There’s an SNL UK now! Funny so far. The cold open and a few of the other skits are on YouTube.
People and blogs involved with and about the IndieWeb community, the fediverse, and/or the open web in general.
Matt Mullenweg
• Matt
Miriam’s Sweet Site
Long-time WordPresser Miriam Schwab just rebuilt her WordPress site with Claude Code and it looks amazing. Go check it out, this is what is possible now with proper prompting. I’d love to see a WordCamp keynote from Miriam on her process in this. (And she’s doing this while missiles are flying overhead. Wow.)
Catching up on this news from Bluesky:
Hubble is a new open-source project to build and operate a whole-Atmosphere public data mirror, synchronizing every atproto repository in real-time, keeping public data available even when a PDS goes down.
Great project. It’s not like the Internet Archive (no history) but more a current mirror for PDSes that might be increasingly hosted outside of Bluesky, and so without the infrastructure for backups, etc. One of Bluesky’s strengths is data portability and this leans into that.
Apple’s Mac app notarization is throwing errors for me today, maybe networking problems, so I guess it’s time to take a break from work.
A bit of history. Read this post from 20 years ago by Phil Jones. That's what I was trying to do back then, just as Twitter came online. I didn't know it then but was the moment when the web stopped growing. When the VCs took over, and monetized the hell out of it. What we got in the end was Trump and Musk. We would have been smart, as a civilization, to hedge against the monopolies. If we get another chance what are we going to do with it? Will we work together this time? It's worth one more shot. My comments on the Jones piece in 2006 and 2026.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
Histomat of F/OSS: We should reclaim LLMs, not reject them
"The materialist response isn't to reject the new technology. It's to evolve our licenses to encompass it."
Loops adds starter kits. I’ve been poking around the Loops API to see if I should support this in the way we support Bluesky starter packs. Probably will wait to see what Mastodon does.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
Ageless Linux
"Software for humans of indeterminate age. We don't know how old you are. We don't want to know. We are legally required to ask. We won't." Open source activism at its finest.
Trying to be better about cleaning up unused Git branches in a new project, before they get out of control. Micro.blog has hundreds of stale branches because I haven’t taken the time to sort out if there are a few I might want to keep, just in case.
Chris Aldrich
• Chris Aldrich
Typewriter Plates for Collectors?
NetNewsWire via AppleScript via MCP… I wonder what the future of scriptability is. We’ve got AppleScript, Shortcuts, App Intents, and MCP. But meanwhile you have agents which are fine just firing up command-line tools.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
AI is changing the style and substance of human writing, study finds
"Teams from Google and leading universities found that large-language models change the voice, tone and intended meaning of human authors."
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
Democratic Backsliding Reaches Western Democracies, with U.S. Decline “Unprecedented”
"Democratic backsliding is now happening in well-established democracies. Democracy in the USA is deteriorating at unprecedented speed, and media and journalists are increasingly targeted across the world."
BTW one big advantage Claude has over ChatGPT is the brevity of its name. One syllable vs four.
Finished reading: To Shape a Dragon’s Breath by Moniquill Blackgoose. Starts with a girl discovering a dragon egg, but really a story about indigenous people, race, class, and colonialism. 📚
River
We are pretty much done clearing out my mom’s house. I’ve found many little memories, keepsakes, books, and other things. One surprise was this letter my mom wrote from Greece in 1980. Preserving it here on my blog as a snapshot in time.
AI sign of brilliance
Another HWC Düsseldorf has taken place this week, where we shared what we’ve been...
Another HWC Düsseldorf has taken place this week, where we shared what we’ve been up to with our personal sites. Nina continued to write more and more for her homepage as well as work on the code. She started adding music to her blog posts. Jochen continues to make selfhosted tools and recently added a (private) “Archive” site where he adds podcasts episodes to, and transcribes the audio into text. I recently added the latest Polaroid to my homepage. We also talked about Kagi’s ...
