People and blogs involved with and about the IndieWeb community, the fediverse, and/or the open web in general.
ArtLung
• Joe Crawford
I’ve been reading Doc Searls blogging for decades. He’s a straight shooter and a thoughtful writer. Was. Is. Will be. For however long. Leavings: So I’ll be devoting more of my bloggings to surfacing valuable lessons and stories left in my care by those now gone, and to making clearer what I’m bringing to generations...
If Bluesky and Mastodon were "on the web" they would already interop because friends that's what the freaking web does. They behave like closed off silos, and until that changes, they can't claim to be on the web. Don't sell out the web so cheap. It really means something to be on the web.
I love the domain for MSNOW. Just before it came out, Jeff Jarvis wondered on all the social networks why it wasn't msnow.com. Well, because they found an even better domain.
The news gets everything wrong about the nouns of our political system. They talk about Repubs and Dems, but the real power is with the people. Something that Heather Cox Richardson said so eloquently in this week's podcast with Nicolle Wallace. I know I recommended it yesterday, but please do listen to this and don't forget it. When you're watching MSNOW you're getting the wrong nouns. I think this problem could be solved by moving every show on MSNOW to a different American city. The people on the panels should come to work in Detroit, St Louis, Phonenix, Denver, Charleston, Cleveland, Seattle, places like that. Get out of NY and DC. Really connect yourself to the whole country. That would rock a lot of boats.
I think of Cognitive Debt as ‘where we have the answers, but not the thinking that went into producing those answers’.
Lately, I have started noticing examples of not just where the debt is being accrued, but who then has the responsibility to pick it up and repay it.
Too often, an LLM doesn’t replace the need for thinking in a group setting, but simply creates more work for others.
ArtLung
• Joe Crawford
From a few weeks ago, after the death of VP Dick Cheney. Dick Cheney Departs The World He Made At its heart, American conservatism is a fantasy. It’s a vision of a world too evil to be saved or cared about, and fearsome enough to justify any and every impulse toward cruelty and violence that...
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
A comprehensive look at Mastodon, Bluesky, and the growing ecosystem of open, interoperable social networks.
Highly recommend this week's conversation between Nicolle Wallace and Heather Cox Richardson. The contrast of their points of view is dramatic, the election wasn't a win for the Dems, it was a victory for the people.
Never mind Cloudflare; the electricity has gone out in our street.
It’s actually kinda nice, playing mandolin by candlelight.
New trailer for Project Hail Mary! This is going to be great. I’m going to try to re-read the book before the movie comes out.
Love this blog post from Ton Zijlstra about discovering a train ticket in an old book:
While the book is in excellent condition, not at all ‘well traveled’, it does make me wonder about its path through the world. From that 1991 train trip up the valley towards the St. Gotthard massif, to a bookshop in Galway, Ireland. And now to my bookshelves.
In 1999 when my wife and I were traveling in Europe, I left a book in a hostel in Italy. I wrote a note in it for the next reader. I still wonder where that book ended up.
Good episode of Dithering today, talking about the impending Gemini 3 release and why OpenAI will probably be fine even if their models fall behind the state of the art. It’s increasingly about products, not models, because all the models are quite good now.
A feed that Aaron Swartz put up early in RSS times was a feed of Paul Graham essays. The feed items have no guid or pubDate. The way FeedLand is coded right now for detecting changes, it sees all these items as updating every time we read the feed. Okay we have to make it a little bit smarter.
What I'm doing now is preparing FeedLand to reliably do things we haven't had it do yet, at least not at scale. It has one important feature most other feed management systems don't have, dynamic OPML lists that I keep touting here. I have a product that can both generate them and use them on behalf of users. But it's a lot more fun if there are other products that can do the same. It means we can build networks of feed sharing apps, no kidding -- it's going to do new things for us the same way RSS did new things for us 22 years ago. Now it can be fun when there are more FeedLand instances out there. It'd be more fun if they were products like Overcast or Pocket Casts. Sometimes companies like Apple or Microsoft show up in these little projects, it has happened (Apple supported XML-RPC, for example. Microsoft supported Frontier in MSIE on the Mac.).
