People and blogs involved with and about the IndieWeb community, the fediverse, and/or the open web in general.
Dave Winer blogging about silos and the opportunity for AI:
We’ve created a predictably bad system now, predictable because we always create silos when we give big money a chance to call all the shots. We don’t get chances to rewrite the rules very often, but this is one of those times. Last one was in the early 1990s with the advent of the web. My plan is to give all the new power back to the web.
Imagine if someone cracked the speed of light. Now we could visit far off galaxies on vacation. Do you think we'd build it or argue about whether we should? Heh I know the human species, we don't do that kind of thinking we just go.
Manuel Moreale — Everything Feed
• Manuel Moreale
21 down, 23 more to go
Great blog post by Nikita Prokopov about imperfection in the in-between state of animated transitions. The most polished apps usually sweat these little details. Hard to do, and my own apps often fall short here.
A tale of two browsers
The giftarticles feed is now a simple RSS 2.0 feed. It's not pretty, that would require some work with Masotdon, but it does work.
The thing about tech, you have to start out small and simple, and carefully add features based on actual real-world-now use cases. Otherwise you end up missing the target, and have to go back and patch it, and it never gets simple. The only way to have a chance is if you start small, learn, and evolve carefully.
Clouds; colour
Sarah Canary by Karen Joy Fowler
Sarah Canary is an odd book, in the best possible way.
On the one hand, it’s a relatively straightforward narrative. An adventure story set in the Pacific northwest in the late 19th century. The viewpoint shifts from character to character, with one exception. The inscrutable title character is a living macguffin that everyone and everything else revolves around.
That all seems straightforward enough, but if you squint at the story just right maybe it’s a story from a very different genre altogether.
So you can enjoy it on both levels; a well-told series of historical adventures, and a clever subversion of genre expectations. Whichever way you take it, there’s a running thread throughout the book exploring racism, sexism, and colonialism.
Quite the debut novel!
Anthropic is disabling Fable and Mythos at the request of the US government. I don’t think this is “our model is so good you can’t have it” marketing, because Anthropic seems annoyed. They blog that there is confusion about the capability even compared to other models:
We have reviewed a report that we believe is the basis of the government’s directive and validated that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models (including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5), and is used every day by the defenders who keep systems safe.
Chris Aldrich
• Chris Aldrich
Chris Aldrich
• Chris Aldrich
Gift articles via Mastodon
There's an account on Mastodon containing a flow of gift articles.
Because Mastodon supports outbound RSS, you can subscribe to it in any RSS reader.
But the RSS is not very good. Have a look.
So I built a little app in my new scripting language, with the help of Claude, and boom now I can read the output of the mangled feed.
I don't know what is responsible, probably has something to do with the account, and something to do with how Mastodon. But the information is being communicated.
https://giftarticles.feedland.org/
This is not finished, it needs some css and the normal structure of an HTML page. We will come back to it.
This Week in the IndieWeb
Casey Liss blogs about how AI can feel like a coworker:
I was struck; I was feeling something that was familiar, but distant. I felt like I had just worked together with a coworker to solve a technical problem. It felt like I was part of a team again.
I reworked our robots.txt parsing to be much better. In the process, I looked at a bunch of website’s robots.txt files… Blah. No wonder the Internet Archive gave up and now ignores it.
The definition of a “crawler” is increasingly debatable. A search engine? Yes. Bookmarking and archiving? Dunno.
Learned about the new gallery embed lexicon for Bluesky and updated Micro.blog to support it, for up to 10 photos per post. It’s working well. Good to see AT Protocol continue to improve. 👍


