Warning signs with social media platforms

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In the aftermath of the issues with the major social media platforms, there have been a number of initiatives to reclaim social networking in a way that makes sense for people, with safety and personal control being at the forefront of a lot of peoples' minds.

However, many of these initiatives which have often showed up out of the blue have a bunch of red flags, and somehow people aren’t noticing them when they decide to commit wholeheartedly to a new platform. I think it’s worth sharing some of those warning signs, as someone who’s been around the block a few times.

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💬 Re: Mastodon is the new Google Reader Notes

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In reply to: Re: Mastodon is the new Google Reader

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.”

💬 Re: Announcing IndieWeb Utils v0.4.0 (with reflections on the library) Notes

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In reply to: Re: Announcing IndieWeb Utils v0.4.0 (with reflections on the library)

Indieweb Utils looks pretty neat and there’s a few projects I’ve had on the backburner which would benefit from this.

I’d also be pretty tempted to look into moving Pushl over to it, just to cut down on my own code maintenance requirements, except it looks like it doesn’t have any support for asyncio, which is less-than-optimal for an I/O-bound tool which sends a bunch of bulk updates. Is there any interest in adding asyncio support?

VRChat continued

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It seems like I chose a very… interesting time to get into VRChat, and also I’m taking a break from it for reasons not related to the current debacle.

I also have a lot of thoughts about VRChat as a platform, and where we can go from here.

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IndieWeb + Tumblr = 💜

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The other day, several IndieWeb developers (including me) got messaged by Tumblr’s COO about them searching for contractors to work on Tumblr-IndieWeb integration. I had to decline due to already being overextended and not really having the spoons or bandwidth to take on this work, but I offered to be available as a resource for high-level conceptual stuff, at the very least.

I’ve written a few bits over on Tumblr about my thoughts on how Tumblr can (and should) become an IndieWeb provider, and I am ecstatic that Tumblr is taking steps in this direction. I think that opening up IndieWeb to a wider audience is absolutely a good thing, and Tumblr is one of the best-positioned providers to make this a reality. In particular, Tumblr’s culture is incredibly IndieWeb-compatible, and rejects the idea that lock-in and monetization are the end goals of any social space.

I have some thoughts about how things can/should possibly work, although keep in mind that there’s absolutely a lot I don’t know about how Tumblr works under the hood. So this is going to be in extremely broad strokes.

(It’s also extremely a midnight rantle, so be warned if you’re expecting a useful technical discussion here.)

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💬 Re: Plurality and the IndieWeb Notes

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In reply to: Re: Plurality and the IndieWeb

@jamesg:

I am intrigued by the IndieWeb’s approach to plurality and building technologies that don’t serve the creation of monocultures or single ways of thinking about things. IndieWeb technologies help build plug-and-play social bridges. The technologies are your pipes. You get to decide how they connect and what you make with those pipes. This idea excites me to a great degree.

Could you explain what you mean by “plurality?” In the circles I run in it almost certainly means something different than what you mean by it, and the definition I’m familiar with is likely to be the more common one on the Internet in 2020 2022.

From context it seems like you’re talking about building a (distributed) voting/polling system, which is definitely an interesting topic to think about, and the first-cut approach would probably be to do something using fragmentions or otherwise having a u-vote-for (or similar) link either to an anchor on the page or to the resource being voted on (e.g. the image itself).

Twitter alternatives

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Because of Twitter’s impending buyout a lot of people are talking about alternatives to Twitter, including Mastodon. I could write a bunch of long rambles about this, but I already have:

Basically, my problem with Twitter isn’t that it’s centralized, but that it’s Twitter.

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