Search Results for: mastodon
IndieWeb Collection
Over the past several years I've written a broad number of pieces about the IndieWeb. I find that many people are now actively searching for, reading, and implementing various versions of what I've done, particularly on the WordPress Platform. Because of some discussions at IndieWebCamp Baltimore, work I'm doing on my related book, interactions with…
Reply to Laying the Standards for a Blogging Renaissance by Aaron Davis
Reply to seanl on literati.org
Reply to @sikkdays @seanl I’m happy to help too if you like.
👓 Towards a more democratic Web | Tara Vancil
Many people who have suffered harassment on Twitter (largely women), are understandably fed up with Twitter’s practices, and have staged a boycott of Twitter today October 13, 2017. Presumably the goal is to highlight the flaws in Twitter’s moderation policies, and to push the company to make meaningful changes in their policies, but I’d like to argue that we shouldn’t expect Twitter’s policies to change.
🔖 Back to the Future: The Decentralized Web, a report by Digital Currency Initiative & Center for Civic Media
The Web is a key space for civic debate and the current battleground for protecting freedom of expression. However, since its development, the Web has steadily evolved into an ecosystem of large, corporate-controlled mega-platforms which intermediate speech online. In many ways this has been a positive development; these platforms improved usability and enabled billions of people to publish and discover content without having to become experts on the Web’s intricate protocols. But in other ways this development is alarming. Just a few large platforms drive most traffic to online news sources in the U.S., and thus have enormous influence over what sources of information the public consumes on a daily basis. The existence of these consolidated points of control is troubling for many reasons. A small number of stakeholders end up having outsized influence over the content the public can create and consume. This leads to problems ranging from censorship at the behest of national governments to more subtle, perhaps even unintentional, bias in the curation of content users see based on opaque, unaudited curation algorithms. The platforms that host our networked public sphere and inform us about the world are unelected, unaccountable, and often impossible to audit or oversee. At the same time, there is growing excitement around the area of decentralized systems, which have grown in prominence over the past decade thanks to the popularity of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a payment system that has no central points of control, and uses a novel peer-to-peer network protocol to agree on a distributed ledger of transactions, the blockchain. Bitcoin paints a picture of a world where untrusted networks of computers can coordinate to provide important infrastructure, like verifiable identity and distributed storage. Advocates of these decentralized systems propose related technology as the way forward to “re-decentralize” the Web, by shifting publishing and discovery out of the hands of a few corporations, and back into the hands of users. These types of code-based, structural interventions are appealing because in theory, they are less corruptible and resistant to corporate or political regulation. Surprisingly, low-level, decentralized systems don’t necessarily translate into decreased market consolidation around user-facing mega-platforms. In this report, we explore two important ways structurally decentralized systems could help address the risks of mega-platform consolidation: First, these systems can help users directly publish and discover content directly, without intermediaries, and thus without censorship. All of the systems we evaluate advertise censorship-resistance as a major benefit. Second, these systems could indirectly enable greater competition and user choice, by lowering the barrier to entry for new platforms. As it stands, it is difficult for users to switch between platforms (they must recreate all their data when moving to a new service) and most mega-platforms do not interoperate, so switching means leaving behind your social network. Some systems we evaluate directly address the issues of data portability and interoperability in an effort to support greater competition.
A reply to John Carlos Baez on “Bye-bye, Google+ — but what next?”
🎧 This Week in Google #400: Toot, Not Tweet
Burger King's new ad sets off Google Home on purpose. Mastodon is great, but it's not a Twitter killer. Facebook's $14 million investment in reputable news. How to keep from being dragged off a plane. Whatever happened to Google Books' plan to digitize all books?
My First Internet Meme! 🍍
A short story about how I was involved in the birth of the Mastodon 🍍 meme
Social Media Accounts and Links
Primary Internet Presences Chris Aldrich | BoffoSocko Chris Aldrich Social Stream Content from the above two sites is syndicated primarily, but not exclusively, or evenly to the following silo-based profiles Twitter--joined February 18, 2008 2:31pm Micro.blog--joined April 27, 2017, 05:11 pm Hypothes.is--joined January 2012 Mastodon.social (Status)--joined December 9, 2016 Mastodon: @chrisaldrich@boffosocko.com (This website has beta support to…
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