Inspired by Brad Enslen’s ‘exit page’ concept, I’ve added a ‘the end’ post to this blog. (I also have to say that many of my upcoming changes are inspired by h0p3’s wiki—moving away from just a blog of recent posts, to a kind of modern home page with updates and Indieweb intertwingliness.) ‘The end’ can be seen right now on /page3, if you scroll to the very bottom. Small, needless things—lovely.
Reads
👓 Can We Ever Reset the Field? | Smokey Ardisson
The rise of the massive corporate-run social networks—silos, where everything was stored inside and nothing left—changed distributed online social relationships. The silos replaced distributed with centralized; all of your social connections were now in one place, making it faster and “easier” to keep up with everyone. Easier in some ways, yes, but now everyone could see every aspect of you, even if you didn’t want them to. Worse, your constant software talk annoyed your bowling-league friends, and your one uncle could not stand the fact you supported the Democratic Party. All of that didn’t happen at once; it took time for these corporate social networks to consume all of your communities, to seize ownership of all of your connections and relationships, transforming something very human into mere pieces of computer data, eventually hollowing out your communities and your humanness in the process. But once it had happened, and once you realized those downsides (and others, such as abuse, Nazis, and anti-democratic propaganda), how could you escape? Was there even anywhere to escape to?
Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia
Just like in real life, where your bar trivia team doesn’t really overlap with your work softball team or your church bowling league, all of your online communities gathered in their own places, ones best suited to them, and you didn’t have to act as all facets of yourself simultaneously when trying to only interact with one. ❧
August 21, 2018 at 01:19PM
our brains have been trained to believe that we want, that we need, a single place where all of “our people” can gather, where it is “easy” to keep up with all of them: a massive network service, just without all the “bad stuff” of the existing ones. ❧
August 21, 2018 at 01:21PM
You find them in a place that you curate yourself, not one “curated” for you by a massive corporate social network intent on forcing you to be every part of yourself to everyone, all at once. You should control how, when, and where to interact with your people. ❧
August 21, 2018 at 01:23PM
web we lost ❧
https://indieweb.org/lost_infrastructure
August 21, 2018 at 01:24PM
we can’t just recreate the same thing we’re trying to escape, and we can’t expect the solution to be precisely as easy on us as the problem was. ❧
August 21, 2018 at 01:25PM
👓 I am completely baffled why some people seem to be choosing Mastodon over Micro.blog | Bruce Godin
It is completely baffling to me that a lot of people seem to be choosing Mastodon over Micro.blog as an alternative to Twitter lately. At least among tech geeks on Twitter anyway. I admittedly do not know a lot about Mastodon but it seems confusing AF to set up by all accounts and may be just yet an...
We should consider: How would Marshall McLuhan pitch it?
👓 Diversity on Micro.Blog | Kicks Condor
One question I wonder: while I think the self-made entrepreneur has got to be synonymous with imperialist America—couldn’t the independent autodidact, operating apart from corporate interests, be a modern type of vanguard for the dispossessed? I feel like the Instagram influencer is more a direct descendant of The American Dream; the bespoke blog a piece of the underground press—particularly in 2018, when they have become ancient machinery.
👓 Getting started | Blogmesh
Blogmesh is in the early stages of development, but we do have a version that sort-of works and can be used for demos and testing. Feeling adventurous? Comfortable with setting up WordPress and installing plugins? Here’s what you’ll need
👓 A quick introduction to Blogmesh | Blogmesh
Blogmesh aims to make blogging more social, and in doing so create an alternative for existing social networks. The main idea is to connect existing blogs in a way that resembles other social networks, like Twitter. Simply follow your friends and see a timeline of their updates.
Because blogs are usually self-hosted, this means Blogmesh has the potential to become a decentralized network that belongs to its users, and where every user owns their own content.
Blogmesh uses existing, well-established standards like RSS. This means that many existing sites are already Blogmesh-ready.
Hi @simonw remember blogmesh? my friend @roytanck behind blogmesh made this https://t.co/wMPe5tQpVC to show how to re-blog. This proof-of-concept uses WordPress. It’s super easy to re-create the social aspects of walled garden social media with RSS & #WordPress #Openweb #indieweb
— Bjorn W (@Bjorn_W) August 21, 2018
Blogmesh looks like an intriguing concept, and on its face it sounds like it’s in a tangential space to Alex Kirk‘s Friends plugin, which allows private connections to friends via WordPress, or even to PressForward, which is a very full featured RSS plugin for WordPress. It almost sounds like a version of Jack Jamieson‘s original Yarns reader which integrates a feed reader with micropub capabilities into one’s WordPress site, but perhaps may not be as powerful as Jamieson’s pending rewrite of Yarns as a Microsub server.
Clicking a post from a friend will take you to their blog, where you can read the full post and leave comments.
While this may be an interesting concept, it isn’t adding much to the broader IndieWeb stack of technologies which are already in place for WordPress. I don’t imagine greater power with this compared to the Micropub spec which might allow me to write a reply within the reader portion of the plugin, publish it to my website and then send a Webmention to the other site the way the coming wave of Microsub servers and reader interfaces will allow. 1
While Blogmesh seems like a relatively solid solution and may fix a few UI issues for some, it doesn’t seem like as robust or decentralized a solution as Microsub, which I think has more promise and which almost any website (WordPress or otherwise) could support. This being said, I also suspect that Roy likely has a much broader vision for the plugin’s functionality that hasn’t yet been stated. It always impresses me the ingenuity and work that people are putting in to fix the problems that exist with current social media and this case is certainly squarely in that category.
I will say that it appears that Roy’s user interface is very solid–I wish there were more WordPress IndieWeb contributors with these kinds of design chops.
The repost functionality which Bjorn W highlights is very cool looking and quite intuitive. It has a simple, but intuitive user interface. However, it isn’t very different from David Shanske‘s solution for reposting content to one’s website using the Post Kinds Plugin. In this case, Post Kinds is even more powerful because it also includes a lot more social post types and can also be easily dovetailed with Webmention and Micropub for broader decentralized social interaction.
I’ve bookmarked the Github repository for Blogmesh and look forward to seeing what develops. I’ve also helped to stub some of Blogmesh on the IndieWeb wiki. I’d love to hear what others think of it if they try it out. I’m blocking some time for the weekend to add it to a WordPress instance I’ve already spun up to test it out.
References
👓 Keep Track of Your Conversations in One Place | WordPress
You can now stay on top of the discussions you care about, right from your Reader.
👓 Trump’s Strange Tweet About Joseph McCarthy | Politico
People who have actually studied the disgraced Wisconsin senator describe a man who bears similarities to some of the president’s most notable attributes.
Sadly, we’re all being doomed to repeat history here.
👓 Amazon Isn’t Paying Its Electric Bills. You Might Be | Bloomberg
The company’s rate discounts have pushed up utility costs for everyone else.
Just as people are woefully inept at mentally handling probability theory in their daily lives, they’re also apparently horrifically terrible at handling marginal costs for things and where the flows of those streams end up. Governments shouldn’t be forced to compete against themselves to benefit the Amazons of the world.
In cases like this, the marginal cost to power consumers gets passed along by state governments which don’t have much if any transparency. The average consumer sees a small rise in their bill over time and doesn’t think too much of it while potentially millions or hundreds of millions are siphoned off of society and are lining the pockets of the already ultra-rich.
I’m reminded of the scheme proposed by Richard Pryor’s character in the movie Superman III or by the group of programmers in Mike Judge’s Office Space. In small bank transactions, just round off fractions of a penny in one way or another to benefit yourself and dump it into a side account. It’s all so small, no one will notice. Except that in aggregate, it is noticeable–eventually. Our representative government shouldn’t be involved in these sorts of transactions, or if they are they should be working in the opposite direction.
It’s one thing if we decide as a government that there should be universal health care and the tax base for it is spread out equally and equitably. And by this I don’t mean allowing loopholes and tax dodges like the recent one mentioned in which Betsy DeVos registers her mega-yacht overseas as a means of dodging not only taxes, but also in paying her crew less, which is yet another form of this type of scheme in which small perks are created for the already privileged.
Another example of this type of issue is the recent Trump tax cuts. The complexity of the system makes it very near to opaque and the long term effects aren’t realized soon enough to catch the cheat. It’s now been long enough since they were enacted that the effect on the overall economy has been generally gauged as minimal and the general populace hasn’t benefited much in comparison to the ultra-rich which have benefitted incredibly handsomely.
I’m curious if there’s a word or phrase that is generally used to describe this sort of system to cheat the broader populace while benefiting a privileged class? If not, I’m going to suggest marginal theft.
👓 PepsiCo to buy SodaStream for $3.2 billion | CNBC
SodaStream will give PepsiCo a new way of reaching customers in their homes.
👓 What Did Ada Lovelace’s Program Actually Do? | Two Bit History
In 1843, Ada Lovelace published the first nontrivial program. How did it work?
👓 #DeactiDay: The growing Twitter movement urging users to delete their accounts over Alex Jones | Mashable
A growing movement urges Twitter users to deactivate their account, at least until Twitter takes action against Alex Jones.
👓 An Open Letter To Derek Powazek On The Value Of SEO | Search Engine Land
Derek Powazek launched an attack on SEO yesterday that really said nothing that others haven’t ranted about before. I’ve responded to many of these attacks over the years in hopes of educating people about mistaken assumptions. I’ve largely given up. But I figured this time I’d give it another go with some personal illustrations I’ve encountered recently.
A similar thing is happening on social media and reach there. By handing your data over to social silos, you may gain a broader audience you don’t or shouldn’t necessarily have (keep in mind a lot of this content is drivel in the grand scheme). Should we allow the silos to create massive audience for drivel just because it drives clicks? Is corporate social siloing creating the world we would otherwise see if SEO black hats could have their way? Put another way, should cat videos have the outsized influence on society that they might not otherwise have without the effect of run away click collecting algorithms? Where is the happy medium?
👓 Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists | powazek.com
Search Engine Optimization is not a legitimate form of marketing. It should not be undertaken by people with brains or souls. If someone charges you money for SEO, they are running a scam.
👓 Maryland’s Goucher College eliminating several majors, including math | Baltimore Sun
Math majors at Goucher College will soon be a thing of the past.