Werd I/O

Catnip for me: the first post in a new blog that tells the story of building Slack from the ground up, by two of its former employees.

This was surprising to me, although I guess I don't really know why: "We used the tried and true LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). We were all deeply familiar with these conventional tools, and Cal and the Flickr team had defined a framework for building out and scaling web applications using them (called flamework for Flickr framework)." #Technology

"[The ACLU] publicly challenged the school district in a statement to media outlets stating that it has filed a public records request seeking more information about the district’s decision to [a firm] to track student attendance and tardiness by having students place their fingers on a biometric scanner."

So many questions: how anyone thought this was a good idea to begin with; how the data is stored and processed; whether this is legal; what the software company providing this platform could possibly be thinking. Nipping this in the bud feels like a good idea. #Technology

The BBC extends its Mastodon experiment for another six months: "We are also planning to start some technical work into investigating ways to publish BBC content more widely using ActivityPub, the underlying protocol of Mastodon and the Fediverse."

The BBC's approach has been great: transparent, realistic, and well-scoped. I suspect we'll see more media entities exploring ActivityPub as the year progresses - not only because of Threads, but as activity as a whole on the social web heats up. #Technology

"Threads users will be allowed to follow accounts that post political content, but the algorithm that suggests content from users you don't follow will not recommend accounts that post about politics."

It's not clear to me what the definition of "politics" encompasses here. Is it just literal party / election politics? Does it include discussions about equal rights, which would disproportionately hit users from underrepresented groups?

Adam Mosseri says that he wants to create a "less angry place", but what about the topics where people are right to be angry? #Technology

A characteristically great review from Molly White of Chris Dixon's disclosure-free shilling of blockchains as a way to save the web. Read, written, owned.

I do think there are some areas where blockchain is unfairly maligned: it introduced the idea of decentralization to a much wider audience, and it's the only community that has made widespread use of identity in the browser.

But this kind of shilling - particularly without disclosures - is out of date and unnecessary. What would serve the conversation is an open, good faith discussion of the possible options that doesn't go out of its way to dismiss technologies in active use as being dead. Otherwise what you're left with is the impression that rather than serving a higher calling to save the web, the author is looking for technologies he can make a lot of money from. #Technology

"In order to be able to choose their own browser, people must be free to download it, easily set it to default and to continue using it – all without interference from the operating system. Windows users do not currently enjoy this freedom of choice."

What's interesting to me is that this is very similar to the tactics that got Microsoft into hot anti-trust water a few decades ago. And here it is again: research that shows Microsoft is prioritizing its Edge browser in Windows. New browser, same dark pattern. #Technology

"NYT is using the open source Ruffle as their Flash emulator. I hope other news outlets follow. It’s great to see my favorite visualizations working again."

A lovely way to keep interactive archives alive.

A little-known, but perhaps obvious, fact about newsrooms is that a lot of the interactive features you see embedded in articles and on news websites are just static webpages. Upgrading these can be painful if they've used out of date JS libraries and so on, to the extent that sometimes they just aren't ever changed.

I like the idea of using web components with a central newsroom-specific library to get around this. In this case, a newsroom could update individual components and have all static interactive pages that use them update at the same time, without necessarily having to rebuild the page itself. #Technology

"Despite their idealist manifesto and their Bill of Rights, I don’t believe they could ever truly be in partnership with their community once they were taking large amounts of venture funding."

This is a key challenge with social networks that try and work with a different model: unless they're forced to be open (which, eg, Mastodon is), it's always possible for an acquirer to roll back their good intentions and do something else if it's profitable. It's also often possible for investors to remove the CEO in order to better serve a return to their fund.

The result is that these networks are hard to pay for. Decentralized networks have some advantage because they don't have to pay for infrastructure, but there's still a question about how the development team can be compensated (and therefore how to make development sustainable).

Lots to learn from in this case study. #Technology

"We can conclude that higher-ranked pages are on average more optimized, more monetized with affiliate marketing, and they show signs of lower text quality."

SEO as an industry has made search engines much worse to use. People are essentially spamming the web, which undermines the signals search engines are supposed to use to determine relevancy and quality. The result is junk - which, in turn, inspires more junk in order for pages to rank higher than the junk that already exists. And so and so on until you get a junky race to the junky bottom.

And generative AI will make it all even worse. #Technology

"Consumer Reports found that a total of 186,892 companies sent data about them to [Facebook]. On average, each participant in the study had their data sent to Facebook by 2,230 companies. That number varied significantly, with some panelists’ data listing over 7,000 companies providing their data."

In other words, there's a whole industry that makes a ton of revenue on providing information to Facebook. It's likely that each of these providers has many other downstream customers. The result is an extensive privately-run surveillance network. #Technology

"Global trade now means that even a pariah government like the Taliban can invest in and operate sophisticated surveillance systems, while imposing regressive policies that keep its population poor, hungry, and isolated. It’s a profound signal of how all governments will approach digital control in our era."

This last point is the most important, and illustrates why privacy and technology independence are vital. Our phones present a trade-off between convenience for us and surveillance opportunities for both networks and governments.

In Aghanistan the trade-off is between providing communications and information for refugees, and handing control over the source of information to the Taliban.

But, of course, there isn't much of an alternative - yet. It's worth considering what a truly independent network that is truly free from centralized control might look like. #Technology

A nice investigation into who actually hosts fediverse instances.

I've been in a few situations where I've had to fend off a DDoS originating from Hetzner servers, and it's just now dawning on me: what if those weren't malicious attacks but were actually a post going viral on the fediverse? #Technology

An in-depth writeup of Meta's fediverse meetup last year by Tom Coates, who was one of the roughly 20 people in attendance.

Most of these details have been discussed and speculated on at this point, but it's good to read them in one place, and I think Tom's perspective is (as always) very good.

The legal issues Tom discusses here are important: I think a lot of fediverse administrators and service operators tend to hand-wave them away, but they really are big issues. I encountered some of them when I was running Known, too: people were angry their content was showing up on some other service that they hadn't opted into.

Meta does seem to be heading into this endeavor in good faith. There's still a lot to figure out, but I think Threads will be a full, participative fediverse participant. I'm curious to see which other large network operators join them. #Technology

This was why I started Known, and I wonder if I should try again.

"If we want the future web we’re all clamouring for, we need to give people more options for self-hosted independence. If we seriously, truly want the independent, non-enshittified personal web to flourish, we need to make it easier for people to join in."

Everything here. I love the indieweb, but it needs to be accessible to people who are much less technical.

The one flaw here is that there's discussion of hosting as the shared, FTP-centric kind. I think that kind of hosting needs to die; I'd like to see web hosting look much more like installing an app on an iPhone. #Technology

Pascal was my first real programming language. I'd learned BASIC first, but I never built a full software application in it. Pascal allowed me to build and release software for the first time. It was magical.

What I didn't know: Niklaus Wirth was from Winterthur, Switzerland, which is right next door to Elgg. #Technology

Among other things, this campaign site has a useful list of US retail stores that use facial recognition right now (for example, Home Depot) as well as some that are thinking about it - and some that definitely won't (thank you, Costco).

"Your face should not be scanned, stored, or sold just because you walk into or work at a store. Retailers justify using facial recognition to protect and predict their profits, but this technology puts workers in danger, exacerbates bias, and amasses personal data. Retailers across the country that are exploring this invasive technology should know that prioritizing profit over privacy is wrong."

Co-signed. #Technology

I really like this exploration of what it might mean to build a sense of ambient togetherness on the web.

"We currently have no visual, audible, tactile, spatial, or embodied awareness of one another. We also have no awareness of the other people reading this post, even if they're doing it at the exact same moment."

Some of these demos are distracting or not quite right, but they're experiments - and experimentation is exactly what we need. Relatedly, I'm excited about PartyKit as a way to easily build these kinds of experiences.

Maybe I should build something into my own website? #Technology

"Meta’s policies and practices have been silencing voices in support of Palestine and Palestinian human rights on Instagram and Facebook in a wave of heightened censorship of social media amid the hostilities between Israeli forces and Palestinian armed groups that began on October 7, 2023."

This includes posts about human rights abuses. Human Rights Watch found that this censorship was "systemic and global", and often led to removal of content that didn't contravene any content policy.

This isn't new: "In a 2021 report, Human Rights Watch documented Facebook’s censorship of the discussion of rights issues pertaining to Israel and Palestine and warned that Meta was “silencing many people arbitrarily and without explanation, replicating online some of the same power imbalances and rights abuses that we see on the ground.”"

Following that and other reports at the time, Meta promised to address these concerns. It appears that it's fallen far short of doing so. #Technology

I really like this: a starter pack of blogs to follow if you're new to RSS. Some of them are new to me (and others have familiar authors but seem to have fallen off my list). What better way to start the new year on the internet than subscribing to independent writers again?

One of my projects in the new year is to put together a blogroll - something I'm now convinced every website should have, so that readers can discover new subscriptions organically from people they're already reading.

Perhaps, though, a blogroll is the wrong model, and it should be a regular post like this? That could be fun - Follow Friday for blogs. Hmm.

Anyway, these are great, and I'm grateful to Matt Webb for kicking this off. #Technology

I like this breakdown of different positions on the open social web: a broad set of things that people who want a big fediverse advocate for, and one for people who want a smaller, safer fediverse.

I'm mostly in the "big fedi" camp. I want the open social web to be as wide and varied as the web itself: a place where any kind of community can erupt and be compatible with all the other communities and still have its own rules and culture. I want supporting fediverse technologies to be as obvious a need as supporting HTML, used by everyone from hobbyists to giant megacorporations.

That doesn't mean that giant megacorporations are my favorite kinds of entities at all. But I think we all gain when open standards are widely supported. A rising tide lifts all groups.

Overall, I guess the answer, for me, is "both". We need the big wide fediverse. But we also need safety and protection, particularly for vulnerable communities. Growth for growth's sake is not a goal; supporting and empowering is. #Technology

Technology news tends to center on the global north, but the implications of technology are global. Rest of World does a wonderful, necessary job shining a light on those stories.

What I particularly appreciate about its coverage is that it's not just critical (although there certainly are critical stories - don't skip learning about nickel mining or the economic effects of digital nomads). There are stories of technology-driven empowerment here too, often in surprising ways. #Technology

If the Markup is jealous of another newsroom's coverage, you know the stories are good: the Markup has consistently been the most important outlet for investigative technology journalism.

There's a special mention here for 404 Media, which has also been a fantastic addition to the tech ecosystem. I'm grateful that both exist. Both outlets need our support. #Technology

A sober breakdown of what it may mean for Meta's new social network to finally join the open social web (aka the fediverse).

For many people, this has been a hard pill to swallow: while it's clear that Meta has been a human rights disaster, its embrace of open social web protocols is a vindication and (if you'll pardon the double meaning of the term) a platforming of that movement that may lead to the accelerated growth of the open social web itself.

I would like to see more social networks - both new and established - join the open social web. The biggest thing that worries me is having a single whale in the room that can, in effect, dictate the evolution of the protocols in its favor. A multi-polar social web would be a much more user-centric place (just as the web is at its best when there are multiple major browsers). #Technology

"An investigation by ProPublica and Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism shows how false claims based on out-of-context, outdated or manipulated media have proliferated on X during the first month of the Israel-Hamas conflict."

"[...] We also found that the Community Notes system, which has been touted by Musk as a way to improve information accuracy on the platform, hasn’t scaled sufficiently. About 80% of the 2,000 debunked posts we reviewed had no Community Note. Of the 200 debunked claims, more than 80 were never clarified with a note."

So here's the problem. The question is, on a massive online service, what exactly can be done about it. #Technology

Flipboard is making its entire platform fediverse-compatible, allowing anyone on any fediverse platform (eg Mastodon, Pixelfed, and eventually Threads) to follow content shared there.

"By March Flipboard says it plans to allow anyone on the platform to open their account to the fediverse and allow any Flipboard user to follow any fediverse account from within the Flipboard app. At that point, Flipboard will essentially be an ActivityPub-based platform like Mastodon or Pixelfed but with an interface designed for reading articles instead of bite-sized posts. It’ll be the biggest thing in the fediverse — at least until Threads shows up for real."

Extremely cool. And this is still only the beginning. #Technology