We should be declaring independence from both political parties. We have to get together with other citizens whose lives are going to be torn apart by what's happening, and the Dems are not at this time representing us. This is our government that is being overthrown.
People and blogs involved with and about the IndieWeb community, the fediverse, and/or the open web in general.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
Empires
For the avoidance of doubt:
All empires are bad.
All empires have always been bad.
All empires always will be bad.
The concept of empire is bad.
The prerequisites for empire are bad.
And the people who like empires — any of them — are bad.
Do not have fondness for empires.
Do not have nostalgia for them.
Empires by definition colonize and rule space — physical, figurative, or both — that might otherwise be free.
Resist the urge to romanticize empire. It was never good, and it never will be.
WordLand is where we start to boot up a simple social net using only RSS as the protocol connecting users. Rather than wait for ActivityPub and AT Proto to get their acts together. I think we can do it with feeds and start off with immediate interop without the complexity of federation. I call it the feediverse. It's not a joke, although it may incite a smile and a giggle. And that's ok.
WordLand opened for everyone to use yesterday. There was a deal-stopping bug reported last night, fixed provisionally immediately, then for real this morning. Prevented new users from getting started. Really embarassing. If you have trouble, please report. There's a link for Support in the main menu in the app.
Decentralization is Not, Itself, An Answer to The Money Question
osteophage.neocities.org/essays/decentralization-money-question
Jay Rosen started a list of journalism sources on Bluesky. John Spurlock wrote an app that generates an OPML subscription list using Bluesky's API. It will enable us to recreate a world that Jay put together, outside of Bluesky. From AT Proto to OPML and RSS.
We aren't prepared for what's coming.
Blog questions challenge
Blogging about blogging.
Fiddling with improved Open Graph support for hosted blogs. I’ve never liked how most social platforms use Open Graph previews. Sometimes they’re great, sometimes they’re redundant, and sometimes they’re plastered over a timeline like ads. But bloggers need more control over this.
Almost whenever I run an alter table in MySQL, I think back to a conversation with Marco Arment at SXSW 15 years ago, about how Tumblr’s database was so big it was faster to add new tables instead of changing existing columns or indexes. MySQL has improved a lot since then.
We are not on the verge of a constitutional crisis, we are in the aftermath of one.
Things are indeed dire. I’m focusing on the only thing I know how to contribute: helping people post on the web and discouraging the spread of misinformation, which I think is largely to blame for getting us here. To those on the front lines for democracy, please remember to be better than the other side. Everything we do must be grounded in truth and compassion.
Matt Mullenweg
• Matt
WordCamp Asia and Kumbh Mela
It’s been fantastic being in the Philippines for this year’s WordCamp Asia. We have attendees from 71 countries, over 1,800 tickets sold, and contributor day had over 700 people! It’s an interesting contrast to US and EU WordCamps as well in that the audience is definitely a lot younger, and there’s very little interest in … Continue reading WordCamp Asia and Kumbh Mela →
5 years or 20 years?
Federico Viticci on the products after the Vision Pro:
I may be stating the obvious here, but I fundamentally believe that headsets are a dead end and glasses are the ultimate form factor we should be striving for. […] There’s a real possibility we may have Apple glasses (a...
CSF_01: Three Steps for IndieWeb Cybersecurity
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
People and Blogs
I was privileged to be interviews for this week’s People and Blogs:
Hi! I’m Ben Werdmuller. I was born in the Netherlands, grew up and spent my twenties in the UK, and spent twelve years in the San Francisco Bay Area. Now I live in Greater Philadelphia in a creaky old house with my partner, our two year old son, and my father. At night the pipes clang and we sometimes wonder if they’re haunted.
I love the whole series, so it’s really exciting to be included. You can read my interview here.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
Texas Banned Abortion. Then Sepsis Rates Soared.
[Lizzie Presser, Andrea Suozzo, Sophie Chou and Kavitha Surana at ProPublica]
My colleagues at ProPublica conducted a first-of-its-kind data analysis on health outcomes after Texas banned abortion in 2021.
Here's what it found:
"The rate of sepsis shot up m...
CSF_01: Three Steps for IndieWeb Cybersecurity
Welcome to my first Cybersecurity Friday (CSF) post.
Almost exactly one week ago I experienced (and had to fight & recover from)
a cybersecurity incident. While that’s a much longer story,
this post series is focused on sharing tips and incident learnings
from an
#...
AI as a feedback machine
This is a variation on something I’ve mentioned in passing before. I like running draft blog posts through AI. Even for very short posts, sometimes I’ll paste the text into ChatGPT and ask it to tell me what the post means. If AI can “understand” it, humans probably can too....
Letting go of Advanced Data Protection in the UK seems a reasonable compromise from Apple. If I’m going to nitpick anything in their statement:
Enhancing the security of cloud storage with end-to-end encryption is more urgent than ever before.
Urgent? Important, yes, but urgent is something that needs immediate attention, and I hardly think encrypted cloud backups qualify. Apple’s statement doesn’t actually matter but the word choice stood out to me.