👓 @sweden signs off after seven years as Twitter voice of nation | The Guardian

Read @sweden signs off after seven years as Twitter voice of nation by Jon Henley (the Guardian)
Curators of Sweden project will fall silent at end of month after 200,000 tweets by 365 citizens

👓 AMP for WordPress Plugin to Introduce User-Friendly Theme Support Settings in Upcoming 1.0 Release | WP Tavern

Read AMP for WordPress Plugin to Introduce User-Friendly Theme Support Settings in Upcoming 1.0 Release (WordPress Tavern)
In October, Google’s open source AMP project (Accelerated Mobile Pages) will be heading into its third year. The initiative aims to improve performance on the mobile web and currently boasts …

👓 Analysis | Not just misleading. Not merely false. A lie. | Washington Post

Read Not just misleading. Not merely false. A lie. by Glenn Kessler (Washington Post)

The Post's Fact Checker Glenn Kessler explains why he's labeling President Trump's claims about Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels "a lie."

The first denial that Donald Trump knew about hush-money payments to silence women came four days before he was elected president, when his spokeswoman Hope Hicks said, without hedging, “We have no knowledge of any of this.”

👓 The world is a terrible place right now, and that’s largely because it is what we make it. | Wil Wheaton

Read The world is a terrible place right now, and that’s largely because it is what we make it. by Wil Wheaton (WIL WHEATON dot NET)
As most of you know, I deactivated my Twitter account earlier this month. It had been a long time coming, for a whole host of reasons, but Twitter’s decision to be the only social network tha…
As I read article this I find myself wondering why Wil Wheaton was looking for a new social media platform? Hasn’t he realized yet that he’s already got one–his very own website?!!

While Wil maintains it more like an old school blog with longer thought pieces and stories, there’s certainly no reason he couldn’t use it to post shorter thoughts, status updates, or notes as he might do on Twitter or Mastodon. It’s also an “instance” which no one is going to kick him off of. He has ultimate control. If people moan and complain, he can moderate their complaints as he sees fit.

This particular post has 410 comments, most of which seem relatively civil and run a paragraph or two–at least enough to convey a complete and coherent thought or two. At some point he decided to cap the commentary for mental health or any other reason he may have, which is certainly his right as well as the right of anyone on their own website. Sadly most social services don’t provide this functionality.

I also notice that instead of trying to rebuild a following on someone else’s platform, he’s already got the benefit of a network of 3,689,638 email subscribers not to mention the thousands more who visit his site regularly or subscribe via RSS. I suspect that those subscribers, who have taken more time and effort to subscribe to his website than they did on any other platform, are likely a much better audience and are far more engaged.

So my short memo to Wil: Quit searching for an alternate when you’ve already got one that obviously seems like a much healthier and happier space.

If you feel like you’re missing some of the other small niceties of other social networks, I’ll happily and freely help you: set up some Micropub apps to make posting to your site easier; add Webmention support so others would need to post to their own websites to @mention you across the web from their service of choice; add a social media-esque Follow buttton; set up Microsub service so you can read what you choose on the web and like/favorite, reply to, bookmark, etc. to your site and send the commentary back to them. Of course anyone can do this on their own with some details and help from the IndieWeb.org community if they wish…

 

👓 Evernote lost its CTO, CFO, CPO and HR head in the last month as it eyes another fundraise | TechCrunch

Read Evernote lost its CTO, CFO, CPO and HR head in the last month as it eyes another fundraise (TechCrunch)
Evernote, the productivity app with 225 million users that lets people take notes and organise other files from their working and non-work life, has been on a mission to reset its image as the go-to service for those seeking tools to help themselves be more efficient, years after losing its place a…

👓 Evernote Lost Its CTO, CFO, CPO and HR Head in the Last Month as It Eyes Another Fundraise | Daring Fireball

Read Evernote Lost Its CTO, CFO, CPO and HR Head in the Last Month as It Eyes Another Fundraise (Daring Fireball)
I never took a liking to Evernote. Its origins as a Windows desktop app were always apparent. It had some interesting and powerful features (particularly OCR for signage in photographs — you can search for text in images) but a terrible interface. If you’re still using it, you should look into your export options.

👓 a post | Flashing Palely in the Margins | Sameer Vasta

Read a post by Sameer VastaSameer Vasta (inthemargins.ca)
[...] We like to tell ourselves that micro.blog is a great place because we are civil and we have good conversations and discussions, even when we disagree, but I have faced more dismissiveness and insult on micro.blog in the past year than I have at any time in that other “micro” social network. This is not the civil community that we make it out to be, and by pretending that it is, we ignore when people feel actively excluded. [...]

👓 I don’t hang out on the internet | Ryan Barrett

Read I don’t hang out on the internet by Ryan BarrettRyan Barrett (snarfed.org)
I use Facebook. Not a ton, but I use it. I tweet, I Instagram, I read blogs. I do much of my work on GitHub. I’m on mailing lists, IRC channels, StackOverflow. Not LinkedIn, but that?...

👓 How I send webmentions to Micro.blog | Eddie Hinkle

Read How I send webmentions to Micro.blog by Eddie HinkleEddie Hinkle (eddiehinkle.com)
If you use Micro.blog completely from the native apps, everything works smoothly. If you communicate via the IndieWeb through webmentions, everything (mostly) works smoothly. But there is a big hiccup that is still being worked out when you communicate via Webmentions to Micro.blog. The current functionality is described here, however it's not exhaustive and it doesn't work 100% of the time. Some of the issues are documented on this GitHub issue, and eventually we'll work out the best practice use case. So what if you don't care about best practices and just want to communicate with Micro.blog through Webmentions? I have a working solution on my own website. Typically in a Webmention you have a source (your post) and a target (the post you are replying to) and the Webmention endpoint used is retrieved from the target. However because with Micro.blog sometimes the target post is on Wordpress or an externally hosted blog instead of Micro.blog. This causes an issue, because if you are wanting the Webmention to be received by Micro.blog but the target post does not advertise the Micro.blog Webmention endpoint, your post will never make it in to the Micro.blog system for an externally hosted post that you are replying to. What I do is I essentially do a "cc/carbon copy" Webmention. First I do the standard Webmention sending procedure, and then I check if the target Webmention endpoint was Micro.blog's endpoint (https://micro.blog/webmention), if it is not then I know Micro.blog did not receive the post and I send an additional Webmention. The CC Webmention contains the source as my post, the target as the post I'm replying to, and it gets sent to the Micro.blog Webmention endpoint. Micro.blog does a couple of things upon receiving the Webmention. First, it checks to see if the source post is coming from a URL that belongs to a verified Micro.blog user. Second, it checks if the target post exists already in the Micro.blog system. If both of those checks go through, then it will add the new post and link it up to the correct Micro.blog user as a reply to the correct Micro.blog post. This is not necessarily an easy thing to add in most Webmention systems and is not the intended final destination of cross-site replies. But if you want it to work today, this useful hack will get it working for you.
A useful layout of the technicalities, particularly for those running their own sites and syndicating into the micro.blog network.

👓 Public Service: beyond the Open Internet | A Stick, a Dog, and a Box with Something In It

Read Public Service: beyond the Open Internet by Bill ThompsonBill Thompson (A Stick, a Dog, and a Box with Something In It)
Anyone who has followed my writing, talks and broadcasting over the last two decades will know that I have a very consistent view of the ways in which we need to manage the Internet (I’ll grant myself the privilege of using an upper-case I to talk about the network I’ve been living and working with since the mid-80’s – it remains a singular thing to me) in order to make it work for people and society.

Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia

like references to Winnie the Pooh.  

Apparently China filters out Winnie the Pooh references because of a meme that ties Pooh to country leader Xi Jinping:
https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-china-blog-40627855

👓 About UnHerd | UnHerd

Read About UnHerd (UnHerd)
UnHerd.com is a new media platform with a double mission. Our aim is to appeal to people who instinctively refuse to follow the herd, and we also want to investigate ‘unheard’ ideas, individuals and communities. We’re not a news site. We focus our journalism on the significant events going on in the world, filtering out the distractions to give our readers what they really need to know.

👓 How social media makes fascists of us all | UnHerd

Read How social media makes fascists of us all (UnHerd)
About twenty years ago the novelist Umberto Eco, noting like George Orwell how loose the word fascism had become, wrote that the ideology is like a virus that changes to reflect the contours of the society in which it exists. Mussolini’s version was quite different from Franco’s, for example. But wherever it went, claimed Eco, …