Showing all posts tagged: technology
If social media was all you knew, would you start a blog?
7 February 2025
Tangentially related to yesterday’s post. This is something Jatan Mehta asked a few weeks ago. It’s an intriguing question. If social media platforms, Twitter/X, Instagram, etc, had remained as they started, maintaining chronological feeds, displaying content posted by accounts a member had chosen to follow in their feed, and keeping algorithms and political whims out of the mix, then no, maybe not.
As I wrote yesterday, I was there when (the original) Twitter landed. Quite a number of people who hitherto had been blogging, eventually went all in with the micro-blogging platform. It was just so much easier, plus no financial cost was involved. After a time, many of these people completely stopped posting content on their blogs, which all gradually disappeared as domain name registrations lapsed.
So it doesn’t entirely come down to come to the presence of social media, it comes down to what suits an individual. Maintaining a self-hosted website is more effort, but, to me, feels like second nature. Nevertheless, I still had a Twitter account, and even a Facebook page (it’s still there, somewhere), as having one for your brand was once a thing. However, I always regarded these social media presences as “out posts”.
They were extensions only of my online presence; not an integral part of it. Even back in 2008, there was the risk the service might shutdown abruptly, or the administrators might pull the plug on your account for whatever reason, without warning (or recourse). To some people, going “all in” on social media seemed foolhardy. Others were obviously prepared to take their chances, in exchange for the convenience the platforms offered.
But the social media platforms have changed a lot since 2008. All the more so in recent months. Being reliant on social media platforms has become a liability for some. Even the more “indie” platforms, such as Mastodon or Bluesky, are not, for various reasons, completely risk free either. The question then of starting a self-hosted blog, after being a lifelong social media user, now seems more a matter of necessity, rather than familiarity.
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social media, social networks, technology, trends
Bluesky reaches 30 million members, are you excited, or not?
6 February 2025
Social media and micro-blogging platform Bluesky passed the thirty-million member mark last week. It must be an exciting time for the Bluesky founders and backers. Exciting also for members who had been looking for an alternative to the likes of Twitter/X. I say this as one of the earlier members of Twitter, which I originally signed up for in 2007 I think. At that point though, Twitter was one of a kind; it was the first of its kind. It would spawn numerous competitors, including Plurk, and Identi.ca, though few struggled to gain traction. By the end of 2009, after being online four years, with about twenty-six million members, Twitter was the place to be.
Up until that point, I’d met close to one-thousand people, many of whom knew of me through this website. But a lot were people who’d just stumbled upon my account, and wanted to connect. Here was a place that was one, big, on-going, conversation. Making Twitter friends was easy in those early days (I could say the same about blogging). Twitter seemed like a big old friendly village. But once sky-rocketing growth came — something founders and backers has been eagerly anticipating — things began to change. And that was good. For some. Good, for instance, for the Twitter gurus, those taking it upon themselves to educate the rest of us about the “correct way” to use Twitter.
And of course of influencers. I’m not exactly sure when either arrived en masse, but I’d say many had made their presence felt by 2010. I think that’s when I began to lose interest in the platform: it’d become too much noise, and not enough signal. Having said that, I kept my account going, ticking over, for another decade, then some. But Twitter was no longer that big old friendly village. And nor, of course, could it stay that way. The platform had to grow, and begin making a return for its backers. Some of the people I followed, and who followed me, became gurus and influencers. Some became both. But by then, I wasn’t really interested in them.
I’d been using Twitter for three or four years, I didn’t need someone lecturing me, especially someone who’d spent less time on the platform than I had. As for the influencers, little of what they said meant much to me. But as a platform, Twitter had matured. It was no longer the exciting, pioneering, experience it had once been. I might — if I were more of a social media power user — call Bluesky exciting, but I could never describe it as pioneering. Twitter, for better or worse, is/was the only micro-blogging slash social media platform to stake that claim. Everything else now, like it or lump it, is a case of been there, done that.
Twitter opened up the frontier, blazed the trail. Kind of like the Telegraph Road, no? Twitter built the cities and the roads between them. Bluesky, Mastodon, and whatever else, may be new, relatively new, but they are picking up were Twitter left off. Micro-blogging slash social media platforms are no longer the undiscovered country. I don’t mean to run down Bluesky in particular. Thirty-million members in two years is impressive. But I dare say there are a few gurus and influencers among that number. Maybe too many, all bringing with them more noise, and less signal. It’s enough to make me fear we’re seeing an early-stage re-run of late-stage Twitter.
I might be a member of Bluesky, and Mastodon, but late-stage Twitter is not something I want to see a repeat of. Give me, I say, a tried and true, though hardly new, personal website, any day.
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history, social media, social networks, technology, trends, Twitter
Jump scares will keep you away from websites you want to avoid
29 January 2025
TabBoo is, I think, a Chrome only extension that helps deter you from visiting websites you don’t want to see, but can’t help looking at nonetheless.
Load the desired (or undesired, as the case may be) URLs into TabBoo, and each time you go to one of the included sites, a horror movie like jump scare image will appear at random.
I don’t know about anyone, else but after looking at the demo, it struck me TabBoo might actually make seeing some websites more fun, with a jump scare image appearing unexpectedly.
Something like this is also needed for social media, to help those trying to wean themselves off doomscrolling the socials day in and day out.
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RSS as a W3C standard? Now there’s an idea
28 January 2025
If the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) can adopt ActivityPub as a recommendation, something they did eight years ago, you have to wonder why they didn’t do the same for RSS.
The W3C should’ve gotten behind RSS long before they endorsed ActivityPub. They’re controlled by big companies who are truly scared of interop, explains why most of their proposed standards go nowhere.
One of the functions of web standards, published by the W3C, is interoperability:
W3C web standards are optimized for interoperability, security, privacy, web accessibility, and internationalization.
Interoperability, however, is also a tenet of the ActivityPub recommendation:
W3C’s role in making the Recommendation is to draw attention to the specification and to promote its widespread deployment. This enhances the functionality and interoperability of the Web.
We can have the ActivtyPub protocol, which has interoperability at it’s core, but not RSS, which is the same.
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social media, social networks, technology, trends
Free Our Feeds with Bluesky and AT Protocol. But not Mastodon, ActivityPub?
17 January 2025
The Free Our Feeds project launched a few days, prompted in part by changes to fact checking and content moderation policies across Meta properties, including Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. The goal of Free Our Feeds seems admirable, to prevent one person/entity having full control of a social media platform:
Bluesky is an opportunity to shake up the status quo. They have built scaffolding for a new kind of social web. One where we all have more say, choice and control.
Is this desirable. While it remains to be seen what the actual outcome of the changes at Meta will be exactly, members of their social media platforms, plus those of other companies, have been ceding ever more autonomy over their user experience in recent years. But is Free Our Feeds, who seem intent only devoting resources to Bluesky, the solution?
But it will take independent funding and governance to turn Bluesky’s underlying tech — the AT Protocol — into something more powerful than a single app. We want to create an entire ecosystem of interconnected apps and different companies that have people’s interests at heart.
The AT (Authenticated Transfer) Protocol was created by the Bluesky Public Benefit Corporation, just for Bluesky. Mastodon, on the other hand, is built on ActivityPub, a protocol allowing different, separate, social media channels to “talk to”, and share information with each other. And unlike AT Protocol, ActivityPub is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommendation.
Free Our Feeds is hoping to raise thirty-million (US) dollars over the next three years to fund further development of AT Protocol. So, should you contribute? You might want to do your homework first. Jürgen Geuter, AKA tante, is concerned about the lack of details:
It feels weird to go to the community asking for so much money without any specifics. Just vibes. Sure, Bluesky is hot-ish right now, but asking for that kind of cash should maybe come with a bit more details and plan? Thoughts about how that new entity will be governed. What the actual mission is (and “outsourcing ATProto development so Bluesky no longer has to pay for it” shouldn’t be it).
Ruben Schade, meanwhile, points to the elephant in the room:
Why is there no mention of ActivityPub, or Mastodon, at all? You know, the protocol that isn’t tied to one app? At best, this reads like not-invented-here syndrome. At worst, it’s obfuscation.
Mastodon, and ActivityPub, are mentioned by Free Our Feeds, but you have open the concealed notes at the foot of their webpage to see this.
Talking of Mastodon though, a few days ago CEO Eugen Rochko announced the transfer of “key Mastodon ecosystem and platform components to a new nonprofit organization.” This, says Rochko, will ensure the decentralised micro-blogging platform is never under the control of any single person or entity.
It could be Mastodon is the place to stay for the time being.
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social media, social networks, technology, trends
HTML: a programming language, not mere markup
9 January 2025
Tim Carmody, writing for Wired:
Because HTML looks easy and lacks features like formal conditional logic and Turing-completeness, it’s often dismissed as not a programming language. “That’s not real code; it’s just markup” is a common refrain. Now, I’m no stranger to the austere beauty of the command line, from automating scripts to training machine-learning models. But underestimating HTML is a mistake.
I might venture to say that the HTML of today is more like a programming language, than the HTML I began working with (and sort of continue to do so) back in the late nineties. Some web designers of the day were adamant HTML was markup, not code (which I sometimes labelled it as), and certainly not a programming language.
HTML gave online life to all manner of web creative’s ideas, how could people fail to see this?
<sarcasm on> Oh now satisfying it is to be vindicated all these years later. </sarcasm off>
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Storing digital data for one hundred years: how is this possible?
2 January 2025
Maxwell Neely-Cohen, writing for Harvard Law School’s Library Innovation Lab:
If you, right now, had the goal of digitally storing something for 100 years, how should you even begin to think about making that happen? How should the bits in your stewardship be stored with such a target in mind? How do our methods and platforms look when considered under the harsh unknowns of a century?
It’s a longer piece, which goes to show how deceptively simple the question is. But how about the RAMAC 305 system, a computer developed by IBM in the 1950’s? This was the first commercial computer to use a moving head hard disk drive, called a 350 storage unit. But the RAMAC 305 was just too big, and heavy, to have much commercial appeal, and production was discontinued.
However, the 350 was capable of storing data for the long term. The real long term. When one of the 350 storage units was restored in 2002, Joe Feng, who was part of the restoration team, said “the RAMAC data is thermodynamically stable for longer than the expected lifetime of the universe.”
I think it’s time to somehow bring back the 350 storage unit.
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The web today is not necessarily worse than the early web
27 December 2024
Xavier H.M., writing on his Mastodon page:
Your neocities blog is cute but I can’t read the 5pt font and your cursor is the size of a bread crumb. The web page is loading so many gifs my computer sounds like a boeing 747.
disassociated once, in a way, looked like a Neocities website. Or, more the point, way back in the day: GeoCities-esque. My websites of twenty-five years ago may have seemed like the work of a web designer trying to be artistic, but the way they were built presented problems to some visitors, particularly those with low vision. For example, much text on my early sites was rendered as images.
The facility to use alternative text, or alt-text, was always there, as far as I remember, but like a lot of visual web designers of the time, I did not make effective use of the facility. For example, if say I was posting a photo of a tree, the alt text would literally read “a tree”. I’d say nothing about where the tree stood. Along a road? In a park? Near a body of water? Nor anything else that would help describe the image more fully to people who had trouble seeing it.
As for blocks of text rendered as images — this to maintain complete design control across different browsers and operating systems — I probably supplied no alt-text, even though it would not have been difficult to do so. In other words, much of the content was invisible to some visitors.
And then we get around to font and cursor sizes that would suit an ant. For sure, it’s all fun, but doesn’t work for everyone. Those early days were more about aesthetics rather than accessibility. Today’s websites and blogs might look bland, might look all the same, but they are easier for a greater number of people to use, and, as a bonus, aren’t too demanding on our devices.
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design, history, technology, trends
W3C ethical web principles: web standards for a mature web
19 December 2024
A statement of twelve guiding principles for an ethical web, recently published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
The web is a fundamental part of our lives, shaping how we work, connect, and learn. We understand that with this profound impact comes the responsibility to ensure that the web serves as a platform that benefits people and delivers positive social outcomes. As we continue to advance the web platform, we must therefore consider the consequences of our work.
Comparable, to a degree, to the IndieWeb community’s core tenets. To me, the W3C’s ethical web principles seem like web standards for a more mature, established web, of the third decade of the twenty-first century. One objective of web standards was to build a web (specifically websites), that everyone could view and use uniformly, regardless of their browser, or platform (operating system). We have the technical side of the web down pat, hopefully, now it’s time to focus on ethics.
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Mocha Mousse 17-1230 selected as the PANTONE colour of year 2025
13 December 2024

We’re twelve days out from the big one, and high in the silly season, as the brevity of recent posts here may allude to. Otherwise, the major highlight has to be the annual announcement of the PANTONE colour of the year. As I wrote two years ago, this was a big deal during my web design days. Well, a somewhat big deal, as we were always on the lookout for new colour inspiration.
Anyway, the PANTONE colour for 2025 is Mocha Mousse 17-1230. Mocha Mousse. I can’t decide if that’s a dessert, or a hair product. Whatever, I’m liking it. Here’s how PANTONE describe the hue:
Simple and Comforting: A Soft, Warming Brown. With its sophisticated, earthy elegance, PANTONE 17-1230 Mocha Mousse can stand alone or serve as a versatile foundation, enhancing a wide range of palettes and applications—from minimalist to richly detailed designs—across all color-focused industries.
To whip up some designs featuring Mocha Mousse in your favourite graphics editor, here are some common colour generating codes. The HEX code is #9e7a68. If Red, Green, and Blue is your thing, use these values: R = 158, G = 122 B = 104. On the CMYK colour model, go C = 31%, M = 47%. Y = 49%, K = 18%. For the HSB colour system, go H = 20°, S = 34%, B = 62%.
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