Tag: site deaths

Independently-hosted web publishing

Bookmarked Independently-hosted web publishing by Daniel Villar-Onrubia & Victoria I. MarínDaniel Villar-Onrubia & Victoria I. Marín (Internet Policy Review Volume 11, Issue 2 DOI: 10.14763/2022.2.1665)
The term independently-hosted is used here to describe online publishing practices that utilise the World Wide Web (hereafter the Web) as a decentralised socio-technical system, where individuals and communities operate as the owners or controllers of the online infrastructures they use in order to share content. Such practices may be adopted as an alternative of, or as a complement to, the use of centralised content-sharing systems that belong to and are entirely operated by third parties. The term “publishing” is used here in a rather inclusive way and refers to the act of making content available online, rather than being restricted to the editorial processes that characterise, for instance, academic publishing.
DOI: 10.14763/2022.2.1665
Great to see IndieWeb.org cited in the academic literature.
Annotated How to Highlight the Internet by Andrew Courter (Medium)
Screenshots are disposable, but highlights are forever. ❧
Highlighting this sentence on the Highly blog (on Medium) ironically using Hypothes.is. I’m syndicating a copy over to my own website because I know that most social services are not long for this world. The only highlights that live forever are the ones you keep on your own website or another location that you own and control.

RIP Highly.
Viva IndieWeb!

Read Microsoft to finally shut down to-do list app Wunderlist on May 6, 2020 (TechCrunch)
Microsoft has for years promised it would eventually shut down to-do list app Wunderlist, which it acquired in 2015, in favor of its own app, To Do — after it felt the latter was able to offer a competitive experience that included Wunderlist’s best features. Today, Microsoft is finally…

👓 Chan Zuckerberg Initiative acquires and will free up science search engine Meta | TechCrunch

Read Chan Zuckerberg Initiative acquires and will free up science search engine Meta (TechCrunch)
Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s $45 billion philanthropy organization is making its first acquisition in order to make it easier for scientists to search, read and tie together more than 26 million science research papers. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is acquiring Meta, an AI-powered r…
Following up on the fate of Sciencescape.

👓 Sciencescape Wants To Solve Academic Research Discoverability, Deal With The Noise Problem | TechCrunch

Read Sciencescape Wants To Solve Academic Research Discoverability, Deal With The Noise Problem (TechCrunch)
Toronto-based startup Sciencescape came about because of a problem that was significant enough to lure co-founder Sam Molyneux away from a bourgeoning career as a cancer researcher, and into a new venture that wants to tackle the bigger picture issue of fixing the entire system of academic, medical…
Checking in on Sciencescape and it’s fate since I had an account there once upon a time and it’s now no longer resolving.

👓 Graying Out | Tim Bray

Read Graying Out by Tim Bray (tbray.org)
For many years I’ve interacted with my fellow humans, I think perhaps more than any other way, via the medium of Internet chat. But in my chat window, they’re fading, one by one. This problem is technical and personal and I felt it ought not to go unrecognized.
An interesting piece about the death of chat clients in lieu of social media. He’s got a list of some interesting people here, many of whom can be found on their own websites now.

👓 CiteULike News | CiteULike

Read CiteULike is closing down by fergus (citeulike.org)

After nearly 15 years operating CiteULike, we’ve made the difficult decision to close the site. Unfortunately, the costs associated with providing it and the fact that none of us really has any time to put into the maintenance and development of the site mean that we have to call it a day.

We know there are still a number of you out there who use the site regularly and we’re sure you’ll be disappointed but hope you’ll understand.

You will be able to download your library until 30th March 2019 but after that it is likely that CiteULike will no longer be accessible. We will be refunding any Gold subscriptions pro rata that extend beyond that date.

We wish you all success in your research and happiness in your life.

The CiteULike team.

I’m glad I’ve been owning my bookmarks and references on my own site for years, knowing that sooner or later just this day would come.

CiteULike was an interesting service and had a useful bookmarklet and some social features, but had quite a janky looking UI. For those looking for alternates, I recommend not looking at other siloed services, but making an attempt to own your own bookmark posts on your own website. I’m happy to help if you have questions or need pointers.

👓 How to replace Facebook with “Nicebook” | Mike Elgan

Read How to replace Facebook with "Nicebook" by Mike Elgan (Mike Elgan)
Many people would like to leave Facebook, but fear that leaving Facebook means losing connection with family and friends. But that’s not true. You CAN leave Facebook and still stay in touch with your loved ones. I call my replacement a “Nicebook” because if give...
I know Mike has always been a major fan of Google+, so it’s nice to see that he’s finally got his own website now. It’s not surprising to see him suggest Google Photos as a potential replacement for something like Facebook, especially since a lot of his content is so visually done. For him I suspect that a lot of the functionality of Google+ is baked right into Google Photos.

It’s an interesting idea in general, but wouldn’t work for me because of a lot of pieces I would be missing as a complete solution. However, for small scale social sharing with family and friends with the ability to have some general private communication, it’s probably not a very bad idea.

🔖 Google+ Exporter

Bookmarked Get Google+ Exporter desktop app (gplus-exporter.friendsplus.me)
Export your Google+ feeds to Wordpress, Blogger and JSON. Simply choose your OS.
I haven’t tried it yet, but this is one of the first Google+ exporters I’ve seen.

hat tip:

👓 Big Changes Ahead for FMA | Free Music Archive

Read Big Changes Ahead for FMA by cheyenne_h (FMA Admin) (Free Music Archive)
We regret to inform you that due to a funding shortage, the FMA will be closing down later this month. The future of the archive is uncertain, but we have done everything we can to ensure that our files will not disappear from the web forever. The full audio collection will be backed up and available at https://archive.org/details/freemusicarchive (some of the collection is already there; feel free to go browse).
Internet related archives are important but fragile things. It’s sad to see when archives like this go down, particularly due to funding reasons.
I’ve seen a lot of people freaking out about the Google+ data leak and even more so about it’s pending shut down. In response many are looking at where they’re planning on going next that will give them the functionality they’re looking for. Sadly, however, almost every one of them is contemplating moving to identical types of platforms which are either incredibly similar to or even worse than Google+ given the criterion by which they are considering. They’re simply looking for and prioritizing the wrong types of functionality.

Quit repeating the mistakes of the past, learn from them, and do something different this time around or I guarantee history will be repeating itself.

While there are a handful of reasonable options (and by this I DO NOT mean Mastodon, Diaspora, Pluspora, MeWe, Vero, Twitter, Facebook, or Solid, etc.) I’d recommend looking at some of the ideas and solutions within the IndieWeb movement. For the less technical minded I highly recommend taking a look at a self-hosted WordPress option or micro.blog.

I’m happy to help people out with making the jump when they’re ready or if they need help.

👓 The breach that killed Google+ wasn’t a breach at all | The Verge

Read The breach that killed Google+ wasn’t a breach at all by Russell Brandom (The Verge)
A bug in the rarely used Google+ network has exposed private information for as many as 500,000 users. Should Google have shared more sooner?