Activity tagged "open web"

Posted:

BlueSky’s “user intents” is a good proposal, and it’s weird to see some people flaming them for it as though this is equivalent to them welcoming in AI scraping (rather than trying to add a consent signal to allow users to communicate preferences for the scraping that is already happening).

I think the weakness with this and Creative Commons’ similar proposal for “preference signals” is that they rely on scrapers to respect these signals out of some desire to be good actors. We’ve already seen some of these companies blow right past robots.txt or pirate material to scrape.

I do think that they are good technical foundations, and there is the potential for enforcement to be layered atop them.

Technology alone won’t solve this issue, nor will it provide the levers for enforcement, so it’s somewhat reasonable that they don’t attempt to.

But it would be nice to see some more proactive recognition from groups proposing these signals that enforcement is going to be needed, and perhaps some ideas for how their signals could be incorporated into such a regime.

Listened to:
"This Publishing Platform Sees the Future, with Ghost's John O'Nolan" (Podcast).
Mike McCue in Dot Social. Flipboard. Published .
I think to have journalism with integrity, you have to have technology with integrity. And in my mind, open source is the way to have technology with integrity. And I want the best journalism to win because it's the best journalism, not because they have the best platform.
Read:
"The Internet is a Series of Webs".
Aram Zucker-Scharff in Aram ZS. Published .
The future core of a internet humane internet, if we are going to be able to use it to do the essential work of surviving this century, is a series of linked routes that stick us all together and supports our communities. This is what the internet needs to accomplish. How to we make that happen? How do we improve not just our telecommunication platform but leverage it towards a better world for all participants?
Posted:

is this feeling... hope?

At various points we revisited our old idea for networked publishing in Ghost and tested a few prototypes, but we were never sure how to make it scale; nor how many other platforms would ultimately adopt it. For all its promise, ActivityPub (like many open standards) seemed to generate products with user experiences that were often confusing and convoluted. But something else happened in the intervening period between 2016 and 2024: People became increasingly fed up with the behavior of centralized platforms, and increasingly hungry for alternatives. The motivation for exploring and understanding new technologies, rough edges included, meaningfully increased. In 2024, for the first time, it finally feels like we have a critical mass of people and platforms who are interested in rewilding the internet to bring back what we lost, and create something new. In the past week alone, we've had conversations with Mastodon, Flipboard, The Verge, Buttondown, WriteFreely, and several co-authors of the ActivityPub spec. There's a palpable feeling that this just might be the year of [begin strikethrough] the linux desktop [end strikethrough] the open web.
"Building ActivityPub: Day 0".
Ghost in Building ActivityPub.
In 2024, for the first time, it finally feels like we have a critical mass of people and platforms who are interested in rewilding the internet to bring back what we lost, and create something new.
Posted:

So excited to hear that the Ghost blogging software is going to support federation via ActivityPub! https://activitypub.ghost.org/

If you sign up for updates, they have a survey where they're asking for feedback. Now's your chance to get your suggestions in!

Cool to see Ghost taking this step, while Substack is over there trying to build walls around their product to trap people in.

Ghost's post is also how I learned that Buttondown is working on ActivityPub support! 🙌 Exciting times.

Listened to:
"Abolishing Section 230 Would Abolish Wikipedia" (Podcast).
Mike Masnick and Rebecca MacKinnon in Techdirt. Published .
Last week, the House Energy and Commerce Committee had a hearing all about Section 230, in which they didn’t even attempt to find a witness pointing out its benefits. Among the many organizations that could have provided that vital perspective is the Wikimedia Foundation (as seen in three excellent posts on Medium), and this week we’re joined by Rebecca MacKinnon, Wikimedia’s VP of Global Advocacy and long-time open internet defender, to talk about why the hearing was bad and Section 230 is very, very important.