busybee fluffy rambles Notes

This article raises some good points, but there’s another reason I’m not all-in on Webmention: comments on private posts.

Post privacy is incredibly important to me, and supporting webmention on a privacy-post context requires that the comment (and notification thereof) be visible to the receiver’s endpoint, without it being visible to the world at large. This is okay with “unguessable” private URLs, but if you are doing a login-requred thing you start running into issues where you have to either let endpoints through to see the data (which means that any bad actor could also do the same), or you need the endpoints to support the authentication protocols (via e.g. AutoAuth or TicketAuth), and given how difficult those have been to get any meaningful adoption, I’m not terribly optimistic about that changing any time soon, especially with how many people farm their webmentions out to webmention.io which isn’t really in the business of managing things like authentication tokens.

But also, if you live in a world of webmentions for replies, that also greatly increases the chances that someone’s reply will be accidentally posted in public. I already see enough issues where friends will reply to my unauthenticated “stub” entries on Mastodon, rather than posting native comments onto my blog.

The more I get annoyed with Internet comment mechanisms, the more I think that email really is the way.

I removed Feedly from my Get Blogging resource for people who want to read and write blogs.

If you’d like to read blogs, there are some great other feed readers recommended in the list. I start every morning with Reeder and NewsBlur.

Molly White has written a great summary of why I can’t endorse Feedly anymore:

In a world of widespread, suspicionless surveillance of protests by law enforcement and other government entities, and of massive corporate union-busting and suppression of worker organizing, Feedly decided they should build a tool for the corporations, cops, and unionbusters.

I cannot support union-busting in any form, and it’s very disappointing to see a tool like Feedly attempt to capitalize on corporations who would like to engage in this activity. So it’s gone from the list, and I’d like to suggest: while they offer this product and cater to this market, please don’t use Feedly.

Personally I’m still a fan of self-hosting Feed on Feeds, which is pretty straightforward to do if you have even basic PHP webhosting. It isn’t the fanciest thing but it’s reliable and won’t sell your data to others, and it’s got the exact UX I want in a reader app (YMMV of course).

Jewish applicants are frequently passed over by hiring managers. In fact, 26% of hiring managers say they are less likely to move forward with Jewish applicants.

[…]

When asked how they come to believe that an applicant is Jewish, 56% say it’s because it was directly stated by the applicant. However, many also make assumptions based on the applicant’s educational background (35%), last name (33%), past or current experiences with Jewish organizations (28%), and even their appearance (26%).

[…]

When asked why they are less likely to move forward with Jewish applicants, the top reasons include Jews have too much power and control (38%), claim to be the ‘chosen people’ (38%), and have too much wealth (35%).

Why use ActivityPub when RSS still exists, and when IndieWeb adds social functionality to traditional, non-ActivityPub blogging?

Even at its best, ActivityPub is a very difficult standard to implement, with a lot of really hairy edge conditions and an at-best-mediocre experience for things that don’t fit neatly into its model, and Mastodon’s particular implementation of ActivityPub isn’t, y'know, great. (And I’ve written a bunch more about my thoughts on this as well.)

Basically I’d love to see more people support IndieWeb, using RSS/Atom and ideally also h-feed as the syndication formats, and to that end, I’d say that micro.blog is a better choice of “new Google Reader.”