Indieweb

Ars and The Register (and probably others) are reporting that Google and Mozilla are working on “browsers that break current App Store rules.” You know, browsers that aren’t dependent on Apple’s rendering engine. Actual full-fledged browsers. For various reasons I use iOS as the least-bad option (for me) between Android and iOS. But this is a thing that’s bugged me a long time. To be honest, I don’t really understand Apple’s reasoning here. Allowing a slightly hobbled version of Chrome doesn’t really provide adequate “defense” of Apple’s walled garden. It seems to me that Chrome loyalists would prefer a mostly Chrome-ish experience to Safari, even if it’s not the full deal. ...

Mastodon is an odd beast. This has been discussed a lot from the user’s point of view, but not so much from the organizational point of view. Specifically, should organizations provide users with branded/hosted instances, and what kind of policies apply for this new breed of social media? (Note: I’m going to use “Mastodon” here, but this really applies to any kind of federated social media over ActivityPub or similar where users are identified in the “@user@organization.tld” format.) ...

Loving the explosion of IndieWeb activity. For fun I decided to try out WriteFreely, a really minimal blog with ActivityPub features.

The surge of people joining Mastodon and the Fediverse the past few days has been inspiring. I’m optimistic about the potential for a better web, but experience keeps whispering in my ear. Right now, people are fired up and ready to try new things. They’re happy to sign up, post a few “toots” to Mastodon, and think about a better web where things are decentralized and users have more control of their destiny. You know, the standard “DIY is better” package. Like when everybody started baking their own bread at the start of the pandemic in 2020. ...

This domain has been online since January 2001. A homepage or, more often, some type of blog has been here almost as long. I’ve been, often, lackadaisical about continuity of content and posting. The kind folks at the Internet Archive, or rather their web scraping bots, have been far more attentive and consistent. I’ve lost track, but I’ve probably wiped the slate clean and started over seven or eight times since I first registered dissociatedpress.net. Most of the restarts have been intentional, but a few were not. More than a few times I’ve wished to recover things I’d written here (and elsewhere), either to put them back on the web or just to have them as reminder how truly bad my writing used to be. (Yes, once upon a time, it was worse.) ...