layout: post title: A polluted trust web created: 1059398700 categories:

• Social Media

Back when I was heavily experimenting with LinkedIn, I was somewhat frustrated about how slowly my network was growing. That is, people that I linked weren’t linking in people that they knew, so it was mainly filled with people that I already knew.

One of the great things that came about from that spate of experimentation was a connection with Andrew Jones. I hesitated about asking him to connect with me directly, since we had only communicated via email, and he was (quick calculation…Evan -> Brendon -> Andrew) 3 degrees away from me. But in the end, I was "linked" to Andrew.

I just recently went back to my LinkedIn page, and found it polluted! Filled with page after page of people that were so far removed, with so many other links, that I would never think of contacting them. So, I think I’m in favour of short-chain links — they are more valuable. You can search by "degrees away", but that is also only useful if all the links are actually strong links. That is, I would never link in someone that I didn’t really know or had some direct interaction with.

What actually prompted me to write was Dan York’s most recent (27 Jul 2003) diary entry, where he talks about similar issues with key signing.

layout: post title: "Minding the Planet: The Birth of the Metaweb" created: 1071214080 categories:

• Personal Publishing
• Social Media

Is it hype? I’m too far gone drinking the Kool-Aid to tell. Go read Nova Spivack and make up your own mind. In short, RSS supplanting email, becoming the primary transport used on the web.

My projections indicate that within 5 years almost every Weblog will provide an RSS channel of its content. In coming years a large percentage of consumers and professionals are expected to begin blogging — Weblogs are the new homepages; everyone should have one.

There is more to this than meets the eye — when people == weblog, this means that a person’s profile is their weblog. Or could their profile actually be their weblog?

layout: post title: Atom will create the two-way web created: 1085869203 categories:

• Personal Publishing

So, this means that the smart money is going to go into the feed space. Because that’s where the action is. Forget AdSense. I need contextual ads built right into my feed. Forget Typepad links, I need the links built right into my feed. Same with comments. And the feed needs to be two way. Atom has that capability I am told. So let me comment right in the feed. That’s a hell of lot better than Trackback. It’s the Feed, Stupid: A VC

RSS, comments, and Trackback (plus tools like Technorati) have gone a certain way into giving us a better picture of our neighbours in cyberspace, and the ability to interact more directly.

Atom, being one spec for both reading and writing to weblogs, definitely is a good candidate for the next, full round-trip model of the two way web.

layout: post title: The Dark Web created: 1119771759 categories:

• Social Media
• Personal Publishing
• Personal

In wrapping up his feelings about GnomeDex, Lee LeFever pinged me to explain what our made up term ‘The Dark Web’ means. I don’t feel entirely comfortably explaining it, so tag, you’re it Richard.

I’ve been hearing more references to different things referred to as ‘dark-something’ Dark Blogs are Intranet blogs, Dark Net is a book by J.D. Lasica and ‘The Dark Web’ is something Boris Mann will have to explain Common Craft: GnomeDex Revolution…

I actually do have my own Dark Web blog — it’s my personal site. In some ways, I would almost welcome a LiveJournal-like (or Flickr-like) set of access rules so that only the people I want can read it. So, it means I sensor myself, but am OK with anyone looking there. After listening to Julie Leung’s presentation for the second time, I feel I’d like a private channel for some people in my life…including me, in the old personal journal/diary sense of the word.

layout: post title: "Google’s challenge: searching the live web" created: 1153717786 categories:

• Google
• Live Web
• Google Subscribed Links
• Google Sitemaps
• PubSub
• Web 2.0
• Search Engine Voodoo

I'm looking forward to the Google "Behind the scenes" presentation put on by the Vancouver HPC Users Group (note: not a permalink; added to Upcoming.org). It's being given by Narayanan Shivakumar ('Shiva'), a Google Distinguished Entrepreneur and the founding Director of the Google Seattle-Kirkland R&D center. The abstract is as follows:

Google deals with large amounts of data and millions of users. We'll take a behind-the-scenes look at some of the distributed systems and computing platform that power Google's various products, and make the products scalable and reliable.

The bio says that Shiva is currently "excited about a variety of search and webcrawling technologies (including Google Sitemaps)".

I see the challenge for Google and all search engines to be "how to search the live web". One of the things I often explain is that I firmly believe that all static web pages will eventually be replaced by dynamic web pages. Another way to say this is that much of the content on the web, especially much of it which is being updated often, is actually being created by web apps.

For web apps, URLs are nothing more than keys to content. Type in www.domain.com/about, and the underlying web application will look up the content that is keyed to that URL. In fact, that "about" string is nothing more than a query to the underlying content "engine" of a website.

What is Google and other search engines? They are a centralized aggregator of all the unique queries of all the web apps that run websites in the world. Increasingly, they are having trouble keeping up.

So, the Google Sitemaps (Search Engine Watch Q&A with Shiva from June of 2005) XML file is an attempt to have a central place per site to indicate to Google how to get at that information. Google Co-op (with Google Subscribed Links powering it) is another, albeit user-driven example. Both are still designed with static content (or relatively unchanging) in mind. Of course, the purpose for Google Sitemaps is to have individual websites use this as a hint file, to inform the GoogleBot what is updated and what it would like indexed. I'm not sure that a new format is needed here — the idea was that it could be an industry standard, but of course it's still being called Google Sitemaps, so it doesn't seem to have done much in that regard.

What other XML format do we know that describes changes to web pages? Yep, RSS/Atom are definite features of the live web, and has well defined mechanisms of being polled for updates (and even publish-and-subscribed to, a much more efficient mechanism than polling).

Social search, cross-language search (search for "monkey" in English, get relevant matches in all languages you understand and optionally machine translations of ones you don't), subscribed searches, levels of notification (your mobilephone, your RSS reader, your work email account) — all of these are combining into something more complex than "type words into a box", in the interest of becoming simpler: getting us the information we need, when we need it.

If you hadn't already guessed, yes, I am going to <strike>try and</strike> ask some questions at the presentation. Of course, this is a presentation at the High Performance Computing Users Group, so maybe I won't get to ask as many search questions as I'd like.

And yes, I do find it ironic that the number one hit for Shiva's full name is a link that leads to a 403 Forbidden error :P

layout: post title: Mobile apps vs. The mobile web created: 1161584196 categories:

• Java
• Google
• Gmail
• Google Reader
• Google Maps
• Web 2.0
• Wireless, Cellular, and Mobile

I made this post originally with Blogplanet, a Java app for mobile. It may end up being one of the few mobile apps that I actually keep around.

But what do I mean about mobile apps vs. the mobile web? Well, we talk a lot about web applications, but we usually think about a full desktop and browser supporting them. The mobile web can be thought of as being the web optimized for mobile devices, or we can think about how web-based applications should be evolving to work well with mobile devices.

Then there are mobile apps. Many of them are, indeed, written in Java for that mythical write once run anywhere, although in the mobile world it's more like write once, endlessly test, tweak, and optimize everywhere. The platform specific apps tend to be richer and more polished — e.g. Series 60 apps for the vast variety of Symbian phones out there. ShoZu is a pretty good example, but even there, there is Seres 60 vXX where incompatibilities creep in.

So, I've been using both the mobile web and mobile apps on my new E61. And the mobile web is winning. Much of that is due to Google.

Gmail? Works great in HTML (*not* mobile) mode using the built in browser. Google Reader has a mobile friendly mode. Google Maps actually doesn't work very well / at all, and I actually used Mapquest. But, then there's a mobile app for this — downloadable Google Maps for Mobile. Chalk one point up for mobile apps.

So why would I use Gmail instead of the built in email client? Which I could even configure with Blackberry push email? Well, one reason is that Gmail for domains is my main email, and I heavily label / sort my email. On the mobile, using POP3, it just grabs everything.  I don't see myself using the built in email client until Gmail (or another system I use) supports IMAP.

Going forward, the browser on my mobile device will, like the desktop, continue to be the most important application on there. Are you developing for mobile? Well, forget it…you're developing for the web, some of it just happens to have slightly smaller screens.

As part of my dive back into open source, I took a look at my blog, social networks, and other tools I’m using.

Well, maybe that’s not quite true. I’ve been tinkering with my blog for 16 years, I doubt I’ll ever stop, regardless of how I’m spending my time!

Twitter all the things§

I’ve stopped using Facebook, Tumblr, Medium, and Instagram and doubled down on using Twitter for my "whole self". Which in my case means posting cooking storms, long threads on travel, as well as lots and lots of tech.

For this post I’m not going to get into why I’m off other platforms. With Twitter, I’ve always seen it as of the web, at the very least — a link for every post. And, thanks to a long ago setup, I have an automatically updated archive of all my tweets.

Twitter once again made changes to their API for third-party apps. I’ve used Tweetbot for years with aggressive filtering to make using Twitter much much better. And Tweetbot still does that, but I’m worried for when that’s no longer possible.

And then Twitter locked my account and wanted to send an SMS to my Canadian number while I was in the US.

And that was a good reminder that that I should work on being less dependent on Twitter¹ as well.

Using MicroBlog§

I’ve had my eye on [[Micro.blog]] for a long time. I reserved the handle @boris there right at the beginning, but didn’t do anything with it.

I have great admiration for Pat Dryburgh and saw him working on a Jekyll theme and using MicroBlog so all his content is on his own site.

MicroBlog is free to use. You sign up and then link in one or more feeds, either RSS/Atom or JSON, and it will publish these to your timeline, linking back to the original. It’s centralized in its namespace, but aggregates content.

You can pay for a few different things. If you don’t want to run your own blog, MicroBlog will run one for you. What I pay for is cross posting, which is only $2/month. This enables, on a per feed basis, linking in your Twitter, Medium, or LinkedIn accounts, and posting content to them. Facebook Pages are supported, but I haven’t been able to get that working, and that isn’t really what I want to spend time on.

Jekyll and Git§

Since I use Jekyll for my blog, all of the content is text/HTML/Markdown files. I store them in Git, and have used a variety of tools to generate and serve up the static HTML site.

Currently I have the blog source in a private repo on GitHub and use a free account on Netlify to build and serve it².

But, with a static site, I need to run a separate server if I wanted to accept short posts on mobile. Specifically, with MicroBlog’s iOS client, it talks to either a Wordpress site or to anything that can accept [[Micropub]]³ posts.

Microglue§

I talked to Pat, who was already doing interesting things with podcasts and Git to get things on MicroBlog, about what a little Microglue server would look like.

I’d want it to run on Heroku, talk to the GitHub API, understand Jekyll front matter and markdown, and speak Micropub.

I wrote this up as a series of issues in a GitHub repo with feedback from Pat, intending to place a couple of bounties. Time passed, I added a large BorisCoin⁴ bounty via Gitcoin, and then had ozkan leave me a note about an existing implementation.

Rube Goldberg IndieWeb§

And so I dove into Pelle’s webpage-micropub-to-github. He pretty much wrote it exactly how I had hoped to have such a thing built.

It’s built in Node and has a [[Deploy to Heroku]]button which can get you up and running in minutes.

Of course, minutes turned into slightly longer as I worked on getting the entire IndieWeb toolchain configured and setup on my blog and various other places.

I documented the process in a Github issue and will likely fork Pelle’s code so I can experiment, bounty some issues, and generally make it work for me. And then contribute fixes upstream of course!

Is it working?§

Since I was using live accounts for all of this, various messages made it through to different systems.

This one [made it to twitter](https://twitter.com/bmann/status/1045576992270295040 pull):

I may quite possibly be posting this via micropublish.net, to my own micropub server on Heroku, which turns it into Jekyll compatible md file and posts it to Github, which sends it to Netlify, which creates a feed for MicroBlog.

Which got me a ["Saw what?" from @jimgroom](https://twitter.com/jimgroom/status/1045577439752196097 pull).

But my favourite was the "It’s past midnight, is it working yet?" which made it all the way to Medium and LinkedIn.

Next Up§

I’m now trying out a bunch of MicroPub Clients, and also documenting that in issues.

I’ll turn a bunch of these things into issues and see how much farther I get.

I don’t have the MicroBlog iOS client working yet, and neither is the OwnYourGram site (which is really great for walking you through every step of getting your IndieWeb / MicroPub setup). Both need some upgrades to the server to work with media handling.

I also need to share the micro and full JSON feed templates that I made for Jekyll to syndicate to Microblog with. Stay tuned, and perhaps I’ll have time to actually organize a fun IndieWeb meetup in Vancouver soon.

Continuing the discussion of how IndieWeb needs to evolve in order to see adoption.

Chris Aldrich responds to my question "What does a Model T assembly line look like for IndieWeb?" by first asserting that that’s what Twitter and Facebook already are.

So I guess I’ll need to explain what I meant by asking that. No, I don’t think "Model T Assembly Line" equals Facebook. And one large MicroBlog instance isn’t it, either.

How does an end user — I’ll call this person a tinkerer, because you’re going to at least need to copy and paste some tech instructions — deploy a site for just them, that works out of the box? And, where is the list of different "just works" solutions that they can choose from?

The answer to Boris is that the IndieWeb has been working on the scope problem first knowing that once the interoperable kinks between systems can be worked out to a reasonable level that scale will be the easy part of the problem. Obviously micro.blog has been able to productize IndieWeb principles (with several thousands of users) and still work relatively flawlessly with a huge number of other platforms. There have been tremendous strides towards shoehorning IndieWeb principles into major CMSes like WordPress (500+ active users currently) and Drupal (50+ active users) not to mention several dozens of others including Known, Perch, Craft CMS, Hugo, Kirby, etc., etc.

Plugins to existing systems are great! But: in many cases, the base system has a high technical complexity. I personally wouldn’t feel comfortable telling people to run their own WordPress or Drupal instances — you need hosting experience and security maintenance. So right away that’s a relatively high cost.

I’ve spent quite some time looking at this stuff, especially just recently. I just added a PR to Pelle Wessman @voxpelli’s webmentions server so that it can be one-click "Deployed to Heroku". Pelle wants to go further and have it work in "single user mode", but for now anyone can host their own webmentions server.

Known is the best of the bunch that Chris lists, in terms of being fully integrated and setup out of the box. Except I think you still need to setup Bridgy separately? Bridgy seems to do everything that people actually need in terms of communicating with today’s social media world, so I don’t understand why that functionality isn’t baked in to more systems? I originally got Known working on Heroku shortly after it launched (notice a theme?) and it’s on my list to set it up this way again.

This "Deploy to Heroku" modality (or Zeit or other serverless style) is a simpler, turn key model for both developers and end users. Especially for distributed systems, we can’t think in a mode of old school LAMP stack systems where the "user" is hand updating the operating system layer. Even Docker deploys just sort

I want to see distributed systems where users are hosting from mobile phones to Raspberry Pis, and every mode in between. IndieWeb has the right spirit for this, and absolutely needs to work on protocols and interoperability, but it also has an issue where a lot of this code is simply stale.

So: how do we encourage more Manton’s and Pelle’s to build Model-Ts that are one-click-deploy simple for both tinkerers and other developers?

Ansible IndieWeb§

Some kind of Ansible-scripted test best of IndieWeb sites, all spun up automatically and then tested interacting with each other.

Also! Would be fun to turn that Ansible IndieWeb test bed into some kind of weird experiment of sites automated interacting with each other. Just letting them go wild and see what happens.

Apple design inspiration Instagram post showcasing the Apple II and a variety of screens Notes on Apple Pascal Design != UI Check out the apple design manual [downloaded, should host pdf somewhere] and take notes on it.

• [[flancian@social.coop]] https://social.coop/@flancian/113459365047313992 pull

• [[2024-11-10T15:28:41.385Z]] @[[flancia.org]]: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:xu4fhdxwmrptiwfvq5ymbkxx/post/3lam4lso5u52d pull

• [[2024-11-10 15:28:38+00:00]] @[[flancian@social.coop]] (link):

  • I just realized this: because of the amount of ads and crap that modern websites often have, the [[archived web]] might *already* be better than the live web.

    Consider, for example, https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/gregor-macgregor-map-of-poyais.

    It is an interesting article; I don’t regret reading it, or supporting Atlas Obscura with my presence. But the context it provides, in particular the ads experience, is subpar as of 2024 — yet representative.

Calibre-Web§

URL : https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web

A web interface for your [[Calibre]] library.

Cozyweb§

• [[2026-09-01 16:52:36+00:00]] [[idopi@mapstodon.space]] https://mapstodon.space/@idopi/117196820111980318 pull

Dense Web§

When the web is so densely [[linked]] that [[Search Engines]] are no longer necessary and we can [[navigate]] by moving where we want to go along our [[desire paths]] instead of going where we’re told.

Dense Web§

When the web is so densely [[linked]] that [[Search Engines]] are no longer necessary and we can [[navigate]] by moving where we want to go along our [[desire paths]] instead of going where we’re told.

Dense Web§

When the web is so densely [[linked]] that [[Search Engines]] are no longer necessary and we can [[navigate]] by moving where we want to go along our [[desire paths]] instead of going where we’re told.

Dense Web§

When the web is so densely [[linked]] that [[Search Engines]] are no longer necessary and we can [[navigate]] by moving where we want to go along our [[desire paths]] instead of going where we’re told.

• [[jonny]] https://social.coop/@jonny/108530524907884972 pull
• [[flancian]] https://social.coop/@flancian/108535332904405502 pull

• [[json_dirs]] https://twitter.com/json_dirs/status/1540187043359121408 pull

• [[librebits]] https://masto.nobigtech.es/@librebits/108470451562037916 pull

• #pull [[dweb principles]]

• [[bengo@mastodon.social]] https://mastodon.social/@bengo/109542966857473990 pull

• [[bengo]] https://mastodon.social/@bengo/109357361761508645 pull

• [[mfosterio]] https://twitter.com/mfosterio/status/1523743207674109952 pull

Environmental impact of the web§

• https://whatdoesmysitecost.com/

• Backlinks :: Web

Thoughts on the current state of the web and taking action to make it more ethical.

The modern web often forces all developers to adhere to more and more specifications (have you seen how long and convoluted the RFC manual is?), and lives in a world where only the companies that create the standards can practically adhere to them.

This is bad abstraction! This process is no different from forcing everyone who uses a technology to add specific components to their work rather than taking on this responsibility as the browser.

Of course, information like a robots.txt, a webpage title and these sorts of things should be standardized and mandated by the user — but there are lots of sensible defaults, like keyboard-navigable websites, that could be applied and later overridden by the user if they don't like these defaults.

Resource Usage

Resources

• Website Carbon Calculator

• This Website is killing the planet

• go green with local fonts

• no, your clean code won't save the planet

• energy consumption measurement of a studio may not be the best place for this

• low tech mag: the printed website

• Web Design and Carbon Impact – Carl MH Barenbrug – Minimalissimo – Minimalism Life

Web Minimalism

Size Compression

There are transpilers and minifying tools, but to best optimize for small websites you might as well roll your own static site generator. I've been using Python's Jinja2 template engine but I'm sure there are better options.

Lots of resources suggest that your site, or its critical resources at the least, should fit in the first ten packets:

• https://www.tunetheweb.com/blog/critical-resources-and-the-first-14kb/

• https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2020/01/front-end-performance-checklist-2020-pdf-pages/#setting-realistic-goals

• https://tylercipriani.com/blog/2016/09/25/the-14kb-in-the-tcp-initial-window/

There are obvious performance improvements to some actions as well:

• https://blog.logrocket.com/improve-site-performance-inlining-css/

• https://www.filamentgroup.com/lab/load-css-simpler/

writing css with accessibility in mind

Behavior

Stop breaking links with javascript:: the web app should act exactly as one would expect a typical website to do. Back buttons should be reproduced to have consistent behavior at the last!

Accessibility

Resources

• REact ESLint Plugin

• Picking friendly colors for error messages for Pyret

• Axe-core (+Storybook a11y addon): checks rendered HTML for accessibility; browser extensions and react integrations are both available

• Spectrum browser extension to examine how those with different color vision deficiencies will view the application

• Tab through you application! Make sure that the tab key proceeds in an order that makes sense. A 'skip navigation' link should appear the first time the 'Tab' key is pressed (a la GitHub) to enable users to tab through the relevant content rather than the heading.

• Always try to zoom to 200%; many users use the web this way! The size should behave in exactly the same way.

• Use a screen reader to browse. This will ensure that your semantic markup, interactive elements and other utilities are up to spec.

• Open content in browser reading mode; ensure that the minimum viable amount of content is available.

WCAG Standard

Text

• All non-text content must have a visible text alternative.

• Any prerecorded audio and video media must have alternatives completely presented via text. Captions and descriptions for these mediums must always be provided.

• Sign language interpretation is provided for all prerecorded audio content on synchronized media.

• Information, structure and relationships can be programmatically determined via text. Tags, aria labels and semantic elements should be used to strictly define navigable websites.

• The purpose of an element must always be determined independent of the component, icon or region (use names and text everywhere).

• Content does not restrict its viewing to a specific display orientation.

• Never use color as the only means of conveying information.

• Contrast ratio is very important, and text should be resized 200%+ without loss of content or functionality.

• No loss of content functionality occurs from:

  • Line height 1.5x

  • Spacing 2x

  • Letter spacing 0.12x

  • Word spacing 0.16x

  • hover on focus: can dismiss without focus

Keyboard navigable

• No keyboard trap; all available through keyboard shortcuts, always remap or turn shortcut off

• No more than three flashes in one second period

• Any animation motion can be disabled

• Bypass repeated blocks of content

• Focus order preserves meaning

• Link purpose can be determined by link text alone

• More than one way to locate a web page

• Focus always visible

• Pointer gestures very important! Target at least 44x44 CSS pixels

Understandable

• Identify specific definitions used in an unusual way, jargon, idioms

• Definitions provided for all abbreviations

• Changing the setting does not change context

• Navigational mechanisms are repeated in many web pages

• Error location is identified and error described to user in text

• Labels & instructions provided for all user input

• Error prevention: legal, financial:

  • Submissions are reversible

  • Data is always checked and validated

  • Method for reviewing, confirming and correcting information before finalizing

• Context sensitive help is always available to the user. (What does this mean?)

Robustness in Context

• Parseable: properly nested, unique IDs, no duplicate attributes

• Name and role can be programmatically determined

• Status messages can be determined programmatically for assistive tech

Tips

• Episodic memory can be hard. Introduce product features gradually.

• Never divide screen into multiple actions.

• Provide clear feedback on progress or completion

• Provide reminders and alerts for habitual actions

• Do not assume anything; abbreviations, acronyms, scrolling, search, back button

• Long-form text is okay as long as attention is focused

• Font size of at least 16px.

• Always pair icons and symbols with text.

• Avoid using blue for colors and never use color to convey a message.

• Reduce the distance between sequential interface elements. Buttons should be at least 9.6mm diagonally for ages up to 70.

• Interface elements to be clicked with a mouse should be at least 11mm diagonally.

• Clear, bold headings to gravitate to are vital to navigation.

• Standard treatments for links should be used as they're familiar.

• Buttons and links should all be clearly labeled and show that they've been clicked; some graphic buttons can be distracting rather than informative, and here text is better.

• Use static menus — leading to another apge on click - rather than walking menus — exposing a sub menu. Sub menus should be on click rather than hover.

• Do error pages provide a robust description to the user?

• Is there a clear site map available from every page that provides an overview of the entire site?

• Can the page be skimmed? Is there an easy starting point? If pages are dense is it grouped?

• Is there an obvious way to increase the font size?

• Is the content written in the active voice?

Sources

Designing user interfaces for an aging population W3C WCAG: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines

• Suggested Accessibility Techniques

Designing for the elderly same thing AARP Site Accessibility ISO: Accessing the World A myriad of accessibility testing tips, links, resources humanetech.com

Organizations

Disroot an organization that stands for internet freedom and provides free services for git, hosting, mail and many others. https://opensource.builders/: open source alternatives to your favorite tools (Primarily web-based!)

The evolution of HTTP de-google your blog

web hostility

article "Facebook is at odds with the open web that I love and defend…" Netscape Navigator (small internet) -> big internet! The modern web is being destroyed — personalized content, growth hacking, social media activation, CMS and user experience. These websites are not built to appreciate the visitor — they are constructed to make the user a customer. Cookies bad! Small blogging good! what is wrong with ads?

today's js

https://lea.verou.me/2020/05/todays-javascript-from-an-outsiders-perspective/ article THe modern web is painful. Interfacing with js and node results in conflitts between es and js versions, node incompatibilities, differnet import syntax in different circumstances, etc. it's painful. How do you import with node? without node? <script> tag or not to script? Where did the node modules go? This is a good rant of questions and things to feature on the wbesite

choose boring tech.

a solar protocol hosted across a network of solar powered servers!

http://bootstrappable.org/projects.html good projects to work on this is a general build philosophy addressing the chicken and egg problem — to trust platforms, we must see how each part is produced from source, but we do not have access to the source of compiled code when we run it against the language they are compiling!

How to detect if JavaScript is disabled?

Create No-JavaScript friendly sites Why is this website port scanning me? designing webpages to last cutting gooogle out of your life

Even Better Motherfucking Website Is tracking users with CSS evil? The internet is for end users

don't break the web; just make 404s into 302s!you can do this in nginx : ) second-guessing the modern web in defense of the modern web accessibility at the university level https://html.energy/ https://github.com/arismelachroinos/lscript lazy scripts for kali linux to enhance penetration testing things

the software heritage archive, for backing up code ethical performance on the web always bet on html

accessibility through simplicity taking advantage of browser cacheing gdpr compliance guide for best practices https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24258855 efficiency after throwing away react

• [[frank]] https://indieweb.social/@frank/109304601553728179 pull

How Blogs Broke The Web§

• How the Blog Broke the Web - Stacking the Bricks

How would you make a local-first IndieWeb?§

…and why would you want to?

[[Local-first software]] applied to [[IndieWeb]].

Would the inbox/outbox model in actor model work in a local-first indieweb context?

• [[flancian@social.coop]] https://social.coop/@flancian/112888112229741380 pull

• [[2024-08-01 18:11:32+00:00]] @[[flancian@social.coop]] (link):

  • Summarizing, a [[humane web]] should be:

    #accessible
    #inclusive
    #safe
    #secure
    #sustainable
    #reliable
    #resilient
    #transparent
    #independent
    [[human centered]]

Indie Web§

• [[pull]] [[indieweb]]

• [[flancian]] https://twitter.com/flancian/status/1466060491483140096 pull
• [[flancian]] https://twitter.com/flancian/status/1442184381997584388 pull

• [[2022-05-06 21:47:53]] [[@ewwn:matrix.org]] (link):
  • Recently I just completed my website finally, static site with a sprinkle of different content types, stream speeds, and of course wikilinks to draw it all together. In the background, I’m working on a selfhostable designed to make webmentions and other decentralized (not crypto fwiw) cross site communication that is integral to the [[indie web]] easy, a topic very relevant to agora

I’m also working on a to-do list that supports infinite nesting in a very powerful way. Less related but cool and still knowledge managementish

There are many other ideas in my head, like a framework designed to ship no JavaScript and analysis of a database of a million love letters I’ve gotten my hands on from a dubious way

• [[2022-05-06 21:48:23]] [[@ewwn:matrix.org]] (link):

  • <@charismatic_shell:matrix.org> What projects?

Recently I just completed my website finally, static site with a sprinkle of different content types, stream speeds, and of course wikilinks to draw it all together. In the background, I’m working on a selfhostable tool designed to make webmentions and other decentralized (not crypto fwiw) cross site communication that is integral to the [[indie web]] easy, a topic very relevant to agora I’m also working on a to-do list that supports infinite nesting in a very powerful way. Less related but cool and still knowledge managementish There are many other ideas in my head, like a framework designed to ship no JavaScript and analysis of a database of a million love letters I’ve gotten my hands on from a dubious way

The IndieWeb wiki is the main hub for information.

The IndieWeb is a community of individual personal websites, connected by simple standards, based on the principles of owning your domain, using it as your primary identity, to publish on your own site (optionally syndicate elsewhere), and own your data. more »

IndieWeb standards include:

• [[Webmention]] to notify other websites
• [[WebSub]] to get real time updates on other sites’ new content
• [[Micropub]] to publish to your site with an ease
• [[IndieAuth]] to authenticate with your website
• [[Microsub]] (experimental) to follow others, collect posts, read, and interact with them

IndieWeb is composed of a number of [[microformats]].

Indieweb§

• A [[community]].
  • [[go]] https://indieweb.org/
  • [[toot]] https://social.coop/web/statuses/104959656532080052
  • [[decentralized]]
  • [[micropub]] is a modern publishing interface.

IndieWeb§

URL : https://indieweb.org

A social network made out of the World Wide Web. Not locked in to big monolithic platforms (Facebook, Twitter).

At the heart of the IndieWeb is an attempt to unify the ideas behind personal websites, blogs and social networks, but in a manner consistent with how the world wide web operates.

– Your Website Is Your Castle - Desmond Rivet

My website at https://doubleloop.net is an IndieWeb site.

Your website acts much like your wall on Facebook or your timeline on Twitter - it’s your personal soapbox, your castle on the web.

– Your Website Is Your Castle - Desmond Rivet

[…]one recreates, in a decentralized manner, the kinds of online interactions one has come to expect from private social networks.

– Your Website Is Your Castle - Desmond Rivet

Misc notes§

rss§

• rss-bridge: https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge

The fedi apps are essentially social readers§

• readers with built in interaction
• the problem is that they only implement the mastodon api
• not AP removed from that
• i can’t use my AP enabled site and plug into an existing fed reader
  • fed readers should implement AP, not mastodon APIs

Offline/local/sneakernet IndieWeb§

• something like Secure Scuttlebutt, but using IndieWeb building blocks
• quite a few related brainstorming sessions already taken place:
  • https://indieweb.org/local_first
  • https://indieweb.org/offline_first
  • https://indieweb.org/2019/Brighton/localoffline
• I’d imagine would use static sites/git/locally-hosted webmention services (telegraph/webmention.io), something like that

Misc§

• Why The IndieWeb? (Webbed Briefs)

“Solidarity grows through increasing liberty, not through constraint or obligation,” writes Ross. “Personal autonomy and social solidarity do not oppose each other, but instead reinforce each other.” In an age in which online spaces feel more divisive and polarized than ever, perhaps it is time to ponder how we can create conditions of personal autonomy that give rise to greater social solidarity.

• The Judgment of Paris | Lizzie O’Shea

self hosting purity tests have no end - you can never be truly independent of everyone and everything else - so we sidestep that debate entirely by being a big tent and saying all you really need is domain and data portability, everything else is up to you

– https://chat.indieweb.org/dev/2022-02-26#t1645893424908900

• [[Aaron Parecki]]
• [[tantek]]
• [[vera’s blog]]

• [[chrisaldrich]] https://mastodon.social/@chrisaldrich/108308485823472446 pull
• [[dougholton]] https://mastodon.social/@dougholton/109296834036764101 pull
• [[chrisaldrich]] https://mastodon.social/@chrisaldrich/109309644980322613 pull
• [[neil]] https://social.coop/@neil/109330710992975927 pull
• [[chrisaldrich]] https://mastodon.social/@chrisaldrich/109333549555337468 pull
• [[chrisaldrich]] https://mastodon.social/@chrisaldrich/109360385886422307 pull
• [[chrisaldrich]] https://mastodon.social/@chrisaldrich/109360393101568771 pull
• [[chrisaldrich@mastodon.social]] https://mastodon.social/@chrisaldrich/109365659531390689 pull
• [[dougholton@mastodon.social]] https://mastodon.social/@dougholton/109376579945251285 pull
• [[chrisaldrich@mastodon.social]] https://mastodon.social/@chrisaldrich/109415054387129962 pull
• [[chrisaldrich@mastodon.social]] https://mastodon.social/@chrisaldrich/109422973567936971 pull
• [[chrisaldrich@mastodon.social]] https://mastodon.social/@chrisaldrich/109423681020278651 pull
• [[chrisaldrich@mastodon.social]] https://mastodon.social/@chrisaldrich/109448748757048796 pull
• [[chrisaldrich@mastodon.social]] https://mastodon.social/@chrisaldrich/109474532768893044 pull
• [[chrisaldrich@mastodon.social]] https://mastodon.social/@chrisaldrich/109533395699549566 pull
• [[chrisaldrich@mastodon.social]] https://mastodon.social/@chrisaldrich/109600263697913522 pull
• [[chrisaldrich@mastodon.social]] https://mastodon.social/@chrisaldrich/110142562465118194 pull
• [[rmdes@mstdn.social]] https://mstdn.social/@rmdes/110634126245812721 pull

• [[flancian]] https://social.coop/@flancian/107394130289354828 pull
• [[frank]] https://indieweb.social/@frank/109304601553728179 pull
• [[frank@indieweb.social]] https://indieweb.social/@frank/109369789719445128 pull
• [[flancian@social.coop]] https://social.coop/@flancian/109369878222693134 pull
• [[techlifeweb@indieweb.social]] https://indieweb.social/@techlifeweb/109379413312586987 pull
• [[techlifeweb@indieweb.social]] https://indieweb.social/@techlifeweb/109521075407344335 pull
• [[techlifeweb@indieweb.social]] https://indieweb.social/@techlifeweb/109629781410270984 pull
• [[techlifeweb@indieweb.social]] https://indieweb.social/@techlifeweb/109662552830538258 pull
• [[danieldekay@masto.ai]] https://masto.ai/@danieldekay/109943711209650375 pull
• [[techlifeweb@indieweb.social]] https://indieweb.social/@techlifeweb/110141278100222598 pull
• [[techlifeweb@indieweb.social]] https://indieweb.social/@techlifeweb/110198016559053792 pull
• [[rmdes@mstdn.social]] https://mstdn.social/@rmdes/110253923724424323 pull
• [[rmdes@mstdn.social]] https://mstdn.social/@rmdes/110264252289406902 pull
• [[rmdes@mstdn.social]] https://mstdn.social/@rmdes/110272154804034095 pull
• [[rmdes@mstdn.social]] https://mstdn.social/@rmdes/110397563030282167 pull
• [[rmdes@mstdn.social]] https://mstdn.social/@rmdes/110491558338406810 pull
• [[rmdes@mstdn.social]] https://mstdn.social/@rmdes/110538058080755081 pull
• [[rmdes@mstdn.social]] https://mstdn.social/@rmdes/110544645845927471 pull
• [[rmdes@mstdn.social]] https://mstdn.social/@rmdes/110634231509434906 pull
• [[rmdes@mstdn.social]] https://mstdn.social/@rmdes/110666915024092591 pull
• [[rmdes@mstdn.social]] https://mstdn.social/@rmdes/110728857121164919 pull

• [[2022-11-03 00:02:17+00:00]] @[[ChrisAldrich]]: https://twitter.com/ChrisAldrich/status/1587958304503828480 pull
• [[2022-11-04 21:21:40+00:00]] @[[ChrisAldrich]]: https://twitter.com/ChrisAldrich/status/1588642658813349888 pull

• [[Scaledish]] https://twitter.com/Scaledish/status/1463024049823666180 pull
• [[Scaledish]] https://twitter.com/Scaledish/status/1463024048707973120 pull
• [[flancian]] https://twitter.com/flancian/status/1467458679662383105 pull

• [[2024-11-27 04:18:17]] [[@doubleloop:matrix.org]] (link):
  • Have you written / have thoughts about a comparison of [[Leaf]] to [[IndieWeb]] protocols anywhere? I’m intrigued as to overlaps / differences.

• [[2022-03-04 15:16:01]] [[@billseitz:matrix.org]] (link):
  • Shortcut [[indieweb]]

• [[2022-11-19 09:58:21+00:00]] @[[flancian@social.coop]] https://social.coop/@flancian/109369878222693134:

  • @tkenben @peterkaminski@mastodon.social @peterkaminski@toolsforthought.rocks interesting, thanks! IIUC that would be close to the [[indieweb]] approach, of which @chrisaldrich is an expert :)

    My currently position is that 1. that would in many ways be ideal, trending to a distributed system (instead of “just” decentralized) but 2. parts of DNS needs to become way more democratic (which in practice might mean: it must work without money involved) for that to have a good chance to work.

• [[TrailMarks]] https://twitter.com/TrailMarks/status/1524124030932037641 pull

• [[techlifeweb@indieweb.social]] https://indieweb.social/@techlifeweb/109493538998183539 pull
• [[techlifeweb@indieweb.social]] https://indieweb.social/@techlifeweb/109493756159302594 pull

• [[jonny]] https://social.coop/@jonny/108778595428428750 pull
• [[bengo@mastodon.social]] https://mastodon.social/@bengo/109552850334284458 pull

• [[neil@social.coop]] https://social.coop/@neil/109568041990975624 pull

Linked Web§

https://linkedresearch.org/ldn/

csarven is a gold mine, I have not fully read any of these yet but he seems to be a pioneer in the field

• https://csarven.ca/dokieli-rww
• https://csarven.ca/linked-research-decentralised-web
• https://csarven.ca/how-to-create-a-linked-data-site
• https://csarven.ca/statistical-linked-dataspaces
• https://csarven.ca/linked-research
• https://csarven.ca/call-for-linked-research
• https://csarven.ca/enabling-accessible-knowledge
• https://csarven.ca/dokieli
• https://csarven.ca/linked-data-notifications

https://github.com/linkeddata/dokieli/wiki#examples-in-the-wild https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData

https://solidproject.org/TR/protocol

test

test

test

test

• [[bengo]] https://mastodon.social/@bengo/109357361761508645 pull

• [[2026-08-24 21:26:30+00:00]] [[idopi@mapstodon.space]] https://mapstodon.space/@idopi/117152598627423191 pull

• [[frank]] https://indieweb.social/@frank/109327350301248919 pull
• [[mathew@campaign.openworlds.info]] https://campaign.openworlds.info/@mathew/109773316931268370 pull

• [[chrisaldrich@mastodon.social]] https://mastodon.social/@chrisaldrich/109474532768893044 pull

• [[2026-10-03 20:45:48+00:00]] [[idopi@mapstodon.space]] https://mapstodon.space/@idopi/117378931001128867 pull

Playing music on the web§

Is there some kind of web player or protocol or similar that you can put a link to a track, and if the person has some legit access to it, it’ll play for them?

So say I link a few tracks on a page. One is on archive.org, so that’s fine for everyone, hit play and off you go. One is under copyright. If the viewer has it in their library they’ve configured their browser to know about on their machine somewhere, they can play it. If they’ve bought it on bandcamp, they can play it. If they have a Spotify account, they can play it.

Don’t know if that makes sense. But I’d like to just link to a track in a webpage and have it playable in the page, regardless of where the visitor ‘owns’ it.

• song.link and odesli.co were recommended

• #references
  • Title: Digital Futures? Sociological Challenges and Opportunities in the Emergent Semantic Web
  • Meta:
    • Tags: #ref/Paper
    • Authored by:: Susan Halford , Catherine Pope , Mark Weal
    • Year: [[2013]]
    • Publication: Sociology
    • URL: https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038512453798
    • Citekey: halfordDigitalFuturesSociological2013
  • Content
    • Placeholder
  • #lit-context
    • Part of sociological sream of inquiry on [[Semantic Web]] and [[infrastructure]]. Cites [[@randallDistributedOntologyBuilding2011]]
  • #[[📝 lit-notes]]
    • Promise of [[Semantic Web]] rests on being able to have unique resource identifiers ([[URIs]]). This relates to [[formality]], although important to distinguish from [[compositionality]]
      • 

        ⥅ [[https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/firescript-577a2.appspot.com/o/imgs%2Fapp%2Fmegacoglab%2FM3PpiGtvzg.png?alt=media&token=e0783be4-c6dd-40fa-b76f-0805b1eb42b7]]

      • But naming entities is far from straightforward. See, e.g., [[@bowkerSortingThingsOut2000]] and [[@randallDistributedOntologyBuilding2011]]
        • 

          ⥅ [[https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/firescript-577a2.appspot.com/o/imgs%2Fapp%2Fmegacoglab%2FzYhdbtf4dB.png?alt=media&token=e9d60c6d-358e-4620-880d-e7cdf6360d82]]

      • This has significant implications for how we think about precisely in what sense [[Z: Composability is necessary for synthesis]], and how [[formality]] plays into it
        • #[[Z: [[context]] and [[formality]] are in tension]]

• an [[article]].
  • #go https://ruben.verborgh.org/articles/redecentralizing-the-web/

• [[flancian]] https://social.coop/@flancian/108376230338480746 pull

• [[flancian]] https://twitter.com/flancian/status/1530312425190346753 pull

• [[rmdes@mstdn.social]] https://mstdn.social/@rmdes/110554765661598856 pull

Rediscovering the Small Web§

– Rediscovering the Small Web - Neustadt.fr

Modern gatekeepers§

Today, most of the time spent on the web is either on a small number of very dominant platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, or mediated through them.

There is so much "content" that is constantly pushed at you as a user that very few of us actually venture out to browse and explore anymore. We simply don’t need to. But these platforms thrive on "user engagement"—likes, comments, clicks and shares—and their algorithms are more likely to give visibility to content that generates this behavior. Instead of browsing, the web is for many an endless and often overwhelming stream of content and commentary picked out by algorithms based on what they think you already like and will engage with. It’s the opposite of exploration.

When you’re not receiving information passively and instead actually actively looking for something, you most likely have the same singular point of entry as about 87% of all web users: Google.

the smaller, amateur web gets hidden in the shadows of web professionals who design around specific keywords and audiences.

Commercial web§

There has always been a place for commerce and marketing on the web. […] But today’s web is mostly commercial. The smaller web of individuals has neither the resources nor the will to compete for visibility and audience the way the commercial web does. […] Compared to the small web, this commercial web is tactical and predatory.

Product-oriented websites§

But the web is not always "profit-oriented" and it certainly does not need to be "user-centric" (and I say this as a UX consultant).

It is worth remembering a website does not have to be a product; it can also be art. The web is also a creative and cultural space that need not confine itself to the conventions defined by commercial product design and marketing.

The Web as a Creative Space§

A painter wouldn’t add more red to her painting or change the composition because market data showed that people liked it better. It’s her creative vision; some people might like it, others might not. But it is her creation, with her own rules. The question of "performance" is simply irrelevant. It’s the same thing with the small web.

Agreed, with the one exception of accessibility. That’s important for inclusivity.

If the commercial web is "industrial", you could say that the small web is "artisanal". One is not better than the other.

• [[jonny@social.coop]] https://social.coop/@jonny/110523454332596751 pull

Reweirding the web§

([[Emergent outlines]])

Outline§

Brief summary of how we got here§

Something along the lines of how web 1.0 to web 2.0 broke the web. The problem with platforms. The loss of agency, individuality, creativity, but also the shift of power dynamics.

You could create a website for free back then. But to communicate with others, you still needed some kind of sidechannel. So perhaps this is what IndieWeb ideas bring to it?

A little revenge from the old internet§

The starting point being the question at the end of [[404 Page Not Found]]:

It’s about time for a little revenge from the old internet

^ what does that mean? How could it happen?

So then the need for ease of individual creativity, and individual publication. Peer-to-peer made easy.

[[IndieWeb]]. [[Digital garden]]s. [[Beaker Browser]]. [[peer-to-peer networks]].

[[No Servers! No Admins!]], [[Information Civics]], etc.

Social media platforms have turned the web into

If you think of it as a historical narrative, maybe 1.0 was those in the know publishing anything; 2.0 was the facade of anybody publishing anything, as long as it goes through the central authority; web 3.0 could be anyone publishing anything, but peer-to-peer.

Why does it matter for people to be able to publish?§

And why does it matter if it goes through a central authority?§

• [[Authority in networks]]
• [[Centralised applications are authoritarian]]

[[Weird corridors]]§

Analogy to green / wildlife corridors. Prefigurative pathways that are re-enabling the weird web. Maybe of interest to [[cyberflâneur]]s?

Web rings, aggregators, etc.

How to enable people to do it?§

A way of finding niches? [[Building the new web in the shell of the old]]. What about [[Four types of anti-capitalism]] as a reference point. e.g. finding niches outside is one type. repurposing inside is another? maybe anti-trust is another. etc.

IndieWeb is one option. Beaker Browser is another. Self-hosting. These are all complicated for individuals.

As much as possible, moving away from client-server. But making that simple.

For web 3000, it should be as easy to get started as Facebook, but not controlled by central authorities. Could be state like the British Digital Cooperative. Could be municipal. Could be mutual aid. Anyone should be able to migrate between options - interoperability and API access. People own their own data and let others access it.

Accessibility§

Are weird designs accessible? If not, this is not good - how to make weird also accessible.

[[Re-ification]]§

Nostalgia fetish. Just bearing in mind that re-doing things might not necessarily be the best way to do things. Rewild. Redecentralise. etc. Maybe things were better, but always evaluate critically. Avoid primitivism.

References§

• [[Seeding the Wild]]
• [[404 Page Not Found]]
• [[Rediscovering the Small Web]]
• [[The Web We Have to Save]]
• [[How Blogs Broke The Web]]

Log§

[2021-04-10 Sat]§

Heh, turns out there’s a post already out there called [[Rewilding the web]] from a few months back. It’s really good, too, and kind of much what I wanted to write. Nay bother, just means its a good topic/idea, and my reweirding spin is a nice touch to add. I think.

Random notes/offcuts§

Thinking about ‘rewilding the web’. After the section named ‘Rewilding the network commons’ in [[Seeding the Wild]]. Rewilding having a double meaning - moving back from the strip malls of the social media platforms to more organic unstructured web.

Don’t really know enough about rewilding though to know if it’s a great analogy. Also wary of nature appropriation. Maybe reweirding the web? Actually yeah I prefer reweirding. It can then cover both rewilding in letting things go back to how things were in [[web 1.0]] (‘rewilding’), and the preference for how things were in web 1.0 ([[weird web]], reweirding). Also weirding is not so far from sounding like weaving ([[Weaving the web]]).

Digital garden analogy fits in alright to rewilding/reweirding.

• include mention of Marx, vectoralism, etc, Jameson?

• [[2024-11-27 20:53:00]] [[@doubleloop:matrix.org]] (link):
  • Oh here I say "Web rings, aggregators, etc." [[Reweirding the web]]

Rewilding the web§

URL : https://troynikov.io/rewilding-the-web/

The web is a much duller place now than it was 20 years ago. A large part of the reason is that the early web was much more fragmented, creating many ecological niches which became inhabited by the various strange and delightful species that tend to flourish in such environments.

The average person could create a web site for free, no questions asked. People took the opportunity and ran with it, building millions of pages –- 38 million at last count, according to Yahoo. They helped make the web a more vibrant territory, no longer the citadel of nerds in the know.

– Ghost Pages: A Wired.com Farewell to GeoCities | WIRED

Webrings, blogrolls, portals, and other mechanisms let people actually find the things on the web that, to them as individuals, were worth finding.

as more people got online and as using the web became more mainstream and less unusual, and eventually more about interaction than one-way publishing, the fragmentation gave way to a great wave of homogenization.

These are twin forces pulling in the same direction; to bring into existence new modes of creation and distribution that operate at human scale, not at the scale of power laws. Just as we are witnessing the revolt of the public tear through legacy institutions, we are about to witness a grass-roots revolt against the platforms, for and by the people for whom homogenization isn’t satisfying.

Patreon, Substack, and Ghost are listed as the tools for rewilding the web.

For now the ecosystem being created by these tools just looks a lot like blogging but with paywalls, tailored to those who want to disintermediate the platforms by owning their own brand, and who want to bypass legacy media institutions by being paid directly by their fans. The communication is still largely one-way. But this misses the larger potential.

What these new tools offer is actually friction.

Friction as a means to create niches. Hmm, interesting. Not convinced that I like the idea of needing friction.

Through these mechanisms the contributors / subscribers / fans, now connected directly to each creator, represent a directly addressable community bound by taste on the one hand and commitment on the other.

I don’t like the sound of this power dynamic. Though later on it does seem to focus more on communities, not some figurehead of the communities.

The platforms still have a role to play. Rather than being hosts and propagators of creativity directly, their function will shift to one of surfacing and discovery

Aggregators, things like Agora, maybe. And IndieWeb streams would be better than platform streams.

The communities are our families, private clubs, monasteries and brotherhoods, while the platforms will be the town square we congregate in.

A new kind of symbiosis, between the vast scale of the platforms and the human interaction of the communities is now being built. The weird will inherit the web.

I believe exactly this - something between the cottage industry of web 1.0 and the social industry of web 2.0.

Interesting the use of ‘weird’ here, too!

semantic web§

Core idea§

"extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation."

Links§

https://www.w3.org/RDF/Metalog/docs/sw-easy [[W3C Consortium]] [[P axis]] [[PNL]]

Semantic web§

• [[tanepiper]] https://tane.codes/@tanepiper/109269392166038148 pull
• [[tanepiper]] https://tane.codes/@tanepiper/109270876196763513 pull
• [[tanepiper]] https://tane.codes/@tanepiper/109284391477962651 pull

• [[jonny]] https://social.coop/@jonny/108522880667294794 pull
• [[jonny]] https://social.coop/@jonny/108535371599262260 pull
• [[smallcircles@social.coop]] https://social.coop/@smallcircles/109454474564003639 pull
• [[jonny@neuromatch.social]] https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/109877950411593701 pull
• [[jonny@neuromatch.social]] https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/109917932693207236 pull
• [[jonny@neuromatch.social]] https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/109985962959174699 pull
• [[jonny@social.coop]] https://social.coop/@jonny/110027855166110410 pull
• [[jonny@social.coop]] https://social.coop/@jonny/110031327017118171 pull
• [[jonny@neuromatch.social]] https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/110122766691767374 pull
• [[jonny@neuromatch.social]] https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/110346670913611962 pull
• [[jonny@neuromatch.social]] https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/110455258333497650 pull
• [[jonny@social.coop]] https://social.coop/@jonny/110546239227354904 pull

slow web§

Small web§

Most websites today are built like commercial products by professionals and marketers, optimised to draw the largest audience, generate engagement and ‘convert’. But there is also a smaller, less-visible web designed by regular people to simply to share their interests and hobbies with the world. A web that is unpolished, often quirky but often also fun, creative and interesting.

– Rediscovering the Small Web - Neustadt.fr

Same as the [[IndieWeb]]? If not the same, then very adjacent to it.

The internet historian and artist Olia Lialina sums up this historical negligence aptly when she writes, “… we’ve studied the history of hypertext, but not the history of Metallica fan web rings or web rings in general.”

– [[404 Page Not Found]]

• [[smallcircles@social.coop]] https://social.coop/@smallcircles/109875823270977404 pull
• [[smallcircles@social.coop]] https://social.coop/@smallcircles/109878664896606610 pull

• [[2026-09-01 16:52:36+00:00]] [[idopi@mapstodon.space]] https://mapstodon.space/@idopi/117196820111980318 pull

• #go https://thedorkweb.substack.com/p/gopher-gemini-and-the-smol-internet
• current software
  • [[gemini protocol]]
  • [[gopher protocol]]
  • [[finger protocol]]

• [[bengo@mastodon.social]] https://mastodon.social/@bengo/109479954304231724 pull
• [[youronlyone@c.im]] https://c.im/@youronlyone/110066291428862570 pull

• [[smallcircles@social.coop]] https://social.coop/@smallcircles/109878680260263217 pull
• [[youronlyone@c.im]] https://c.im/@youronlyone/110122290465129259 pull
• [[youronlyone@c.im]] https://c.im/@youronlyone/110444510494753961 pull

The Intelligent Social Web§

• https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AqbWna2S85pFTsHH4/the-intelligent-social-web

The vulgar and the strange (web)§

In the frame of digital urban planning, I think this quote from [[Jane Jacobs]] is very [[IndieWeb]].

What a wonderful challenge there is! Rarely has the citizen had such a chance to reshape the city, and to make it the kind of city that she likes and that others will too. If this means leaving room for the incongruous, or the vulgar or the strange, that is part of the challenge, not the problem. Designing a dream city is easy; rebuilding a living one takes imagination.

– Jane Jacobs

Says O’Shea:

We need to protect space in our minds for the vulgar and the strange, for the unpredictable experiences of living free from the influence of commercialism. Like the flâneur or flâneuse, we should aim to cultivate curiosity through this liberated lens.

There is a layer of governance infrastructure missing from the web§

Resources§

• Points of inspiration · Wiki · Media Enterprise Design Lab / CommunityRule · …
• [[Metagov]] Govern your Collective with Metagov Gateway

Log§

[2021-05-31 Mon]§

Read [[Governing the Information Commons]]. Linking in [[Online Communities Are Still Catching Up to My Mother’s Garden Club]].

[2021-05-17 Mon]§

• [[Flancian]] asks a good question on the social.coop tech channel - why does [[social.coop]] not use [[Mastodon]] to coordinate [[governance]]?
  • In my opinion because Mastodon is not very good for governance. It only has polls and even that is fairly new.
  • In fact I don’t find Mastodon very good for even just conversation.
  • That said, having two/more platforms to coordinate things is definitely a huge piece of friction to involving a community in governance.
  • h’s mockups from way back when, are interesting: https://social.coop/@h/1868600 https://social.coop/@h/1870490

[2021-05-09 Sun]§

Listened to [[Nathan Schneider on Cooperatives and Digital Governance]].

• [[neil]] https://social.coop/@neil/107322674783643844 pull

There was never an ‘open web’§

There was never an ‘open web’ because at a fundamental level the web enforced hierarchy via how URLs were defined to work. For most…

There was never an ‘open web’§

There was never an ‘open web’ because at a fundamental level the web enforced hierarchy via how URLs were defined to work. For most protocols (including gopher), a URL combines a hostname with a path. That hostname gets resolved (via DNS or simply by being an IP address) to a particular machine or a small set of machines. This was fine in the early 90s, when a 486 connected over ISDN could handle the simultaneous traffic of nearly everybody on earth with a web browser, but as soon as the number of users began to increase it became clear that scale was a problem: that single host needed to be beefy and have a thick pipe, or else the host for a popular page or image would get the ‘hug of death’.

A number of hacks were developed to get around this, without ever really addressing the underlying problem. Beefy gateways running extremely lightweight software would forward requests to a large number of servers in order to balance load. Other beefy gateways would cache static or static- enough content. Layers upon layers of networks of expensive rented servers would be put between the user and the ultimate web host in order to ensure that the host at the end didn’t go down under high traffic (and the landlords who own these hosts — Akamai, Cloudflare, and now Amazon, Google, and Microsoft — got very rich). Meanwhile, the W3C’s proposed idea of having a translation layer between permanent URIs that reference content and temporary URLs that reference hosts was never implemented or even really adequately planned.

This gap — the lack of any kind of guarantee that the content at an address would remain static — became very lucrative for other organizations too, for other reasons. It made the web-app ecosystem possible: you can charge for open source software & keep proprietary software away from disassembler-wielding pirates and crack authors by hosting it on a web server and using the mutability of web pages as a delivery system for what would otherwise be a native application (and this lets you change or cut off access any time you want as well — making you permanent landlord of the software, rather than a mere manufacturer and distributor of software products). It made scammy, ad- ridden domain-squatting outfits a viable business strategy, and made piracy slightly harder by making domain seizure of sites hosting ‘unauthorized’ copies of ‘copyrighted’ content possible (nevermind that in all Berne Convention countries, all copyrightable content is implicitly copyrighted). It made targeted advertising possible because pages could be changed to host different ads based on the person viewing the site.

What most people call the ‘loss of the open web’ is an Eternal September situation: most contributors to the content of the web were no longer people who had the time & money to buy their own domains & host off their own machines.

It’s still a problem, and the problem does not lay at the feet of the influx of new users. Everybody in 1990 should have been able to see that by 2000 lots of people would be online and the people who were up for buying a domain name would be the same ones who had one in 1990.

Instead of making it easy for people to host things on their own machines & optimizing for inconsistent connections in the dialup era, we took the easy way out & relied on ISPs to host user content. That seemed OK because we were doing the same thing with usenet back then. We never really fixed this as the dailup era ended.

Of course, we’re addressing this a bit now with IPFS and DAT and similar things. But, it might be too late. Already, hosting content is “something that nerds do” and “something that big companies do”, never “something that I can do” from the perspective of non-technical users.

Everybody has a browser cache & so it’s pretty stupid that we don’t have cache sharing along bittorrent or something built into every major browser and turned on by default. Like, we could have done that in 1995 (not with bittorrent but just with full-file hashing or something, among users with the same ISP, with the ISP coordinating). Federated peer-to-peer cache contents sharing is a lot easier to gradually transform into a hostless fully distributed storage thing. Instead, when ATT WorldNet stopped hosting our home pages we turned to geocities, and when geocities stopped we went to MySpace.

By John Ohno on April 24, 2018.

[Canonical link](https://medium.com/@enkiv2/there-was-never-an-open- web-69194f9b1cf1)

Exported from Medium on September 18, 2020.

Ur/Web, or the Ur programming language and the Ur/Web domain-specific language standard and library, is an ecosystem designed to promote very safe webdevelopment. The system has some interesting ideas like validating requests, queries, HTML and SQL, and has an inbuilt ORM for expressing database interactions. It's also super easy to install with Nix!

Unfortunately, it's software developed on master without rigorous testing practices and the documentation can be lacking at times (though it is very good for a research effort). In my limited time using the framework, I found that I would frequently struggle with errors related to bad parses; if I used the wrong syntax at some point, I would receive an error that felt incredibly inconsistent with the code I was writing - I wish the system had more logging to inform the user of where the error occurs at the least!

It's also clear that the framework operates entirely independent of any progress in the web development space — which leads to some interesting ideas but foregoes several nice-to-haves of current systems. Urweb, though, is in it for the long haul.

Ur/web does seem to have decent Emacs support, though I had some initial trouble getting urweb-mode to run in Emacs out of the box.

Starting Out

If you're starting and you're a beginner, don't bother with the manual at first. Install the urweb package with Nix (use a nix-shell!) and jump straight to the examples. I found that without the proper context the manual and reference weren't super useful; they focus on the programming language itself rather than the ecosystem surrounding web development, which is likely why you're using the framework.

Of course, once you're familiar with using the ecosystem, go back to the reference to learn more about the language!

Links

the Urweb repository the main demo as provided in the repo a great writeup on why urweb is worth trying http://expdev.net/urtutorial/ decent tutorial

ur/Web part of BazQux Reader sources Useful Ur/Web functions. ur programming languages - web dev w this!

Wandering the web§

No, the web was much more of an adventure. It was a place that you wandered to discover new areas, like exploring the vast open seas. A new virtual space that lead to all kinds of strange, interesting, exciting places. This is what the web was like, at least, in our collective imagination.

– Rediscovering the Small Web - Neustadt.fr

See: [[cyberflâneur]].

Weaving the Web§

Berners-Lee’s creation was fueled by a highly personal vision of the Web as a powerful force for social change and individual creativity.

– Berners-Lee: Weaving the Web

[[World Wide Web]].

weird web§

What’s the political philosophy of the IndieWeb?§

This is a really fun listen from Doug Belshaw. He discusses [[IndieWeb]] and the issues he sees with it.

Microcast #081 - Anarchy, Federation, and the IndieWeb - Doug Belshaw’s Thoug…

Doug has a preference for the Fediverse as an approach to an open web, and says the [[political philosophy]]of the IndieWeb is a type of right-libertarianism, because it lacks social equality, and without that it is just a focus on individual freedom.

My gut response is that I disagree and that it’s all a bit more nuanced than that. But it’s a good jumping off point for discussion!

IndieWeb and federation. Geeky, white and male.

Bit of a superficial summary of IndieWeb…

Likes the practical side of it.

Doug doesn’t think it will scale. More enthusiastic about federation.

Definition in opposition to a thing is not a good idea.

Political philosophy…

Anarchism.

Left-libertarianism. Individual freedom and social equality. Anti-authoritarianism, social anarchism.

Social equality aspect is missing. Collective ownership is missing. And therefore compatible with neoliberalism.

People have to be equipped for the journey. "Bring your own infrastructure" (mantra of Indieweb?) - individualist rather than collectivist.

Doug doesn’t like being a sysadmin.

He doesn’t mind it, but doesn’t think it is socially focussed.

When did you join the IndieWeb?§

I think I first heard of the [[IndieWeb]] movement in 2016 sometime. It’s a bit hazy now, but I’ve a memory that I stumbled on it through a trail of links starting on [[Wikity]].

I’ve tinkered with web sites in some form or another for a long time, and I have happy memories of various weird Geocities experiments, sadly lost to the sands of time it seems.

As far as independently hosting goes, I appear to have had a self-hosted blog since 2006 at my old domain noodlemaps.net - thanks Wayback Machine for that! My first self-hosted post is seemingly on the topic of data sonification and playing non-audio files through /dev/dsp on Linux. Excellent.

I’ve had a self-hosted blog up at doubleloop.net since around 2013 (thanks again Internet Archive). I went through a through static site generators. I actually really like how my old Hexo-based site looked. Better than my current site…

My first documented attendance of HWC London looks to be December 2016, hosted by Calum and Barry who were really welcoming. Around then, I fiddled about with various platforms before switching over to WordPress.

I’ve really enjoyed being part of the IndieWeb community. My active involvement (at events, on IRC, etc) has peaked and waned over the years, but I’ve still always felt part of the bigger whole. That’s another post, though.

How did you find out about the IndieWeb community?

Wood Wide Web§

A cute name for [[Mycorrhizal network]]s.

World Wide Web§

Bookmarks§

• The internet was built for connection – how did it go so wrong? - New Statesman

• [[smallcircles@social.coop]] https://social.coop/@smallcircles/110472874019791039 pull