sit on the business side of the operation, it's an absolute privilege to support these journalists. This is on poin...

When people said they didn't know Kamala well, they weren't kidding. She didn't start broadcasting until three months before the election. That's not even one season of Abbott Elementary or Wheel of Fortune. Of course they didn't know her. We should be marketing the hell out...

[Oxford Martin School] The Oxford Martin School is a multidisciplinary research institution at the University of Oxford focused on tackling global challenges and shaping a sustainable future through innovation and collaboration. It ran a study on the societa...

[Dan Milmo at The Guardian] The Department of Justice has filed its proposed remedies to Google's illegal monopoly over search services: "The proposals filed to a Washington federal court include the forced sale of the Chrome browser and a five-year ban from...

YES! THIS!!!

A ban on tracking-based personalised advertising will provide an incentive to reinforce sustainable alternative models and, in fact, will be a condition for making them viable. The advertising industry already has sustainable, proven concepts for effective online advertising that do not require targeted tracking and personalisation (e.g. contextual advertising).

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Technology doesn’t have to be terrible. Here’s an absolutely wonderful use of an e-ink display:

I made as much use of vanilla HTML and CSS as possible. I used a small amount of JavaScript but no framework or other libraries.

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React is a non-transferable skill.

React proponents might claim that React will teach you modern UI, but from what I’ve seen it barely copes with modern UI. autofocus is broken, custom elements don’t work in all but the experimental version, using any “modern” features like dialog or popovers requires useEffect, and the synthetic event system teaches you so little about how DOM actually works. This isn’t modern UI, it’s UI from 2013 at its inception. I don’t have the time left in my career to pick up UI paradigms that haven’t evolved much beyond from when Barack Obama was in office.

When I mentor early career developers and they ask me what they should learn, I can’t say React, they don’t have time. I mean sure, pick up enough React to land you the inevitable job doing it, but it’s not going to level up your career.

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