People and blogs involved with and about the IndieWeb community, the fediverse, and/or the open web in general.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
Wednesday session
New home internet update: Verizon 5G router arrived and it’s… alright. 100 Mbps if the wind is blowing the right direction. 🤪 Trying to be patient until fiber is ready.
And btw to Mitch McConnell, fuck you. You had a chance, with one freaking vote, to avoid this. You are among a small number of people who could have stopped this. This should be the first line in your obituary. "He could have saved the United States, but chose not to do it."
Today we’re rolling out two plug-in changes to Micro.blog. The first is that for new users, the Sumo theme by Matt Langford is now the default theme. This is a great theme that I think will serve new users better than our previous default theme Marfa. Sumo is better maintained and easier to customize.
Inspired by the good work that plug-in developers are doing, we’re also starting to sprinkle in donation buttons on your plug-ins list. The buttons can say either donate, tip, or buy me a coffee. Here’s an example:
I’ve been manually wiring these up, but later we’ll automate this so that Micro.blog can discover the donation link via a plug-in’s config or readme. If you’ve created a plug-in that accepts donations, let me know and I’ll update the listing.
Federico Viticci blogging about timeline apps:
My problem with timeline apps is that I struggle to understand their pitch as alternatives to browsing Mastodon and Bluesky (supported by both Tapestry and Reeder) when they don’t support key functionalities of those services such as posting, replying, reposting, or marking items as favorites.
There’s no reason these apps can’t also support creating new posts. Sort of like how the Micro.blog iOS app can post to WordPress. I don’t think apps need to support all social features, though.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
[Eoin Higgins, excerpted in Lit Hub]
This is a neat encapsulation of Musk’s rightward turn, and everything that happened next:
“By this point, Musk believed that part of the business problem of Twitter was that, somehow, the right wing was “suppressed.” As such, “woke culture” needed to be destroyed for Twitter the business—and democracy itself—to survive. In many ways this belief was a natural outgrowth of the Silicon Valley mythos of meritocracy and the tech industry’s opposition to diversity; a politics based on destroying wokeness was not far from the supremacist ideology he grew up with in South Africa.”
If you take a step back, it’s remarkable that the weirdest guy from PayPal has evolved into the world’s richest and most dangerous man. This serves as a reminder of what happened.
[Link]
I updated the Developers account on Bluesky to follow Tim Bray, Simon Willison, Techdirt, Manton Reece and Cory Doctorow. I took my feeds off the list, and added other developer accounts I regularly read. I'm trying to bootstrap something here, to see what can be done, and feel it's important to take myself out of the list for now.
Amazon’s Kindle Vella is shutting down with only a few weeks notice. I never read any stories but I thought it was an interesting idea — serialized novels delivered in short episodes like a chapter at a time, mostly fantasy and romance. Perhaps should’ve been more integrated with Kindle Unlimited.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
Tuesday session
Freaky warning. As easily as Musk can turn off government websites, he can turn off our sites. He could turn off all .com or .org sites. He'll probably do it just that way. Only one domain will work in the future, x.com. Goodbye Google, Amazon, your drug store. Bubye. Not sure if moving your DNS to Europe or Asia will make a difference. He's taking advantage of centralization, and will try to make it more centralized. Totally centralized. A journalist couldn't report this, because what proof do I have? It's because there's a pattern here. And it's pretty obvious the tools he's using.
