Rambles that are fluffy, by fluffy
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.
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.)
In reply to: Re: Plurality and the IndieWeb
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).
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.
In reply to: Re: Building a Feed Reader to Follow Blogs and Websites: Part 1
Out of curiosity, have you put any thought into adding TicketAuth/bearer token support so that folks can get private subscription content as well? There’s a bunch of security aspects to consider with that but it’s a thing I’d love to see come into a reader.
There’s also a few UX things implied by microsub which I’m not a fan of, personally, and when I get around to finally building Subl (which I’ve only been talking about for as long as I’ve been talking about Publ) I was planning on building it as a standalone thing which could maybe optionally support microsub readers later, but the UX I want to build isn’t cleanly supported by the data model implied by microsub.
(Basically I want to build Feed on Feeds except in Python and with TicketAuth support.)
Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about some of the differences between self-hosted vs. silo spaces. One thing that really stood out to me is that in self-hosted spaces, the tendency is to allow complete control over which comments are visible, and silos almost never allow that, or if they do it’s at best an in-retrospect thing.
For example, most self-hosted blogging systems give you the ability to moderate all comments (as I do), or give easy access to deleting comments which got posted, or any number of mechanisms for curating the community.
But most silo systems don’t give you that access; you might be able to block recurring trolls, or flag a comment for third-party review (usually to no effect), but all posts are set to allow anyone (with access to the post) the ability to post anything at any time, and by default everything gets floated to everyone else.
This came especially to mind today because of this unfortunate video:
I’ve seen so many creators get burned out on what they like doing, because even if 99% of the comments are positive, that 1% really gets under their skin, and they stop creating.
I’ve seen so many creators get burned out on their communities, because even if 99% of it is positive, that 1% really gets under their skin, and they stop interacting with the community, turning it into a toxic cesspool.
I’ve seen so many creators decide to capitulate to the communities and set up a personal SubReddit that they designate other people to moderate, just to keep it contained somewhere else.
I know so many creators who are on the verge of burnout and getting really tired of the dark side of having an audience.
I’m not sure if giving people the ability to require commentary to be opt-in rather than opt-out would solve these problems, but I do know anecdotally that the random snipe-type responses I get from Twitter or Mastodon are way more annoying to me than the comments I opt not to post when submitted to my site. They’re out there and visible and I have to take extra steps to get rid of them, and it’s taken out of my hands as to whether I even can get rid of them.
I don’t think I like how webmention works.
