Links

Read Gopher: When Adversarial Interoperability Burrowed Under the Gatekeepers' Fortresses by Corey Doctorow (Electronic Frontier Foundation)
When Apple's App Store launched in 2008, it was widely hailed as a breakthrough in computing, a "curated experience" that would transform the chaos of locating and assessing software and replace it with a reliable one-stop-shop where every app would come pre-tested and with a trusted seal of...

The Gopher story is a perfect case history for Adversarial Interoperability. The pre-Gopher information landscape was dominated by companies, departments, and individuals who were disinterested in giving users control over their own computing experience and who viewed computing as something that took place in a shared lab space, not in your home or dorm room.
Rather than pursuing an argument with these self-appointed Lords of Computing, the Gopher team simply went around them, interconnecting to their services without asking for permission. They didn’t take data they weren’t supposed to have—but they did make it much easier for the services’ nominal users to actually access them. ❧

Annotated on February 23, 2020 at 08:39AM

Today’s Web giants want us to believe that they and they alone are suited to take us to wherever we end up next. Having used Adversarial Interoperability as a ladder to attain their rarefied heights, they now use laws to kick the ladder away and prevent the next Microcomputer Center or Tim Berners-Lee from doing to them what the Web did to Gopher, and what Gopher did to mainframes. ❧

Annotated on February 23, 2020 at 08:40AM

Legislation to stem the tide of Big Tech companies’ abuses, and laws—such as a national consumer privacy bill, an interoperability bill, or a bill making firms liable for data-breaches—would go a long way toward improving the lives of the Internet users held hostage inside the companies’ walled gardens.
But far more important than fixing Big Tech is fixing the Internet: restoring the kind of dynamism that made tech firms responsive to their users for fear of losing them, restoring the dynamic that let tinkerers, co-ops, and nonprofits give every person the power of technological self-determination. ❧

Annotated on February 23, 2020 at 08:42AM

Read Your right to comment ends at my front door. by Derek Powazek (Derek Powazek)
John Gruber of Daring Fireball posted a response to critic who took him to task for not having comments on his site (skip down to “As for Wilcox’s arguments regarding user-submitted comments”). My humble site has a tiny fraction of the traffic of Daring Fireball, but in this latest incarnation, I also decided to go without comments. Here’s why. I agree wholeheartedly with John that the decision to add comments to your site begins and ends with the site’s owner. I also agree that his site is a “curated conversation.” Conversations have been happening between weblogs since the advent of the permalink. Joe Wilcox, who obviously has a bone to pick with John, has no right to pick that bone on John’s site.
I love the ideas here.
Acquired Breaker – podcast listening & discovery (Breaker)
Listen to the best new podcast episodes with Breaker. Follow your friends to see what they’re listening to, and discover new shows that you’ll love. Like, share, and comment on your favorite episodes. Join the Breaker community and listen to the best stuff!
Downloaded a copy of this to my Android Phone to test out the functionality. Not much hope for using it as a daily driver, but I’m curious how they handle sharing URLs and if it could be used in creating listen posts.

Reminds me that I should throw a few podcast feeds into Indigenous for Android to see how it might work as a podcatcher and whether it would make a good Listen post micropub client.

↬ IndieWeb.org 2020/Austin/fromflowtostock Session () (#)

Read 2020/Austin/fromflowtostock (indieweb.org)
From Flow to Stock was a session at IndieWebCamp Austin 2020.
I’d love to see the video for this conversation once posted. The notes give a reasonable idea, but there’s a lot of discussion of silos going on here. I’m curious how those who attended might begin to own some of the ideas on their own websites in the future.

I see a lot of overlap with the ideas of commonplace books with what is going on here. Looking at the list of participants I’m not seeing any that I think might actually have both “stock” and “flow” on their personal websites yet. I feel like I’m getting ever closer to having them on mine.

Read 2020/Austin/mfmicro by IndieWeb (indieweb.org)
Learn microformats by fixing micro.blog was a session at IndieWebCamp Austin 2020.
I really want to see the video from this session once it gets posted. Building out and testing themes for various systems in the IndieWeb space is something we need to do some additional significant work on improving.

This is definitely an area I’m actively hacking in lately.

Read Why I Quit Twitter, a List by Derek Powazek (Medium)
After 12 years and over 41,700 tweets, I’ve deactivated my Twitter account. Here’s a few reasons why.
A solid list of reasons why to quit Twitter. Someone pointed out to me that he’s actually returned since. I find that my new use from a more IndieWeb perspective is a lot happier and healthier. I ought to document how I’ve been using it lately to diminish the harms.
Bookmarked Twitter OPML Export by Luca HammerLuca Hammer (opml.glitch.me)
Get websites and RSS Feeds of the people you follow on Twitter. Import the OPML-file with your favorite feedreader.
I love nothing more than OPML related tools! I just finished exporting all of my YouTube subscriptions the other day, now I can get the RSS feeds from the websites of all the people I’m following on Twitter?! This is awesome. I’ll need to work out how I might be able to import it all into my following page.

As I look at this wonderful little app, I can’t help but think at how nice it might be if they added the SubToMe universal following button for these. I haven’t looked in a while, but it’s possible that the Feed.ly integration for SubToMe needed a tweak to get it working again.