Read | Chris Aldrich

👓 It’s time to say goodbye to Twitter | sonniesedge

Replied to It's time to say goodbye to Twitter by

sonniesedge (sonniesedge.co.uk)

When I first got on Twitter it was like usenet in the 90s. Just a bunch of people talking shit about things that they enjoyed. It was small enough that everyone seemed to know each other, but large enough that there were still interesting nerdy people to find and get to know and enjoy the company of. The perfect little club.

But at some point it went horribly wrong.

I hope that as you wean yourself away from Twitter that you regain the ability to do longer posts–I quite like your writing style. This is certainly as well-put a statement about why one should leave Twitter as one could imagine.

I remember those old days and miss the feel it used to have as well. The regrowing blogosphere around the IndieWeb and Micro.blog are the closest thing I’ve seen to that original feel since ADN or smaller networks like 10 Centuries and pnut. I enjoy finding that as I wean myself away from Twitter, I do quite like going back to some of the peace and tranquility of reading and thinking my way through longer posts (and replies as well). Sometimes I wonder if it doesn’t take more than ten minutes of thought and work, it’s probably not worth putting on the internet at all, and even then it’s probably questionable… I’m half tempted to register the domain squirrels.social and spin up a Mastodon instance–fortunately it would take less than the ten minute time limit and there are enough animal related social silos out there already.

As an aside, I love the way you’ve laid out your webmentions–quite beautiful!

👓 Custom Domains service deprecation | Medium

Read Custom Domains service deprecation (Medium Support)

Medium is no longer offering new custom domains as a feature. Instead, you can create a publication on Medium that will live on a medium.com/publication-name URL. Existing publications on custom do...

The amount of work required to support this feature should be exceedingly low. It’s probably a good indication that Medium won’t be around within a year or so.

This definitely signals the fact that Medium has moved toward the more silo end of the spectrum from a data ownership standpoint. While I might have recommended it with reservations as a potential IndieWeb solution, this change means I can’t recommend it at all.

📖 Read through page 13 of 288 of Linked: The New Science Of Networks by Albert-László Barabási

📖 Read through page 13 of 288 of Linked: The New Science Of Networks by Albert-László Barabási

So far a very facile opening. Somewhat surprised to see a reference to Jesus and Paul here, but interestingly apropos.

Highlights, Quotes, & Marginalia

Introduction

…the high barriers to becoming a Christian had to be abolished. Circumcision and the strict food laws had to be relaxed.

Highlight (yellow) – 1. Introduction > page 4

Naturally, if you make it easier to be a Christian, then it will be easier to create links and grow the network

👓 An open letter | Social.Coop

Read An open letter by Michele Kipiel (loomio.org)

Dear fellow members, the events that unfolded over the past few days have put our cooperative to the test, and we failed miserably. Many voices calling for change were silenced in the past, be it by negligence or by sheer lack of commitment by those, whose position of privilege allowed to disregard such calls. By failing to listen, we became the people MLK warned us about: the white moderates who are more devoted to order than to justice. We wasted precious time and energy in endless debates about trivial details, calling for the creation of ever new committees and processes, and we eventually lost sight of the only true reason our cooperative came to existence: to wrestle control of our social media out of the hands of the rich, white, capitalist elite.

Nice to hear that this Mastodon instance seems to be doing the right thing, but the idea of temporarily shutting down an instance makes me glad I didn’t join and that I have my own personal website instead. It’s nice not to be beholden to outsiders in cases like this or other corporate interests.

👓 My Feedly wishlist | Paul Jacobson

Replied to My Feedly wishlist by Paul Jacobson (Paul Jacobson)

Richard MacManus wrote about the state of feed readers as he saw it in his AltPlatform.org post titled “The state of feed readers”. He mentioned a couple things in his Feedly wishlist that prompted me to think more about what I’d like to see added to Feedly.

Feedly and custom sharing

Apparently there were a bunch of us thinking and writing about feed readers and the open web a year ago last June. Several week’s prior to Richard’s article, I’d written a piece for Richard’s now defunct AltPlatform entitled Feed reader revolution (now archived on my site), which laid out some pieces similar to Paul’s take here, though it tied in some more of what was then the state of the art in IndieWeb tech.

Around that time I began tinkering with other feed readers including Inoreader, which I’ve been using for it’s ability to auto-update my RSS feeds using OPML subscriptions from the OPML files I maintain on my own website. Currently I’m more interested in what the Microsub specification is starting to surface in the feed reader space.

I’m not sure if he’s played around with it since, but, like Paul, I was using some of the Press This bookmarklet functionality in conjunction with David Shanske’s Post Kinds plugin for WordPress to make posting snippets of things to my website easier.

Feedly has a Pro (aka paid) functionality to allow one to share content using custom URLs.

Screenshot of the custom share functionality set up from within Feedly.com.

While one can use the Share to WordPress URL functionality, I’d recommend the Custom Sharing feature. Using the Post Kinds plugin, one can use the following example URL to quickly share things from their Feedly account to their personal website:

https://example.com/wp-admin/post-new.php?kindurl=URL&kind=bookmark

One should change the URL to reflect their own site, and one can also change the word “bookmark” to the appropriate desired kind including “like”, “favorite”, “read”, or any of the others they may have enabled within the Post Kinds plugin.

I personally don’t use this method as it only allows one custom sharing URL (and thus allows only one post kind), and instead (again) prefer Inoreader which allows one to configure custom sharing similarly to Feedly, but doesn’t limit the number of kinds and the feature is available in their free tier as well.

In addition to some of what I’ve written about the Post Kinds plugin before, I’ve also detailed how to dovetail it with sharing from my Android phone quickly in the past.

Highlights and Annotations

Also like Paul, I was greatly interested in quickly creating highlights and annotations on web content and posting them to my own website. Here I’m using a modified version of the Post Kinds plugin to accomplish this having created highlight posts and annotation posts for my site. Next I’m utilizing the ability to prepend http://via.hypothes.is to URLs on my mobile phone to call up the ability to use my Hypothesis account to easily and quickly create highlights and annotations. I then use some details from the outline linked below to capture that data via RSS using IFTTT.com.

Naturally, the process could be streamlined a lot from a UI perspective, but I think it provides some fairly nice results without a huge amount of work.

An Outline for Using Hypothesis for Owning your Annotations and Highlights

I will mention that I’ve seen bugs in trying to annotate easily on Chrome’s mobile application, but haven’t had any issues in using Firefox’s mobile browser.