Instagram | Chris Aldrich

👓 There’s Nothing Wrong With Posing for Photos at Chernobyl | Taylor Lorenz | The Atlantic

Read There’s Nothing Wrong With Posing for Photos at Chernobyl by Taylor Lorenz (The Atlantic)

Influencer-style pictures are simply the way we document our lives now.

Strip away the headline and the social media influencer angle which is a canard.

There’s an interesting societal shift happening here in photography. For counterpoint, compare this with Pictures of Death: Postmortem Photography by Nancy West (The Atlantic).

👓 Adding Instagram to a Social Reader | Mr.Kapowski

Read Adding Instagram to a Social Reader by

Chris (mrkapowski.com)

I mentioned yesterday my frustrations with Instagram were at an all-time high, and I wanted to “soft quit” the app by adding my follows as a source in Monocle. I didn’t find any existing guide on how to do this (sorry if I misse...

Granary will give you some additional options I suppose, but I’ve always just blindly used Ryan Barrett’s other atom-based tools for Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook to make feeds for my feed reader of choice.

In my experience, the session cookies needed for these will last from about four months or more before needing to be refreshed. I just refreshed my Instagram cookie earlier this week.

Read Black and white and RSS by Giles Turnbull (gilest.org)

Black and white and RSS is an RSS feed of black and white photographs, updating throughout June 2019. There is no associated website. You can only see the photos if you use an RSS feed reader and subscribe to the feed.

This is certainly a cool looking experiment Giles Turnbull is attempting. I’m almost half tempted to hide my actual website and just make my content available via RSS, h-feed, or JSON-feed.

Sometimes for as much time and effort as I put into making my site look the way I want it, I often worry that it’s all for naught as I suspect many of my readers are just reading it in a feed reader or interfaces like Pocket or Instapaper that are stripping away all my CSS and reformatting it in some vanilla way for simpler reading.

I remember reading about Instagrammers making their accounts private as a means of getting more people to subscribe to them for the fear of missing out on their content. Maybe stopping posts to your site, but simply maintaining a feed could be the IndieWeb equivalent of this?

Hat tip: Jason McIntosh.

👓 Judge may jail Roger Stone after Instagram post | NBC News

Read Judge may jail Roger Stone after Instagram post (NBC News)

Judge Amy Berman Jackson will rule whether he has violated the conditions of release after a hearing Thursday.

The more I see, read, and hear about the vagaries of social media; the constant failings and foibles of Facebook, the trolling dumpster fire that is Twitter, the ills of Instagram; the spread of dark patterns; and the unchecked rise of surveillance capitalism, and weapons of math destruction the more I think that the underlying ideas focusing on people and humanity within the IndieWeb movement are its core strength.

Perhaps we need to create a new renaissance of humanism for the 21st century? Maybe we call it digital humanism to create some intense focus, but the emphasis should be completely on the people side.

Naturally there’s a lot more that they–and we all–need to do to improve our lives. Let’s band together to create better people-centric, ethical solutions.

👓 Instagram’s Christmas Crackdown | The Atlantic

Read Instagram’s Christmas Crackdown (The Atlantic)

No meme account is safe—not even @God.

There are so many reasons here for these folks to join the IndieWeb. A solid, popular feed reader would solve many of these problems.

“We are our own BuzzFeed,” said Declan Mortimer, a 16-year-old who ran the @ComedySlam account, with more than 11 million followers. Kaamil Lakhani and Jonathan Foley, who work together on @SocietyFeelings, said they were even in the process of building a dedicated website, as accounts such as @Daquan have already done.

Despite the Christmas setback, most meme account holders mentioned in this article said that they weren’t planning to abandon the platform anytime soon. But the incident served as an acute reminder of how quickly they can lose it all and be forced to start from scratch. “We’re playing on rented property,” said Goswami, “and that’s just so apparent now more than ever before.”

👓 Overthinking Instagram | Oh Hello Ana

Read Overthinking Instagram by

Ana (Oh Hello Ana - Blog)

I very rarely share online if something isn’t going well in my life. I’ve always treated my social media the same way most of us do: we only share the good bits. I thought I was doing that but nowadays, I look back at some photos of what looks like an excellent time of my life but now I know ver...

This post has a lot of great things to think about for people either designing social media related websites, or even IndieWeb site designers who might want to take advantage of these things for themselves. I don’t see these issues being written or talked about enough in the community, so I’m glad that designers and developers like Ana are starting to consider them.

As I think about it, some personal-related posts could potentially be marked to auto-expire (unpost themselves) at some future date and be auto-archived to one’s back end so that they’re no longer public, but so that they exist if one wants to look at them personally, but also so that they’re also hidden from the site owner and need to be actively searched for. As an example, I can imagine something along the lines of a “dating” tag so that when one creates an “engaged” or “married” post that all the old dating history disappears? There is some existing artwork and thought about this on the IndieWeb wiki that I came across a week or so ago in relation to Last.fm’s expiring content, but more work and motivation could be added.

Incidentally, like many, I’ve begun reading her regularly and she’s not only quite the writer, but she’s got a pretty little site as well. I highly recommend folks give her a look and subscribe.

Maybe during this Christmas break I will find the guts to do a purge but I know that it will be a “fake purge”. ❧

I’ve been seeing a lot about (Japanese) minimalism this past year in relation to physical goods, but hadn’t considered what a minimal social media presence would look like. This is definitely something that could use some more thought, both in minimalism of code, typography, and even design.

December 19, 2018 at 02:57PM