reply | Chris Aldrich

Replied to Our Social Media is Broken. Is Decentralization the Fix? by Wendy Hanamura (Internet Archive Blogs)

We agree. Much work has been done and some of the fundamentals are in place. So on January 21, 2020 the Internet Archive hosted “Exploring Decentralized Social Media,” a DWeb SF Meetup that attracted 120+ decentralized tech builders, founders, and those who just wanted to learn more. Decentralized social media app builders from London, Portland and San Francisco took us on a tour of where their projects are today.

Something important to notice about this article. Not a single person here is linked to using their own website, or via a link to their presence on any of their respective decentralized networks. All the people whose names are linked are linked to on Twitter. All of the people who’ve written pieces or articles linked to in this piece are writing on Medium.com and not on their own sites/platforms. How can we honestly be getting anywhere if there isn’t even a basic identity for any of these people on any of these decentralized networks? At least most of the projects seem to have websites, so that’s a start. But are any of them dogfooding their own products to do so? I suspect not.

I’ll circle back around shortly to watch the video of the event that they recorded. I’m curious what else they’ve got hiding in there.

Interestingly, I’ll note that it appears that my site will at least somewhat federate with the Internet Archive’s as they support pingback. (Great to see technology from almost 20 years ago works just as well as some of these new methods…)

Graber helped us understand the broad categories of what’s out there: federated protocols such as ActivityPub and Matrix; peer-to-peer protocols such as Scuttlebutt, and social media apps that utilize blockchain in some way for monetization, provenance or storage. ❧

Missing from this list is a lot of interop work done by the IndieWeb over the past decade.
Annotated on February 03, 2020 at 06:48PM

Thought leader and tech executive, John Ryan, provided valuable historical context both onstage and in his recent blog. He compared today’s social media platforms to telephone services in 1900. Back then, a Bell Telephone user couldn’t talk to an AT&T customer; businesses had to have multiple phone lines just to converse with their clients. It’s not that different today, Ryan asserts, when Facebook members can’t share their photos with Renren’s 150 million account holders. All of these walled gardens, he said, need a “trusted intermediary” layer to become fully interconnected. ❧

An apt analogy which I’ve used multiple times in the past.
Annotated on February 03, 2020 at 06:50PM

Replied to Navigating my way into veganism by Bryan Alexander (bryanalexander.org)

For the past month I’ve been I’ve following a vegan diet. So in a brief pause from my focus on the future of education, I’ll share some thoughts about this experiment. It’s…

This is excellent Bryan. It’s something I ought to look into in more depth myself, but reading about your experience actually points out to me that I’m eating a lot more rice and beans in the last few years. Having a rice cooker means I almost always have cooked rice on hand with a fraction of the effort it had taken before. I also make about 4 cups of beans every week, so those are always hiding in the refrigerator. I also bought a tortilla press and making those is far easier and they’re far tastier than those in the stores and for a dramatic fraction of the price. I’ve taken to having a lot more fresh fruits and vegetables in the house, and I find it’s easier to grab an apple, banana, orange or something than it is chips or other junk food of which I’m starting to keep almost none around the house.

Another shift that I’ve found somewhat useful is that I became lactose intolerant in the middle of last year, so diverting around large amounts of dairy has likely been helpful.

One of my other shifts in the past few years is that I truly love a great pastry. As a result, the level of what I consider good pastry and other treats has risen dramatically. Now I find that I either have to make my own or get them on demand at local shops. This has prevented me from eating a lot of inferior and rather tasteless junk food as a result. Girl Scout Cookie season is upon us, and I just can’t bring myself to eat such dreadful snacks anymore when I could have something much tastier and likely healthier. Of course as part of all this, I’m also making a lot more of my own bread now too. It isn’t nearly as difficult as I had thought it would be to make fresh bread every couple of days.

In sum, I hadn’t really noticed it until you’ve pointed it out, but I’ve largely taken to the diet you’ve outlined. The primary difference is that I’ve come around to it in a much different fashion.

Replied to tweets by Bill Seitz and chronology samhjao mereko (Twitter)

https://t.co/GrbjEGjI1S
— chronology samhjao mereko (@geekodour) January 21, 2020

I'm more a PESOS fan.https://t.co/CPPH8Td8U6
— Bill Seitz (@BillSeitz) January 30, 2020

#TeamPESOS or #TeamPOSSE?

As long as you’re not #TeamPOOSNOW. #OwnYourData

Replied to a tweet by

Mathew Ingram (Twitter)

This might seem a little weird, but I'm trying to get back into using an RSS reader as an alternative to just relying on Twitter, so if you have any "weblogs" or sites you think I should add please hit me with them here -- odd, personal, insightful etc.
— Mathew Ingram (@mathewi) January 13, 2018

Discovery can definitely be a bear. Interestingly I came to your tweet through a handful of related blogposts via a feedreader from a random OPML file, so apologies for the late reply.

I keep an old school blogroll, but it got so big I made it an entire page. It’s split out by a few broad categories, but there are OPML linked files by category at the bottom to let you follow it all or pick your poisons. Hopefully you’ll find some fun and interesting gems hiding in there.

You might find some interesting feeds by clicking around within Dave Winer’s http://feedbase.io/ which will uncover some interesting active feeds. Best yet, it has lots of OPML files everywhere so you can quickly follow a lot.

Matthias Ott’s post Into the Personal-Website-Verse was at the top of Hacker News earlier this week. Both his post and the HN post have lists of people with websites that could be interesting and useful to follow for voices on the web.

You also might take a look at some of the details and resources on the discovery, blogroll, and even webring pages within the IndieWeb wiki. Not to be missed is Kicks Condor’s hrefhunt. Andy Bell also had a project to highlight personalsit.es.

In a somewhat related question, but from the other perspective (especially for journalism), I’m curious if you have any thoughts on: How to follow the complete output of journalists and other writers?