People and blogs involved with and about the IndieWeb community, the fediverse, and/or the open web in general.
Meta’s Ray-Ban Display glasses really are impressive. I’m not going to support Meta with a purchase, but I do appreciate the work that went into them. Nice live demos too, even if a couple failed. Ben Thompson:
They are an excellent explanation as to why Apple now fully pre-records their product announcements, but it’s the risk of demo fails happening that makes them so compelling.
Me and Julio down by Shaka when the walls fell.
Matt Mullenweg
• Matt
I’m at a dinner tonight and they have these old magazines on the table, including some old copies of WIRED, which, if you can imagine, as a kid in Houston in the 90s, was a portal to the amazing world of the internet and technology. I flipped through, and there is an entire web hosting … Continue reading Every 6 Minutes →
ArtLung
• Joe Crawford
Listening to This Week in Startups interviewing Medium’s Tony Stubblebine. He makes the wild claim that ChatGPT’s obsession with the em dash is because it’s so commonly used in Medium posts! I’m having trouble accepting this theory, but it would be amazing if true.
Wednesday session
I've heard some reports of people having trouble using WordLand. I was just able to do a test post, and I can see from the logs that other people are successfully posting. It would be helpful if people with accounts could do a short test post. And if you have something to report, here's a good place to do it.
A bunch of new people are trying out FeedLand news products. I haven't looked at them in a long time. I'm glad they're looking, but most of my demo news products were broken. Oy. It was hard to untangle. It should be a lot easier, and next time I can dig in and do it over I think it will be. Anyway as I convert my demos, I'll list them here: mblriver.com, politics.newsriver.org, bloggers.scripting.com, dave.podcatch.com.
ArtLung
• Joe Crawford
I will mourn those who I feel grief over. You can’t demand I mourn. You may request basic respect for the dead. You can’t demand I respect a legacy I find invidious. You can’t demand I ignore the words of the dead. If you can demand my feelings and thoughts be “correct,” you are authoritarian.
Love this story and illustrations on animator James Baker’s blog, from a trip to China in the late 1980s.
In a piece I wrote yesterday on my WordPress blog, I offered to do a virtual handshake with the people who worked at Netscape when it disappeared just as RSS 0.9.1 was being adopted by the blogosphere in 1999. I never considered their point of view, but in fairness, they never would talk to us except to dictate and dominate. In the piece I try to explain how it all looked from my point of view, that of a developer who had adopted RSS in favor of my own earlier format. Most of the stories miss the real innovator here, and when you find out who it is you will be surprised. (It's not me, most of my job re RSS has been fairly thankless and not creative. I wish other people would share the load. And definitely not profitable, but still worth doing because the web is the only place independent developers can work without the interference of big tech companies.)
Matt Mullenweg
• Matt
I’m on my first United flight with Starlink, and wow! I ran a fast.com test and got 110 mbps down and 38 mbps up, which is insane. 28ms ping times. While flying! When you think of all of the engineering and technology coming together to let me blog this it’s really incredible.
Says something about Vimeo’s decline that I heard about them being acquired not from the tech news websites that I read all the time, but from Cartoon Brew in my RSS reader:
Vimeo, once the internet’s most prestigious stage for independent filmmakers and animators, is being acquired by Milan-based app developer Bending Spoons in a $1.38 billion all-cash deal.
There is a narrow space for an indie-focused, YouTube alternative. Hosting video is difficult.
It's really simpler than really simple.
