People and blogs involved with and about the IndieWeb community, the fediverse, and/or the open web in general.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
This interview with Bookshop CEO Andy Hunter on Decoder is excellent. Andy seems like the kind of person who will change things. I can’t believe he wasn’t on my radar even though we’ve linked to Bookshop in Micro.blog bookshelves for a few years.
Anyone who says competent white men should be in charge probably has never actually run anything. Women are better in general at seeing the big picture and managing accordingly. A man is more likely to hone in on one aspect of the problem and if they're good, do something brilliant, but misses out on pretty much everything else. I, as a man, have had to severely discipline myself to get anything done, because that's how I'm built. Given a chance I will always put my head down and focus on one thing until its done, then the next and the next and so on.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
Me complaining a year ago:
No, I don’t want to rate the app, or the Skype call, or the mechanic, or the quality of a support email, or a song, or my doctor’s appointment, or whether the web page answered my question… I don’t really want to rate anything ever again! If I actually have feedback, I know how to send it.
The prompts have only gotten worse since then. By trying to improve customer service, they’ve actually destroyed it.
Monday session
A small, pointless Apple Intelligence chat completion failure as I’m chatting with Verizon support… It thinks I’m talking to myself? I know it’s a cheap shot to gripe about AI, but this is really basic stuff.
Trying to get internet at the new place. AT&T will only talk on the phone and they make everything complicated. Google Fiber is in the neighborhood but not on our street. Verizon was supposed to overnight a 5G router a few days ago, it hasn’t shipped. Trying to avoid cable if fiber is imminent.
There are so many great quotes in the Six Colors report card for 2024. Hardware is good, the Mac is good, but Apple has run their relationship with developers into the ground, and most people think Apple Intelligence is a miss.
Wouldn't it be something if the WordPress community were mobilized to get shit done right now?
We need to change who reps us as much as we need to get the ones who current do rep us off their butts and actually do some representing.
Imho it would be smart for Musk to stop shutting things down and just do his work, whatever it is. By creating constant shitstorms he's making it impossible for anyone to defend him, and you can be sure some would be if what he was doing wasn't so blatantly outrageous. We never voted for that mofo. And every American alive, whatever their preference, thinks their own vote should count. That's going to be a massive hurdle for them to get over.
Parker Ortolani blogs about Bluesky clients:
I want Tweetbot or Twitterrific, but for Bluesky. I’m not seeing that yet. The opportunity is clearly there, it has tens of millions of users making it three times the size of Mastodon.
John Gruber adds a note on Daring Fireball about timeline position sync.
Many people want an app that can manage multiple accounts on different networks. That’s fine. But what I want is one identity that can interact with all open platforms. A client app can never provide that, only new platforms like Micro.blog.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
I really like the way this guide to Signal lays it all out. As Matt Haughey explains:
"A friend of mine works in the federal government and wrote a guide for their fellow federal workers on how to use Signal. There are lots of good reasons for switching to Signal for messaging, and this does a great job of laying it all out. This friend doesn't currently have a blog, so they asked me to post it for them, and I obliged since I think it's a straightforward introduction to protecting yourself when communicating with others."
This doesn't just go into the what - it talks a little about the why for Signal, including some of the protections you'll get on Signal that you won't get anywhere else.
Take a look - and then start using it.
[Link]
A bit of advice for Dems in Congress. Go home and have town halls, and listen. And stop listening to the consultants and each other. Find out what the people want, and bring that back to DC. And let the press attend the town halls so they can report. Make our own Tea Party.
BTW, it turns out that Pip's, a restaurant in Severance, my favorite show in a while, was hot at the Phoenicia Diner, which is one of my favorite places to eat in the area. Funny thing I didn't recognize it until I saw an article about it in a local magazine.
I don’t see myself using Bookshop.org’s new e-books until there’s Kindle support, but now that I’ve read this article on Wired, I’m convinced they’re on the right track. From CEO Andy Hunter:
The first step is to launch the platform. Our second step is to make it popular, so we have leverage. And then we can start fixing what we consider to be the industry problems around ebooks.
