The article goes back and forth between bloggers who "are doing well" (ie: making money) and efforts that are non-commercial. It comes across as asking humanity to put more effort into writing and publishing in a non-profitable space while the blogging incentives are profit. I still think the unexplored space for blogging (and the LLM-proof space) is _private_ blogging--for friends and family. But maybe Facebook killed that space off, who knows.
The one key element I added was privacy. If your posts are private to your social group then there is no mechanism to try appealing to a broader "viral" audience. Also--if it is decentralized then the company (or person in my case) building it can't change their mind and start selling your data/eyeballs.
I have a LOT of thoughts in this space. Lots of people think they want some sort of healthier social-media alternative, but we're fighting against systems that are so finely tuned engagement monsters that is hard compete to protect your attention and time.
I met a guy a while ago who's passion was enabling self-hosting. His vision was to use an old android phone as a server--he ended up building a domain registrar[1] to facilitate OAuth-style flows for configuring DNS and an ngrok-style proxy[2] service that could configure DNS through said flow.
This is very cool. I have been thinking of a similar service that should exist.
Suppose you want to host your own email, or a mastodon server or similar. You download this application to your local computer. You pick what you want to install. It asks you which domain name provider you want to use, and which server host you want to use (eg. local or hetzner). It guides you into creating accounts for these services. Then uses their API, to set up the appropriate server, DNS settings etc.
It might not be fully automated, but something like this can seriously bring down the skill floor needed to host anything.
who's can also mean who has, which is where you've probably seen it used in ways that imply a possessive, but normally means who is, as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45257167 indicated
Further off-topic: You're not wrong, but maybe you should be. It's one of the most pointless irregular grammar rules in English. Nobody is ever confused by the wrong usage of the apostrophe here (when spoken there's no voicing of it). Native writers of English often get it wrong. If we had an Academy Anglaise we'd just regularise this usage. I give it 50 years max before possessive "who's" is considered correct (along with "it's").
> I give it 50 years max before possessive "who's" is considered correct (along with "it's").
"It's" is one I've struggled with a lot. I understand "It's" -> "It is" but my brain wants to add an "'s" for possessive-ness. It just feels more right. I'm been able to mostly break that bad habit but I still don't like it.
The one that people get wrong all the time is "its" vs "it's" for exactly this reason. By the usual use of posessive apostrophe you would expect "it's" and yet that's only ever correct if you're eliding something (i.e. you mean "it is", "it has" etc.)
Honestly if we (in England) really had an institute of that kind we'd probably just end up formalising the weird spellings and grammar as being "right" instead of what we have now where our grammar rules are descriptive instead of prescriptive. Who knows how the differences with American, Indian, Australian, etc. dialects of English would be handled, but I'm sure we'd make a big mess of it somehow.
Edit: incidentally I now live in Sweden where there is such an institute, and they do seem (to my ignorant understanding) to make sensible updates to the dictionaries etc. to reflect actual modern pronounciation - but I'm still sure my homeland would figure out a way to mess it all up ;)
This is a class of errors I never made when I first learned English (mostly by reading/writing). My pronunciation was so bad that I pronounced these words differently.
It was a major milestone for me when I made my first its/it's mistake in writing :)
(open source) Self-hostable, private social media alternative (like Facebook circa 2012). Functionally it is a private blog that speaks RSS with a built-in RSS aggregator. Self-hosting being the only way to actually have privacy in a social-media-type space.
I have opinions[1] on Webmentions. It sounds like such a great approach, but it also opens up the original author to hosting mountains of spam and other low-quality comments, and moderation is a lot of work. Arguably, we see the same problem today on sites that let you post comments.
There is a lot of interesting work in this space by the IndieWeb community. They've got a vision of (and lots of a spec for) a social reader[1] that uses RSS for lots of the things people got in the habit of with Web2 social media (comment, repost, etc)
(Although the IndieWeb community has this weird thing against "side files" and prefer having the content inside the HTML, marked up with Microformats2 special attributes. A social reader then polls the HTML and parses it additionally with the Microformats2 algorithm. I suspect this cultural preference is a result of the usage of static site builders of the early IndieWeb pioneers like Tantek.)
Yeah, I don't really grok the focus on MF2 given the wide adoption of RSS/Atom, but the social reader concept isn't one I've seen anyone else advocating for. It also suffers from the same spam problem of anything else that allows public submission of content. I've been exploring it more in the context of _private_ blogging were you already have a layer of access control.
Is there a Github API for creating issues? I also maintain a free, open-source app and would love to make it easy for a crash to give users a button that opens a Github issues form--allowing users to see what crash data is populated and submit it if they want.
Oh cool, it's like RSS consumption for video content (I think). I worry that since it isn't using blessed APIs it would get shut down by the platforms if it gets much traction. Also "trust me instead of them" can be a tough sell to the privacy-focused crowd. I'd love something that makes it trivial effort for the creators to directly publish on more open platforms--more like RSS publishing for video content. But youtube gives you discovery and a cut in the ad revenue, so I'm not sure how to get the incentives to align...
You don’t need APIs if your app includes a web browser, though; you just need the patience to hook into the browser’s APIs, rather than the page’s, in order to backup content when viewed. User-operated Selenium is legitimately the biggest threat model to content islands. It’s too bad a third-party had to invent Grayjay as a standalone, rather than one of the browsers figuring this out and shipping it as subscription-payment functionality :/
(It has to be subscription payment to deal in a scaleable and timely manner with sites changing their page schemas anticompetitively.)
