Reads

Reading list of books, magazines, newspaper articles, other physical documents, or online posts
Read Installing Ghost on Reclaim Hosting (Reclaim Hosting Community)
Node has been updated and I was able to install the latest version of Ghost (3.0.2).
Perhaps I can leverage a bit of these instructions to get the Node.JS version of TiddlyWiki working on my own domain?
Read Show HN: Fraidycat (fraidyc.at) (Hacker News)
So I built this - and its initial purpose was just to help me keep up on public TiddlyWikis (like philosopher.life) that I had discovered. But I couldn't get myself to rip off other news readers - I've not been satisfied with RSS and I disliked Google Reader. I didn't like that it basically created a second read-only email inbox - where I'm supposed to look through every message. And I didn't like that I lost the formatting and styling of the original hypertext. I much preferred just surfing my favorite sites periodically. As I began to add blogs, Twitter, YouTube support - it felt like I was connecting the whole Web, as if it was all one network, almost as if I viewed it like the government does. (Equipped with my own personal XKeyscore Lite.) I had felt isolated before - unable to see past whatever was being recommended to me on Twitter - but now I had a tool that forced me to rouse my dormant research skills. The task of reading, writing, publishing and hunting on the Web is a formidable one - and we're far from mastering it. It's no wonder that we abdicated to social networks that attempt to do it all for us. So yeah - Fraidycat is a very small attempt to move toward tools that give us some power. It really only adds the ability to assign "importance" to someone you are following - allowing you to track them without needing to be aware of them every second. But hey - it's four months old - I think it's a good start and hopefully others here can be encouraged by it to work on tools for the World-Wide Web again.
Read The master tapes by Robin Sloan (Robin Sloan)
“What do I miss” is the wrong question, because the feeling isn’t an absence, but a presence.

If running your own website is like operating a nuclear reactor, then, yes: let’s give up on that. But what if it’s more like cooking dinner at home? That’s an activity that many people find challenging and/or intimidating, one with all sorts of social and economic ~encumbrances~, but even so, who would argue that it’s inappropriate to hope more people might learn to cook for themselves?
Maybe, after everything, we’ve actually ended up in a healthy place. Maybe the great gluey Katamari ball of technology has served us well. In 2020, you can, using nothing but the free app provided by Instagram, publish something very close to a multimedia magazine. Or, sitting at your laptop, you can produce a lightning-fast website all by yourself, every line of code calibrated just so, and host its files at a domain of your choosing. Or! You can do something in between, using a service like WordPress or Squarespace. This is not a bad range of options! ❧

There’s something between the lines here that feels like it’s closer to what the idea of IndieWeb Generations should really become. Perhaps it’s the case that when even a small handful of larger competitors like micro.blog exist it will force the larger corporate silos to come into line (they’ll lose out on market share and need to offer better service) and be more IndieWeb-like over time?
Annotated on March 21, 2020 at 11:34PM

Whether their scenario is a historical reenactment (albeit with higher-res images) or a seductive counterfactual, I don’t know. Whether it “matters,” I don’t know. I do know that I am enjoying my fraidy-follows, their slow pulse—people really are blogging, doing the dang thing—and the feeling of an old instinct waking up. ❧

Annotated on March 21, 2020 at 11:36PM

Read Freeman Dyson, Math Genius Turned Technological Visionary, Dies at 96 (nytimes.com)
After an early breakthrough on light and matter, he became a writer who challenged climate science and pondered space exploration and nuclear warfare.
How did I miss this when it came out?

Bookmarked on March 21, 2020 at 02:39PM

Read - Reading: Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974 by Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer (W. W. Norton & Company)
When did America become polarized? For leading historians Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer, it all starts in 1974 with the Watergate crisis, the OPEC oil embargo, desegregation busing riots in Boston, and the winding down of the Vietnam War.
I’m 29% done with Fault Lines (page 207/Location 3173)
Discussion of the tail end of Reagan’s presidency, Iran/Contra, and the beginning of the fall of USSR.
Read RSS is not dead you know (nor is Atom) by Sebastiaan AndewegSebastiaan Andeweg (seblog.nl)
Quite a while I wrote about building a social reader[^ Then called IndieWeb reader, but social reader is the better term.], but these days I have to admit it went nowhere. The biggest problem with it being that I myself don’t really use any reader to consume stuff: I was not used to keeping up wit...
I need to do some deep thinking and design layout of the feed reader I’d like to have. Something like a cross between some of the traditional readers like Inoreader and Fraidy.cat which has some of the time-based and social sorting that Ton has suggested in the past.