Reply to Weekend Reading – Rediscovering Blogging Edition by Lee Skallerup Bessette

Replied to Weekend Reading – Rediscovering Blogging Edition by Lee Skallerup BessetteLee Skallerup Bessette (ProfHacker - The Chronicle of Higher Education)
Blogs are back! At least, they seem to be making a resurgence as we try to disentangle ourselves from the predatory social media platforms that took all the words many of us used to write on blogs. I’ll admit, I started my own tinyletter in part because I wanted to find an audience again that was a little more personal that what gets lost in the algorithmic facebook feed and the firehose that is Twitter. My blog (which is my domain) is kind of an experiment in long-form writing now. I’m working at another Domains school, so we are thinking about how students are using their domains, owning their own data, and writing publicly.
Lee (t), thanks for the mention in Profhacker. I’ve only just seen it thanks to an old Web ~0.4 technology called Refback. You’ve done a great job of calling out the recent blogging renaissance, some of which is being powered by the Domain of One’s Own and the IndieWeb movements.

There are a bunch of us who are happy to help out anyone who’d like to jump in with both feet.

👓 Twitter to remove ‘like’ tool in a bid to improve the quality of debate | Telegraph

Read Twitter to remove 'like' tool in a bid to improve the quality of debate (The Telegraph)
Twitter is planning to remove the ability to "like" tweets in a radical move that aims to improve the quality of debate on the social network.

🔖 Read.as

Bookmarked Read.as by Matt BaerMatt Baer (Read.as)
Long-form reader built on open protocols.
This is a cool looking reader project that’s got some ActivityPub. Would be cool to see integrated microformats h-feeds or even some mixing with Microsub to help bridge the Fediverse and IndieWeb efforts. His write.as project is fantastic looking too.

Reply to Ben Werdmuller on social media resharing

Replied to a tweet by Ben WerdmullerBen Werdmuller (Twitter)
“The single change social networks could make that would have the most positive impact is to remove all kinds of resharing. Force people to speak in their own voices or not at all. Using other peoples' language to express yourself forces you to evaluate the world on their terms.”
I’ve been awaiting the percolation of your prior thoughts. For additional reference Manton Reece may have some thoughts as this lack of repost functionality is relatively central to how micro.blog works.

Deplatforming and making the web a better place

I’ve spent some time this morning thinking about the deplatforming of the abhorrent social media site Gab.ai by Google, Apple, Stripe, PayPal, and Medium following the Tree of Life shooting in Pennsylvania. I’ve created a deplatforming page on the IndieWeb wiki with some initial background and history. I’ve also gone back and tagged (with “deplatforming”) a few articles I’ve read or podcasts I’ve listened to recently that may have some interesting bearing on the topic.

The particular design question I’m personally looking at is roughly:

How can we reshape the web and social media in a way that allows individuals and organizations a platform for their own free speech and communication without accelerating or amplifying the voices of the abhorrent fringes of people espousing broadly anti-social values like virulent discrimination, racism, fascism, etc.?

In some sense, the advertising driven social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, et al. have given the masses the equivalent of not simply a louder voice within their communities, but potential megaphones to audiences previously far, far beyond their reach. When monetized against the tremendous value of billions of clicks, there is almost no reason for these corporate giants to filter or moderate socially abhorrent content.  Their unfiltered and unregulated algorithms compound the issue from a societal perspective. I look at it in some sense as the equivalent of the advent of machine guns and ultimately nuclear weapons in 20th century warfare and their extreme effects on modern society.

The flip side of the coin is also potentially to allow users the ability to better control and/or filter out what they’re presented on platforms and thus consuming, so solutions can relate to both the output as well as the input stages.

Comments and additions to the page (or even here below) particularly with respect to positive framing and potential solutions on how to best approach this design hurdle for human communication are more than welcome.


Deplatforming

Deplatforming or no platform is a form of banning in which a person or organization is denied the use of a platform (physical or increasingly virtual) on which to speak.

In addition to the banning of those with socially unacceptable viewpoints, there has been a long history of marginalized voices (particularly trans, LGBTQ, sex workers, etc.) being deplatformed in systematic ways.

The banning can be from any of a variety of spaces ranging from physical meeting spaces or lectures, journalistic coverage in newspapers or television to domain name registration, web hosting, and even from specific social media platforms like Facebookor Twitter. Some have used these terms as narrowly as in relation to having their Twitter “verified” status removed.

“We need to puncture this myth that [deplatforming]’s only affecting far-right people. Trans rights activistsBlack Lives Matterorganizers, LGBTQI people have been demonetized or deranked. The reason we’re talking about far-right people is that they have coverage on Fox News and representatives in Congress holding hearings. They already have political power.” — Deplatforming Works: Alex Jones says getting banned by YouTube and Facebook will only make him stronger. The research says that’s not true. in Motherboard 2018-08-10

Examples

Glenn Beck

Glenn Beck parted ways with Fox News in what some consider to have been a network deplatforming. He ultimately moved to his own platform consisting of his own website.

Reddit Communities

Reddit has previously banned several communities on its platform. Many of the individual users decamped to Voat, which like Gab could potentially face its own subsequent deplatforming.

Milo Yiannopoulos

Milo Yiannopoulos, the former Breitbart personality, was permanently banned from Twitter in 2016 for inciting targeted harassment campaigns against actress Leslie Jones. He resigned from Breitbart over comments he made about pedophilia on a podcast. These also resulted in the termination of a book deal with Simon & Schuster as well as the cancellation of multiple speaking engagements at Universities.

The Daily Stormer

Neo-Nazi site The Daily Stormer was deplatformed by Cloudflare in the wake of 2017’s “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville. Following criticism, Matthew Prince, Cloudflare CEO, announced that he was ending the Daily Stormer’s relationship with Cloudflare, which provides services for protecting sites against distributed denial-of service (DDoS) attacks and maintaining their stability.

Alex Jones/Infowars

Alex Jones and his Infowars were deplatformed by Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and Facebook in late summer 2018 for his Network’s false claims about the Newtown shooting.

Gab

Gab.ai was deplatformed from PayPal, Stripe, Medium , Apple, and Google as a result of their providing a platform for alt-right and racist groups as well as the shooter in the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting in October 2018

Gab.com is under attack. We have been systematically no-platformed by App Stores, multiple hosting providers, and several payment processors. We have been smeared by the mainstream media for defending free expression and individual liberty for all people and for working with law enforcement to ensure that justice is served for the horrible atrocity committed in Pittsburgh. Gab will continue to fight for the fundamental human right to speak freely. As we transition to a new hosting provider Gab will be inaccessible for a period of time. We are working around the clock to get Gab.com back online. Thank you and remember to speak freely.

—from the Gab.ai homepage on 2018-10-29

History

Articles

Research

See Also

  • web hosting
  • why
  • shadow banning
  • NIPSA
  • demonitazition – a practice (particularly leveled at YouTube) of preventing users and voices from monetizing their channels. This can have a chilling effect on people who rely on traffic for income to support their work (see also 1)

🎧 My Url Is aaronparecki.com (Episode 1)

Listened to My Url Is aaronparecki.com (Episode 1) by My Url IsMy Url Is from myurlis.com

In this episode Eddie interviews Aaron Parecki, one of the co-founders of the IndieWeb. We talk about how the IndieWeb got started, what makes an IndieWebCamp particularly memorable and how he decides if a new feature should be a public service or part of his website.

A fitting interview subject for episode 1. A great, but short conversation. I love the opening line of what I suspect each episode will have and how Eddie is doing individual album artwork for each episode. Very solid!

Following My Url Is

Followed My Url Is (myurlis.com)

My Url Is features a new guest every two weeks to talk about how they got involved with the IndieWeb and what hopes, goals and aspirations they have for the community and for their website. The guests are a combination of those both new to the IndieWeb and those who have helped build it from the beginning.

An awesome new podcast by Eddie Hinkle with an IndieWeb flavor!

👓 Version 2.0 of the Micropub Plugin Released | David Shanske

Replied to Version 2.0 of the Micropub Plugin Released by David ShanskeDavid Shanske (David Shanske)
At the Indieweb Summit in June, someone said something to me that made me decide to embark on a major rewrite of the Micropub endpoint for WordPress. For those of you not familiar with it, Micropub is a standard that allows for you to publish to a website. The major work on this actually finished in...
Hooray! And Congratulations!

Reply to Greg McVerry about DoOO paper

Replied to a post by Greg McVerryGreg McVerry (Quick Thoughts)
@chrisaldrich @jackjamieson and I are writing a case study analysis on #IndieWeb and #DoOO using GitHub markdown. It is a chapter for @shsabrams is editing. GitHub is a decent collaborative research space.
For a few minutes, I thought I was being drafted in as an author, in which case I’ll need some additional background information. I did find the repo.

Then I thought it might be a status update where it might be more apropos to replace the word “writing” with “living”.

But perhaps it was a simple @mention to notify me of an awesome little project?

In any case, I’m in, just let me know how much you need, when, and where!

🙂

Checked into SupplyFrame DesignLab
Giving a short 15 minute talk on some basic IndieWeb ideas, particularly with an eye toward science communication, to a great turnout of students at the Space Apps Challenge 2018 Kickoff event as part of Connect Pasadena.

For those interested, I’m giving a more advanced version of this talk at the upcoming WordCamp Riverside on November 3rd.

❤️ staeiou tweet: GitHub pages template supporting CV-style content for academics

Liked a tweet by Stuart GeigerStuart Geiger (Twitter)
More academics should definitely try this out! For those who might need help or support, check in with the community via chat or find resources at https://indieweb.org/Indieweb_for_Education
#academicsamizdat

👓 Friction-Free Racism by Chris Gilliard | Real Life

Read Friction-Free Racism by Chris Gilliard (Real Life)
Surveillance capitalism turns a profit by making people more comfortable with discrimination

Facebook’s use of “ethnic affinity” as a proxy for race is a prime example. The platform’s interface does not offer users a way to self-identify according to race, but advertisers can nonetheless target people based on Facebook’s ascription of an “affinity” along racial lines. In other words. race is deployed as an externally assigned category for purposes of commercial exploitation and social control, not part of self-generated identity for reasons of personal expression. The ability to define one’s self and tell one’s own stories is central to being human and how one relates to others; platforms’ ascribing identity through data undermines both.  

October 15, 2018 at 09:34PM

📅 RSVP to Space Apps Challenge 2018 Kickoff

RSVPed Attending Space Apps Challenge 2018 Kickoff
Hello makers, designers and enthusiasts! Welcome to NASA Space Apps Hackathon 2018 Pasadena, a three day event with presentations by industry professionals and 48 hours of hacking! Everyone is welcome to join and a background in coding or computers is not necessary. We will open the event on Friday with speakers from JPL, The Planetary Soceity, and Space Decentral. Saturday the hacking will begin and teams will tackle an array of challenges which are designed by NASA. Two teams from this portion will be selected by our judges to go on to the national round. Space Apps takes place in over 69 countries and is the largest hackathon in the world. Last year we had 28,000 participants and in 2016 the global winner came out of the Pasadena event.
I’ve been asked to give a 15 minute talk at this event on Friday evening.

👓 Some IndieWeb WordPress tuning | EdTech Factotum

Replied to Some IndieWeb WordPress tuning by Clint LalondeClint Lalonde (EdTech Factotum)
Been spending a bit of time in the past 2 days adding some new functionality to the blog. I am making more of an effort to write more, thanks in no small part to the 9x9x25 blog challenge I am doin…

Right now, I just want to write.  

You might find that the micropub plugin is a worthwhile piece for this. It will give your site an endpoint you can use to post to your site with a variety of third party applications including Quill or Micropublish.net.
October 14, 2018 at 01:01AM

My hope is that it will somehow bring comments on Facebook back to the blog and display them as comments here.  

Sadly, Aaron Davis is right that Facebook turned off their API access for this on August 1st, so there currently aren’t any services, including Brid.gy, anywhere that allow this. Even WordPress and JetPack got cut off from posting from WordPress to Facebook, much less the larger challenge of pulling responses back.
October 14, 2018 at 01:03AM

Grant Potter  

Seeing the commentary from Greg McVerry and Aaron Davis, it’s probably worthwhile to point you to the IndieWeb for Education wiki page which has some useful resources, pointers, and references. As you have time, feel free to add yourself to the list along with any brainstorming ideas you might have for using some of this technology within your work realm. Many hands make light work. Welcome to the new revolution!
October 14, 2018 at 01:08AM

the autoposts from Twitter to Facebook were  

a hanging thought? I feel like I do this on my site all too often…
October 14, 2018 at 01:09AM

I am giving this one a go as it seems to be the most widely used.  

It is widely used, and I had it for a while myself. I will note that the developer said he was going to deprecate it in favor of some work he’d been doing with another Mastodon/WordPress developer though.
October 14, 2018 at 01:19AM