UI | Chris Aldrich

Reply to Aaron Davis about links

Replied to a post by

Aaron Davis (Read Write Respond)

I think it is one of those topics with a lot of conjecture John. Apologies if there are too many links. ❧

Don’t apologize for links. It’s the web and links are important. In fact I might think that you could have a few additional links here! I would have seen it anyway, but I was a tad sad not to have seen a link to that massive pullquote/photo you made at the top of the post which would have sent me a webmention to boot. (Of course WordPress doesn’t make it easy on this front either, so your best bet would have been an invisible <link> hidden in the text maybe?)

I’ve been in the habit of person-tagging people in posts to actively send them webmentions, but I also have worried about the extra “visual clutter” and cognitive load of the traditional presentation of links as mentioned by John. (If he wasn’t distracted by the visual underlines indicating links, he might have been as happy?) As a result, I’m now considering adding some CSS to my site so that some of these webmention links simply look like regular text. This way the notifications will be triggered, but without adding the seeming “cruft” visually or cognitively. Win-win? Thanks for the inspiration!

In your case here, you’ve kindly added enough context about what to expect about the included links that the reader can decide for themselves while still making your point. You should sleep easily on this point and continue linking to your heart’s content.

In some sense, I think that the more links the better. I suspect the broader thesis of Cesar Hidalgo’s book Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies would give you some theoretical back up for the idea.

👓 Twitter is relaunching the reverse-chronological feed as an option for all users starting today | The Verge

Read Twitter is relaunching the reverse-chronological feed as an option for all users starting today by Casey Newton (The Verge)

Just hit that sparkle, fam

Apparently so many people are using shortcuts like “filter:follows -filter:replies” from a few months back that they’ve decided to fix their UI.

Of course the article indicates that it seems to be higher engagement (aka clicks for advertising) as the motivator rather than simply making a stronger and more usable product:

Keith Coleman, vice president of product at Twitter, told The Verge that in tests, users who had access to the easy toggle participated in more conversations than average.

I was reading a post by Greg McVerry when I happened upon the credit for his featured photo. At first I had thought it was a stock photo, and when I realized it was from a IndieWebCamp, I looked closer and noticed that Aaron Parecki’s website was featured on the photo in the cell phone. I looked a bit closer and thought “someone has doctored his avatar as it’s tilted in the photo.” Then, knowing Aaron, I thought I had better check on my cell phone.

It turns out if you visit his site on a cell phone, his avatar rotates with the phone!

The whimsy of this just brightens my day.

👓 Following People or Feeds in the #IndieWeb #mb #DoOO #edtechchat #literacies” | Greg McVerry

Read Following People or Feeds in the #IndieWeb #mb #DoOO #edtechchat #literacies by

Greg McVerry (quickthoughts.jgregorymcverry.com)

I am scrolling through history (h/t to Kevin Marks for reminding of the ccurated posts by danah boyd) as we discuss how best to follow people in social readers on the IndieWeb. Tantek Çelik has suggested nobody ever on the history of the web wants to follow feeds. danah seemed to agree in 2004. T...

👓 disconnected thoughts on fandom and the indieweb | privilege escalation

Read disconnected thoughts on fandom and the indieweb by

Marianne (privilege escalation)

Recently I discovered the IndieWeb project, and I… think I am a lot more intrigued by it than by other Better Social Media Platform pipe dreams and decentralization projects I’ve seen? Because it’s...

I love that this post has all sorts of ideas and itches which resonate with large swaths of the growing IndieWeb. Some problems here are solved, and many remain to be worked on and improved. Either way, this has a reasonable beginning roadmap for people who are interesting in taking a crack at solving or improving on some of these problems.

I hope Marianne joins into the fray to not only make things better for herself, but for all of us. I know I and many others are happy to help on the WordPress front or otherwise. Here’s an overview video that may help some of the less technical.

It also raises some questions for me:
Do any wikis, bulletin boards/forum software send or receive webmentions yet? I receive refbacks from the IndieWeb wiki, but shouldn’t it handle sending webmentions? How about software for wikis and fora that allow for micropub or simple syndication?

It’s never dawned on me to look before, but I’ve just noticed that at least the IndieWeb wiki actually has an h-card!

👓 masterpost of tumblr alternatives | snowballphil

Read masterpost of tumblr alternatives (snowballphil.tumblr.com)

this post will be updated as I find more websites to add! please check with the original before reblogging to see if there’s an updated version, and message me with more suggestions if you have them!!

for general use

myspace.com - yes, it still exists, i’m just as surprised as you

soup.io - very similar to tumblr, plus it can import your tumblr blog

twitter.com - allows posting both text and photos in sets, allows retweets

geared towards writers and bloggers

archiveofourown.org - specializes in hosting fic, excellent tagging system

dreamwidth.org - a blogging site similar to livejournal or wordpress

fanfiction.net - another big name in fanfic posting

livejournal.com - still an option, but questionably safe for fandom

wordpress.com - old and well-established, often considered the default

geared towards artists and photographers

deviantart.com - huge community, allows posting art + sorting into folders

furaffinity.net - similar to DA but for furries, easy to display commish info

instagram.com - photo and video posts, excellent tag search

piczel.tv - allows both streaming and posting art / photosets to a gallery

pixiv.net - huge anime art community, allows livestreaming

paid platforms

patreon.com - subscription-based access to many diff types of content

pillowfort.io - still in beta, but should function almost identically to tumblr

typepad.com - similar to wordpress but with reblogging and a dash

ways to save your current tumblr posts

use the wayback machine! you do have to archive each page of your blog individually but once you do all the content, including media, will be saved exactly as it was at the moment you archived it.

wordpress and soup both allow you to directly import whole tumblr blogs, and if i recall correctly it’s something both dreamwidth and pillowfort have said they are working on.

if you have some knowledge of computers you can try this github solution which uses a python script to download your whole blog to your computer. even if you don’t know anything about programming or the command line they give a very good beginners tutorial on how to use it so you should still give it a shot!

post version 1.0, 2018-12-03 21:33

👓 The Fans Are All Right | Pinboard Blog

Read The Fans Are All Right (Pinboard Blog)

I've had a couple of emails and tweets asking somewhat cautiously why the popular page has filled with slash fiction. That's because the fans are coming!

I learned a lot about fandom couple of years ago in conversations with my friend Britta, who was working at the time as community manager for Delicious. She taught me that fans were among the heaviest users of the bookmarking site, and had constructed an edifice of incredibly elaborate tagging conventions, plugins, and scripts to organize their output along a bewildering number of dimensions. If you wanted to read a 3000 word fic where Picard forces Gandalf into sexual bondage, and it seems unconsensual but secretly both want it, and it's R-explicit but not NC-17 explicit, all you had to do was search along the appropriate combination of tags (and if you couldn't find it, someone would probably write it for you). By 2008 a whole suite of theoretical ideas about folksonomy, crowdsourcing, faceted infomation retrieval, collaborative editing and emergent ontology had been implemented by a bunch of friendly people so that they could read about Kirk drilling Spock.

👓 More control over comments | Inoreader blog

Read More control over comments (Inoreader blog)

You can see that we are focused lately on the social stuff. Why? Because it was always there in front of you, but there were many obstacles that made it not very usable or friendly. Comment has improved, but one thing with them remained. Many people don’t know that comments in InoReader are actually public …

👓 Gutenberg FAQ | Matt Mullenweg

Read WordPress 5.0: A Gutenberg FAQ by Matt Mullenweg (Matt Mullenweg)

We are nearing the release date for WordPress 5.0 and Gutenberg, one of the most important and exciting projects I’ve worked on in my 15 years with this community. I knew we would be taking a big leap. But it’s a leap we need to take, and I think the end result is going to open up many new oppo...

👓 Key | The Independent Variable

Read Key (The Independent Variable)

I like how the author creates a key to their posts here. Most are obvious based on the emojis, but if they’re not more obvious are they really as broadly useful from a UI perspective? I do wish they all had links to archives of each type however.

👓 Exploring Mastodon | Bryan Alexander

Read Exploring Mastodon by Bryan Alexander (Bryan Alexander)

I decided to explore the Mastodon social network after a great deal of suggestions and gentle prodding from many people. That’s Mastodon the software, not the very fine metal band. In this post I’ll share my experiences of getting to know the thing.

I joined Mastodon about two years ago this week. I’d written a bit about it as well as bookmarked several interesting early articles that help to explain it, what it is, and what it does, which can be found here and scrolling back a few pages: https://boffosocko.com/tag/mastodon/

While Mastodon is working to remedy some of the issues that large corporate and advertising supported social sites like Facebook and Twitter have, one ought to be careful jumping into just any instance as there is little, if any, guarantee that the instance you choose will still be around tomorrow.

indieweb movement. ❧

hooray!
November 28, 2018 at 08:02PM

What was that about crowdfunding instances? How much of an instance’s conversation was visible to the outside? How much of this is Google-spidered? What are those anti-abuse tools? Why can’t governments “completely block” Mastodon (as a whole, or just instances?)? Can one join more than a single instance? ❧

Managing an instance can come with a lot of work and maintenance, so some instances are crowdfunded to help defray the costs of full time management of a particular instance.

Anti-abuse tools give users the ability to better block people as well as instances have the ability to block incoming messages from entire instances. Thus an instance that serves as a haven for Nazis could be completely blocked by one or more other instances which prevent their users from seeing any content from all users on an instance that is a “bad actor.” One of the common anti-abuse tools is the CW or content warning functionality, which some instances mandate, which can be used to hide spoilers or controversial content. (As an example, some instances require content warnings on political related posts.)

Governments could block instances based on their IP addresses, but would have to do some work to block all instances (primarily by knowing where they all are).

One can join as many instances as they’d like, but it would likely become confusing after a while. Ideally one should be able to join just one instance and be able to follow or be followed by anyone from any other instance. Some communities have particular sets of rules they expect their users to abide by. Some may be centered on particular topics of discussion as well. Some instances are individually run and have only one user.
November 28, 2018 at 08:11PM

Is stability a problem in the Fediverse? ❧

Stability is typically an issue based on who is running the instance and what sort of server they’re doing it on. Is it fast or slow? Does it have 3 people or 300,000? Naturally the larger the instance, the more resources it requires. Some instances have popped up and shut themselves down because the maintainer was doing it as a hobby and just got tired of it. Often there isn’t much information about who is running the server and how long it may or may not be around or how well it’s maintained.
November 28, 2018 at 08:16PM

No other options presented themselves on the page ❧

This website has some reasonable set up for helping one determine an appropriate instance:
https://instances.social/
November 28, 2018 at 08:19PM

other routes in. ❧

http://www.unmung.com/mastoview will show content from random instances to give one an idea about the content within a particular instance before joining.

Most instances will have some general information about themselves. Usually the more thought out they are, the more likely they will be around for a while. Here’s an example of the instance maintained by the creator of the original platform, which is also one of the largest and most popular instances out there: https://mastodon.social/about/more
November 28, 2018 at 08:24PM

Any pointers or experiences to share? ❧

There are a couple of WordPress plugins for Mastodon that allow you to syndicate your content from your own website into your instance. You might find that somewhat useful.

The IndieWeb wiki has some generally useful information as well as some criticisms and related articles which might be helpful: https://indieweb.org/Mastodon

Mastodon runs on the Activity Pub specification for sending messages back and forth. As a result some people are looking into having their personal websites support these protocols so that people on Mastodon (or other parts of the Fediverse) can subscribe to one’s primary website. If you can do this then you don’t necessarily need “yet another social platform” for interacting with those online. The two biggest of these efforts within the WordPress community are Fed Bridgy and the Activity Pub plugin
November 28, 2018 at 08:50PM