Pan-fried Irish salmon.
People and blogs involved with and about the IndieWeb community, the fediverse, and/or the open web in general.
Pan-fried Irish salmon.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
"The Trump administration is providing the names of all air travelers to immigration officials, substantially expanding its use of data sharing to expel people under deportation orders."
Completed it mate.

I suppose it’s not clear to me what a ‘good’ window into unreliable, systemically toxic systems accomplishes, or how it changes anything that matters for the better, or what that idea even means at all. I don’t understand how “ethical AI” isn’t just “clean coal” or “natural gas.” The power of normalization as four generations are raised breathing low doses of aerosolized neurotoxins; the alternative was called “unleaded”, but the poison was called “regular gas”.
There’s a real technology here, somewhere. Stochastic pattern recognition seems like a powerful tool for solving some problems. But solving a problem starts at the problem, not working backwards from the tools.
Matt Mullenweg
• Matt
The colors here have now gone blue for winter, and snow has started, thanks to the excellent Snow Fall plugin. I also wanted to congratulate Wealthfront on their IPO. Many on their team have been friends or advisors over the years, from David Fortunato responding to my email about their WordPress blog being on an … Continue reading Winter Fun →
Chris Aldrich
• Chris Aldrich
Good post from Creative Commons with concerns about pay-per-crawl efforts, including principles to guide deployment:
Pay-to-crawl represents a strategy that may work for some websites, and not all websites share the same underlying concerns. Pay-to-crawl systems should not be deployed as an automatic or assumed setting on behalf of websites by others, such as domain hosts, content delivery networks, and other web service providers.
Matches some of my thinking about Cloudflare and AI.
Enjoyed the discussion on Hard Fork about the Australia social media ban for kids. In a nutshell: it’s a good experiment that we will actually have data for in several years. No parent says, “I wish my kid was on Instagram and TikTok more often.”
Announcing a special Micro.blog winter photo challenge! @BonnieRue has written a new post with details over on the challenges blog. It starts on Monday and runs 12 days. ❄️
I’m hoping to add a new Micro.blog pin too for anyone who participates.
In the world of WordLand and FeedLand I can create my own API for my own client. No more living with all the things the Twitter and Bluesky API designers left out or made fragile, or straight out broke. If there's a missing endpoint, I have a talk with the service devs (ie me), they listen and understand, and in an hour or so there's a new freaking endpoint. This is how we did it in the early days, I had all three components needed to move publishing forward: Manila, my.userland.com and Scripting News. Well folks we're back in business again. Enough for a rebooted writer's web. As they say, still diggin! :-)
Not sure yet how to read the Epic vs. Apple appeals court decision. Seems like a partial Apple win, but Tim Sweeney says on Twitter / X that it’s actually good progress. I think we’ll know for sure when the district court judge updates her ruling.
A little-known Micro.blog feature is getting better visibility today: we store previous versions of private notes (and blog posts!) so you can restore them if you make an editing mistake or delete something. From @news:
Added note versions browsing to the web interface. When editing a note, you’ll now see a “5 versions” link in the corner. For Premium subscribers, we’re storing previous versions for a full year. (60 days for everyone else.)
The NYT should have started their own Twitter, with exclusive access by people who are quoted in the NYT, so there would have been a connection between the pub, its rep, more inclusive than the masthead, but still fairly exclusive, in the way of the NYT. I'm not being funny or sarcasting, I mean it. They already had a mechanism for deciding who matters. And the software they used could have been employed by all the other pubs, and anyone else. What I'm describing is the alternate reality where the Twitter founders followed the WordPress business model. They might not be worth billions, but they certainly would have far more money than one person can use. And I don't think they could be happier with the way it actually turned out.
The natural follow-up from my last post: people want a place to belong. Friends, a community. So the challenge is building a community that minimizes the more negative effects of tribalism. I’m not sure how to do this, but I can usually spot when things have drifted into unhealthy territory.
Let’s not confuse tribes and principles. Principles allow us to build coalitions with people who don’t agree with us on everything. They keep us on the right path, even when it’s unpopular. With tribes, we are heavily influenced by those around us, sometimes with social pressure to attack others.
Without much of a spoiler, this end of this week's Pluribus made me both emotional and aroused at the same time. People complain because after the first two or three episodes they thought it was going to be an adventure, like Last of Us or Lost, but it turned out to, at least for now, be more thoughtful and emotional, and sexy.
I wonder if the VCs would fund an entirely fictitious implementation of Twitter with AI of course. All the other people can be exactly the kind of people who make you feel good. On "Your Own Twitter," or perhaps "TWTR 4 U" you'd have the most followers of anyone. Elon Musk would kiss your ass. You could change reality at will, have Trump removed from office and watch the MAGAs wail in pain. You could say absolutely whatever you like and never be cancelled. Don't laugh, I bet this happens.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
In the face of government oppression, it's time to encrypt.