Goodbye, Twitter third-party login fluffy rambles

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So, a little while ago I did an extremely unscientific poll on login methods via Authl on this website. The results of that (measured by folks who accessed my site for any authenticated reason, not just folks visiting the login method poll):

  • 8 signed in via Fediverse (Mastodon/Pleroma/etc.)
  • 4 signed in via IndieAuth
  • 7 signed in via email

Not a single one signed in via Twitter.

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💬 Re: Private Comments, or Why I’m Down On Webmentions Notes

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In reply to: Haven Blog: Private Comments, or Why I’m Down On Webmentions

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.

What is the IndieWeb? General Articles

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Over the past several years, you’ve probably heard me or other web geeks talk about the IndieWeb, but just hearing about it doesn’t necessarily tell you what it actually is, exactly. The reality is that it’s both sort of complicated but also, at its core, really simple! If you do anything online with other people it’s definitely worth understanding and knowing more about.

At its core, the idea of the IndieWeb is that rather than participating in the public web on sites owned and operated by others, you do it on your own website, managed using whatever mechanisms you are most comfortable with, with some fairly-simple protocols for sites to then communicate with one another.

It’s not really any one specific thing, so much as a set of ethics and standards to follow to give people control over their own experience online. It’s people driving practices, which inform protocols. There is no one specific piece of IndieWeb software that you must run in order to participate; instead it’s a set of loose agreements about how to participate, with some simple, mostly-optional protocols to make it work better.

But I know that’s extremely vague and unhelpful, so here’s my attempt at writing a practical guide for what the IndieWeb is and how you can participate in it!

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Warning signs with social media platforms fluffy rambles

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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 fluffy rambles

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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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