Reads

Reading list of books, magazines, newspaper articles, other physical documents, or online posts
Read Deprecate Facebook by Courtney Rosenthal (crosenthal.com)

At some point, something changed. First, I no longer find social networks to be the uplifting, positive places they once were. In fact, in 2020, they’re pretty distressing places. The bad content, intrusive advertising, and terrible privacy practices are untenable.

That means the numerator of the cost/benefit ratio has been increasing. At the same time, the denominator has started decreasing. I’m not creating new connections on my social networks as I once was. When I do the math it’s clear that the price of my social network activity in 2020 is too damn high.

Therefore, it’s time for me to deprecate Facebook.

In software engineering, deprecation has a very specific meaning. It means a feature is not being discontinued, but it is being discouraged. It signals that the feature can be expected to be removed at some future time. Most importantly, it says there probably is a better way to do it.

I’m hoping that better way is blogging. I know, I know, the blogosphere is pretty moribund these days. However, I’ve become very interested in the Indie Web movement. I hope that it becomes a usable way to have conversations on the web outside of the silos of social media networks.

I love the engineering framework given here. It’s also a great motivation for why one should go IndieWeb.

Read Roadmap (Pine.blog Knowledge Base)
There's so many great features planned for Pine.blog, but I've compiled a list of the big ones here. Features might be released out of order, but I've tried to keep them, roughly, in the order I intend on releasing them. Keep in mind, this list is not static. Features may be added/removed at any time.
Read What you get with Pine.blog (pine.blog)

By signing up for Pine.blog you'll have access to a new kind of social network. Pine.blog combines a blogging app with a feed reader that's jam-packed with cool features.

  • A fast and beautiful timeline of posts from sites and people you follow! Keep up with the news and the people you care about in real-time!
  • Follow unlimited sites and users easily. Just search for them in the Pine.blog index and click Follow, or add a site manually using it's feed URL.
  • Save posts as favorites. Keep track of interesting posts from anyone you follow by favoriting them.
  • Post to your own site with Pine using the built-in Wordpress integration. Simply add your site in your account settings!
  • Discover new, awesome people and sites to follow using Pine's built-in search engine.
  • Import subscriptions from other services using Pine's OPML import!
  • Use Pine from the web, an iPhone, or iPad via the Universal iOS app!
  • With Pine you can follow almost anything. Just copy the URL from the page and follow it using either the app or the web!
Read Webmentions (pine.blog)
What are Webmentions? Webmentions are a technology that allows people who use Pine.blog or another compatible platform (i.e. Wordpress, Blogger, Micro.blog, Mastodon, etc) to like, comment on, and reply to each others posts, even across platforms. Think of it like being able to like a photo from Instagram on Twitter.
Read My IndieWebCamp Austin 2020 Projects by gRegor MorrillgRegor Morrill (gregorlove.com)
I often come into an IndieWebCamp without a specific project in mind. Sometimes I will get inspired by the discussions. If not, I always have a list of things to tweak on my site; or improvements to indiebookclub, indiewebify.me, or other indieweb tools. I have recently been working on updating my p...
Read Getting Started With The IndieWeb by Jean MacDonald Jean MacDonald (micro.welltempered.net)
What is the IndieWeb? A people-focused alternative to the “corporate web.” A place where you own and control your content. A home base from which you can syndicate and share with people on other websites, including social media. How can I participate in the IndieWeb? Get your own domain name. Th...
Some excellent work here by Jean following her session at IndieWebCamp Austin yesterday.
Read Curating Comments Threads | CSS-Tricks by Chris CoyierChris Coyier (CSS-Tricks)
Long comment threads on blog posts are a mixed blessing. It is great to have stirred up such great community discussion. But anything beyond, say, 20 comments is beginning to get beyond what anyone is willing to actually read. What likely happens is people read the article, read the first few comments, then start just scanning them (at increasingly swift rates) until they hit the bottom, then read the last one or two. At least, that's what I do.
This is an interesting old thread. Could use some contemporary examples.
Read Ind.ie scales back, focuses on Heartbeat social networking client by David Meyer (gigaom.com)
The pro-privacy project Ind.ie, which I covered a couple times last year, has scaled back its ambitions due to a lack of resources – despite having raised over $100,000 in a crowdfunding campaign just one month ago. Brighton, U.K.–based Ind.ie will now focus purely on Heartbeat,...
Apparently I wasn’t paying as close attention to the space at the time this originally flared up. This adds a lot of context to what I’ve perceived as some of the conflict from the old Ind.ie camp in the past that has never been talked about or referenced.
Read Gopher: When Adversarial Interoperability Burrowed Under the Gatekeepers' Fortresses by Corey Doctorow (Electronic Frontier Foundation)
When Apple's App Store launched in 2008, it was widely hailed as a breakthrough in computing, a "curated experience" that would transform the chaos of locating and assessing software and replace it with a reliable one-stop-shop where every app would come pre-tested and with a trusted seal of...

The Gopher story is a perfect case history for Adversarial Interoperability. The pre-Gopher information landscape was dominated by companies, departments, and individuals who were disinterested in giving users control over their own computing experience and who viewed computing as something that took place in a shared lab space, not in your home or dorm room.
Rather than pursuing an argument with these self-appointed Lords of Computing, the Gopher team simply went around them, interconnecting to their services without asking for permission. They didn’t take data they weren’t supposed to have—but they did make it much easier for the services’ nominal users to actually access them. ❧

Annotated on February 23, 2020 at 08:39AM

Today’s Web giants want us to believe that they and they alone are suited to take us to wherever we end up next. Having used Adversarial Interoperability as a ladder to attain their rarefied heights, they now use laws to kick the ladder away and prevent the next Microcomputer Center or Tim Berners-Lee from doing to them what the Web did to Gopher, and what Gopher did to mainframes. ❧

Annotated on February 23, 2020 at 08:40AM

Legislation to stem the tide of Big Tech companies’ abuses, and laws—such as a national consumer privacy bill, an interoperability bill, or a bill making firms liable for data-breaches—would go a long way toward improving the lives of the Internet users held hostage inside the companies’ walled gardens.
But far more important than fixing Big Tech is fixing the Internet: restoring the kind of dynamism that made tech firms responsive to their users for fear of losing them, restoring the dynamic that let tinkerers, co-ops, and nonprofits give every person the power of technological self-determination. ❧

Annotated on February 23, 2020 at 08:42AM

Read Your right to comment ends at my front door. by Derek Powazek (Derek Powazek)
John Gruber of Daring Fireball posted a response to critic who took him to task for not having comments on his site (skip down to “As for Wilcox’s arguments regarding user-submitted comments”). My humble site has a tiny fraction of the traffic of Daring Fireball, but in this latest incarnation, I also decided to go without comments. Here’s why. I agree wholeheartedly with John that the decision to add comments to your site begins and ends with the site’s owner. I also agree that his site is a “curated conversation.” Conversations have been happening between weblogs since the advent of the permalink. Joe Wilcox, who obviously has a bone to pick with John, has no right to pick that bone on John’s site.
I love the ideas here.
Read 2020/Austin/fromflowtostock (indieweb.org)
From Flow to Stock was a session at IndieWebCamp Austin 2020.
I’d love to see the video for this conversation once posted. The notes give a reasonable idea, but there’s a lot of discussion of silos going on here. I’m curious how those who attended might begin to own some of the ideas on their own websites in the future.

I see a lot of overlap with the ideas of commonplace books with what is going on here. Looking at the list of participants I’m not seeing any that I think might actually have both “stock” and “flow” on their personal websites yet. I feel like I’m getting ever closer to having them on mine.