People and blogs involved with and about the IndieWeb community, the fediverse, and/or the open web in general.
Manuel Moreale — Everything Feed
• Manuel Moreale
It's the modern way to travel!In related client API news, Dave Winer has also been hammering on this recently from his perspective working on WordLand and the long history of the MetaWeblog API:
But the web is what matters, not my product or yours. Even if your product is huge, it’s only part of the web. This is how we build, how we get back on track. Somehow we need to get a simple bridge that lets all blog content flow to Mastodon.
Lear year, I really wanted to see Mastodon adopt an open posting API. I even wrote a FEP to fix some limitations in how APIs were too hard-coded to Mastodon’s capabilities. It went nowhere.
Steve Bate has a long blog post about why ActivityPub’s client-to-server protocol has not been implemented:
Yet despite its promise, ActivityPub C2S has seen minimal real-world adoption. Most Fediverse platforms — including Mastodon, the dominant implementation — have actively avoided supporting it. Instead, they expose custom APIs that tightly couple client behavior to server internals.
More clients should use Micropub. It is also a W3C recommendation, but unlike C2S, Micropub is already widely implemented and has evolved through extensions to accommodate most real-world use cases.
ArtLung
• Joe Crawford
I emailed James about his post Brainstorming a tool to follow new album releases with Wikipedia. He mentions my mirrored IndieWeb Profile page. I mentioned in the email that the more interesting page from the IndieWeb wiki I mirror is the Front End Study Hall page. That page pulls in the content of the page,...
Part of the reason I don't like it is that I pay for the NYT and read very little of it, and most of what I read I think is bullshit. But there still is a bit of credibility in it. So even though I'm over-paying for this, they still want more money. Every fucking time I go to the site they stop me to be sure now isn't the time I'm going to go for the "full package." Even if I did, I'm sure there would be an even bigger package that I could pay more money for and not read like the rest of their bullshit. I hate them more than I usually would because I used to trust them, when I was a kid, I trusted them blindly. Being betrayed like that, ugh. BTW the NYT is my hometown paper, but you know what they don't even cover the Mets and Knicks. Fuck that shit. (Said in the NY fucking dialect of English.)
I really like the Wikipedia slogan, "The internet we were promised."
I was going to recommend an episode of The Daily podcast, but when I found the show page on Apple podcasts, it said it was subscribers only. They interviewed the person who runs KFSK, an Alaska public radio station. Very revealing. I listened to it in a standard commercial podcast client. How did it know that I am a NYT subscriber, so I could listen? I heard from a few people who don't subscribe to the NYT, they can't get through. There was a lot of cooperation going on there, and I don't really like listening to episodes that I can't pass on to friends. That's cheap, I also don't read Krugman any longer for the same reason I guess. I'm going to start recommending specific episodes of podcasts, but only ones that everyone can listen to. Not even sure why I want to do that, but it feels right. If the money went to KFSK I would definitely feel better.
I'm going to add a command to WordLand that lets you quickly edit the text of the current post in Markdown. So if you you can quickly change the URL on a link. Or just see what you got when you pasted some text into the document. The thing I don't want to do is a full-blown Markdown editor. I want to do that too at some point, or leave the door open for other developers to do it. I'm not trying to own the market for nice editors for WordPress, I just want to open the market. And along the way I'm going to do a bunch of marketing for WordPress that it really needs. I hope Matt and company appreciate this. WordPress needs, imho, a kind of love and support that honestly it hasn't been getting.
I love the interactive illustrations in this article filled with type and architecture nerdery!
Brian’s excellent comparison of network latency and the nervous system of animals:
If an earthquake occurs in California USA, halfway around the globe someone can find out faster than a blue whale detects something has touched its tail.
I should do this more often, spelunking around an old server that's just sitting there. I was wondering why my posts to my linkblog feed were going to Mastodon, since I only post them to Bluesky in my new software. I just found out. I have an app running on this server called FeedToMasto, which apparently is watching that feed. It's been chugging away like an abandoned science fiction robot, seeing if I posted anything to my linkblog, and forwarding it to Mastodon if I have. Hello my robot friend, you were forgotten but still appreciated. It's open source, of course, and appears to be well-documented. If you're looking for example code that reads feeds and pushed the result to interesting places, this is for you.
I was poking around on an old server, and found a domain that looked interesting, and it was. The first version of Daytona, built around an outliner. I got the impression people didn't like it, so I developed a new one using a more conventional approach, and I love that one too, and I did a better job the second time. But it's interesting to poke around the old one as well, and it still works, which is great to see. In an alternate universe in the year 2025 the whole human species is organized by one big outline that everyone contributes to in peace, love and harmony, as opposed to this one which grunts and snorts on Twitter and can't even put a freaking title on their posts.
ArtLung
• Joe Crawford
Crystal Pier is back open. Many folks fishing. Had to avoid fishing lines. Overcast. Still mulling my next moves. I created an art page ahead of the WOCA event this past weekend. And today a short interview/questionnaire with me went live. Over/Under #27 with Joe Crawford which features me opining on CSS, Surfing, Robots, Curl,...
Monday session
NYT’s Ben Mullin posting on Bluesky: WaPo opinion section will “communicate with optimism about this country”.
When newspapers turned on Joe Biden last year, I realized opinion sections are antiquated. We have the whole web for opinions. Newspapers have lopsided reach and should stick to the news.
Chris Aldrich
• Chris Aldrich
When we launched Micro.blog, we got pushback on the lack of likes and reposts and follower lists and trends and global firehouse. Now eight years later I’m confident our approach is an important niche on the social web.
We absolutely do lose customers who drift away because of lack of engagement. So be it. If you want the dopamine hit of notifications and a more active timeline, pulling you back in, there are other platforms like… well, literally all of the other ones!
