Whatever regulation that required these kinds of policy-change notification emails greatly failed us. A notification is not enough. If a company changes their policies, individual user data should be made completely inaccessible to that company until that user explicitly agrees to the new policy.
Yes, this should be the default. However, companies would heavily exploit a rule like this, like they abused the cookie consent UIs on the web.
If your passion or livelihood depends on a set of tools or capabilities, don’t rent those tools from someone who can deny you access or claim your output at any time. Own your tools. Be a digital homesteader.
This is what differentiates blogs from newspapers, journals, and academic writing. This is supposed to be a space where anyone and everyone can express themselves. I’d hate for someone to be put off sharing something because they don’t meet a hypothetical bar of wit.
This is something I also talked about couple of days ago.
I’m playing around with Tailscale, but I’m not sure about the privacy aspect of being on a VPN all the time. I want to sync DEVONthink and OmniFocus using a WebDAV server on my Mac mini, but running Tailscale 24/7 raises some questions.
I love the idea of having my private network of devices available everywhere. But I don’t trust random companies with my data, so I want to do my research before I start to use Tailscale with all my devices.
If we all build our own places, we can live the dream of the web, now. We can create the web that was always meant to be. By connecting our websites together by—spoiler alert—linking to the people who inspire us, we build a stronger web than a search engine can index, one that won’t be littered with content we can’t control.
Amen!
The new version of the ActivityPub WordPress plugin lets me reply to comments coming from Mastodon and federate them back as standard replies. I just wanted to install an instance this morning to have a profile that I can use to reply to incoming comments, but this one is way better.
Again, you can follow me on Mastodon by searching for my profile (zsbenke@decoding.io) from your instance.
I’m very disappointed after reading comments on this article: How Twitter’s descent into chaos is paving the way for a new web
I don’t want to see this divided mentality (especially politics) under articles that are talking about cool indie projects. The mainstream web has gotten into a state where people just inject politics into everything. If I want to have a place that I like, I have to build my part of the web.
A Zettelkasten and a blog can help with that. I can make my blog cozy, write about what I like, and then browse that from time to time to rediscover things.
Minus is a finite social network where you get 100 posts—for life.
Mostly, though, it’s that blogging itself has enough problems with adoption. I’m not sure it’s a great idea to be “hiding” blog posts. Good blogs are hard enough to find these days. Why limit your writing to only those people who’ve already discovered you?
These are exactly my thoughts about this RSS Club thing. I don’t want to make my readers search for hidden content on my site (there is hidden content on my site, but it won’t be accessible by RSS), I want them to find my stuff easily.
It is already annoying that social networks, like Twitter, hide otherwise free content behind a login page; bloggers shouldn’t force readers into subscribing to something (maybe this is why I wouldn’t say I like newsletters too).
If you enjoy hiding your content, that’s fine, but we have a sparse number of good blogs these days. I want good content to be more discoverable, not hidden behind login pages and RSS feeds.
I read: What should I do with my Twitter:
I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with my Twitter/X account. I don’t want to leave it dormant, because the current policy is to reclaim usernames from accounts that don’t post, which creates a risk that someone will come along and claim to be me later on.
I was worried about this, but I don’t care anymore.
Then… The idle elite:
At this point, if you’re still on Twitter, it might be time to accept a hard fact about yourself: there’s not a single thing that its leadership could do that would push you off the site. Since the takeover almost a year ago they’ve fired everyone who cared, they’ve invited back 4chan, kiwifarms, and sundry other threat actors, they’ve started revenue sharing with the rape peddlers and insurrectionists, they’ve given priority lanes to every paying NFT and AI grifter, and even outright blamed the jews for their bad finances. That’s not even close to an exhaustive list!
Twitter is the worst “social media” site you can use nowadays. Look at what is happening with Threads and Mastodon over here.
I still don’t trust Meta, though.
Since web apps can’t just use the components provided by the operating system, they have to recreate everything from scratch. And this creates a lot of burden for developers and, I think, lowers the quality floor. Creating beautiful, compelling apps is possible, but it requires so much work. People building native apps get it all “for free”. In fact, this could be one of the reasons Apple still has such a vibrant ecosystem of great artisanal apps since developers can build most things out of nice ready-made components.
Well, yeah!
Jim writing about his reading note publishing process:
I like to let my notes sit for a couple days (or even weeks). I find that if I come back to a note and still find it interesting/insightful that means it’s worth keeping, so I put in the work of cleaning it up and publishing it.
I don’t do this. If I see something interesting, I usually publish it immediately (like this post). On the other hand, I have a Zettelkasten site, which contains more in-depth notes that are also coming from reading notes. However, that site is so new that I haven’t really published anything that counts as reading notes there yet.
Between 2012 to 2022, we came to believe that the natural structure for online interaction was for billions of people to all use the same small number of privately-owned social platforms. We’re increasingly realizing now that it was this centralization idea itself that was unnatural. The underlying architecture of the internet already provides a universal platform on which anyone can talk to anyone else about any topic.
I’m messing with my bookmarks today.
I keep a lot of cool articles in DEVONthink as my central repository, but I also want to share some of these links here.
I’m testing a simple workflow for this using a DEVONthink smart group, which shows me all my bookmarks from my Decoding database that aren’t published yet.
I’m using DEVONthink custom metadata to mark a record “published”.
This workflow desperately needs automation, but I want to start as simple as possible and see how it works in practice.
You see, I love email. It’s gotten a bad rep, and numerous services and startups have both tried to replace it, and make it work differently. To me, email was never a bad thing, not since we moved over from POP3 to IMAP. Sure, there’s better and more secure technology out there, but the fact that my email account will work, and synchronise, with any device using standard protocols is great. Amazing, really. I don’t need a specific app for a specific service, not as long as I stick with the open standards (i.e., no Proton or Skiff). You can’t say that about Slack, possibly the worst solution to “the email problem” to date. There, you are stuck with the Slack app, which is basically the same as running the service in the web browser. And it whines at you in real-time, breaking your workflow.
I’m still a big believer in having expertise in something and sharing that with your peers.
The future is returning to an artisanal web, where you cultivate your niches and small communities, where maybe you don’t become a millionaire and a star, but you do feel a sense of belonging, and maybe make enough to get by.
But having enough money is what people forget to realize. You can get a nice online side business up and running relatively quickly if you have an interesting “product”. Making that a full-time job is yet another step, but you can still stay a niche without losing your soul.
I love how you can save web apps into separate apps via Safari in Sonoma like you can with Fluid.
Safari tries to fetch the default icon, but sometimes it’s not that pretty or it’s even in a wrong aspect ratio. Finding proper app icons is hard, but a lot of web apps have iOS versions, so why not use their icons?
I created a shortcut, which lets you search the App Store and download the raw app icon. Now you can also use the proper iOS style icon for the web app.
You can download the shortcut from here.
Here’s a video on how you can use it.
Tools I still like to use:
E-mail, text/MMS, RSS, a blog/personal website, podcasts, forums. What did I miss?
These fundamental tools are still around because they are the best tools where you are in control of what you are interested in and what you can discover.
These are some alternatives to Reddit:
Each of them has shallow usage and general topics.
Reddit’s strength, for me, is the niche subreddits that any other social network or forum engine hasn’t replicated. At least they aren’t aggregated like this.
I couldn’t agree more with Mr. Brooks.
Bookmarked “Montaigne“.
Make a website, blog, or portfolio using nothing but Apple Notes.
I found this old video of me doing a morning browsing session on my old plastic MacBook. This video was recorded 14 years ago! Please don’t ask me why I recorded this.
Here are some interesting tidbits:
Portable thoughts is a website built using a single HTML file.
It simply uses URL
#fragmentsand the:targetCSS selector to show and hide “pages”. The result is a self-contained website, digital book, interactive document, or whatever you want to call it.
So, you have a single HTML file that contains everything and is easily navigable without any JavaScript by just showing and hiding sections via CSS. This is smart.
I don’t know what I’m going to use this idea yet, but it will be useful one day.
HEY for World can be an excellent idea for those who don’t want to be bothered to set up a blog.
When I write a certain kind of email — aka a blog post — why do I have to address it to someone? Why can’t I just address my thoughts to the world? Direct to the web for anyone and everyone? Rather than define the recipients, I just write and let the recipients find me.
Although we had this before and it failed miserably.
Mióta bekötöttem ide a webmention plugint, azóta minden egyes külső helyről érkező reakció megjelenik itt a blogon a posztok alatt. Ez jöhet mondjuk egy másik blogról vagy egy másik social networkről – bármiről, ami IndieWeb ready.
Sajnos nem minden szolgáltatás ilyen, ami régóta zavar. Az utóbbi években népszerűvé vált elzárt platformszigetek megcsorbították a web nyitott mivoltát, így mától nem fogok direktben kontentet írni egyetlen ilyen zárt platformra sem. Ezentúl a bejövő reakciókra adott válaszaimat is blogon fogom megtenni, tehát a Twitterről fogadott pingbackekre is itt fogok írni.
Az itt megjelenő tartalom ugyanúgy fel fog bukkani különböző helyeken, ahogy az IndieWeb POSSE is ajánlja, viszont a platform ahol a tényleges interakció fog folyni, az teljesen a sajátom lesz, ahogy annak már régóta kellene lennie.
