Category: social networking

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Twenty years ago today E and I visited Reboot 7 in Copenhagen. What I wrote a decade ago at the 10th anniversary of that conference still holds true for me.

Over time Reboot 7 became mythical. A myth that can’t return. But one we were part of, participated in and shaped.
Still got the t-shirt.


The yellow t-shirt with red text from the 2005 Reboot 7 conference, on my blue reading chair in my home office 20 years on.

Seventeen years ago today I blogged about a barcamp style event in Amsterdam I co-hosted, called GovCamp_NL. I struck up a conversation there about open government data after having had a similar conversation the week before in Austria. It marked the beginning of my work in this field. We just welcomed the thirteenth team member in the company that over time grew out of that first conversation. Our work at my company is driven by the same thing as the event, something I’ve come to call constructive activism.

These days, the principles and values that drove those events, and have set the tone for the past two decades of everything I’ve done professionally and socially, seem more important than ever. They are elemental in the current geopolitical landscape around everything digital and data. We can look back on our past selves with 20 years hindsight and smile about our one time optimism, because so much exploitation, abuse and surveillance grew out of the platforms and applications that originate in the early 00’s. But not because that optimism was wrong. Naive yes, in thinking that the tech would all take care of itself, by design and by default, and we just needed to nudge it a bit. That optimism in the potential for (networked) agency, for transparency, for inclusion, for diversity, and for global connectedness is still very much warranted, as a celebration of human creativity, of the sense of wonder that wielding complexity for mutual benefit provides, just not singularly attached to the tech involved.
Anything digital is political. The optimism is highly political too.

The time to shape the open web and digital ethics is now, is every day. Time for a reboot.

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I’ve been using Flickr.com to externally share photos since March 2005 (just before the Yahoo acquisition), and I have some 40.000 photos there from the past two decades.
Pixelfed a federated photo sharing tool is meant as a Instagram alternative. I created a test account on Pixelfed.social in December 2018 (profile number 4000) but never used it for anything.

More recently Pixelfed has enjoyed wider attention and has been a top download on mobile phones.

I wonder, would Pixelfed be suitable as a Flickr replacement? Does anyone treat is as such yet?

A quick exploration of the settings seems to indicate I can’t, like in Flickr, share images with specific circles of contacts (e.g. designated family for pictures that have our daughter in it), or choose to not share them at all other than with myself. Uploads are limited to 20 images at a time, I saw, although albums (on Pixelfed connections) are possible. There also doesn’t (yet?) seem to be a way to explore an image exif or other meta-data, like location.

I’m tempted to self-host a personal instance to experiment. Anyone with experience in that?

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In reply to Kann man die Twitter-Uhr zurückstellen? Zum Bluesky-Hype im österreichischen Journalismus by Heinz Wittenbrink

Du hast denke ich recht Heinz das der Umzug von Journalisten in Richtung Bluesky eine verpasste Chance ist. Aber nicht nur für die Journalisten selbst als individuelle Professionals. Ich verstehe nicht warum Zeitungen und Medien nicht selbst eine kleine Fediverse-Instanz ins Leben rufen. Damit kann man direkt und unangreifbar die Authentizität eines Accounts belegen, da sie verbunden ist mit der eigenen Internetdomäne. Sowie zB hier in den Niederlanden der Mastodon Server der Verwaltung auf social.overheid.nl läuft, und overheid.nl die Domäne ist für alle Verwaltungsinformationen. Strategisch ist eine verpasste Chance mMn das Zeitungen das Potential für Handlungsfreiheit im offenen Web nicht beachten, und das den einzelnen Reportern als Wahl überlassen. Obwohl man sich regelmässig darüber beklagt das BigTech ihnen Handlungsfreihet wegnimmt (sowohl bei online Äusserungen wie bei Werbung und Besucherzuleitung über Suchmashinen). Man erinnert sich anscheinend nicht das es Journalisten und Politiker waren die Twitter über die Tech-Szene hinaus groß gemacht haben als Nachrichtenquelle, und verpaßt jetzt diese (vierte?) Macht anzuwenden, und verliert sich aufs neue in einen Silo betreut von Miljardäre, VCs und Crypto-bros. Nur weil freier Zugang und hypothetische Federation (pinky promise) über den Eingang steht. Tech geht immer schneller wie man sagt, und ich nehme an das diese Beschleunigung auch eine schnellere Enshittification (Verscheißifikation?) bedeuten wird. In den Niederlanden gibt’s die Initiative Public Spaces, gestartet durch öffentlichen Medien und in Zusammenarbeit mit anderen Organisationen die ein offenes Web und öffentlicher Diskurs stärken wollen. Mit praktischen Mitteln, eine jährliche Konferenz usw. bringen die das voran. Vielleicht ist es möglich da auch in .at was zu bewegen, so wie du das in 2008 mittels dem Politcamp auch bez. politische online Kommunikation getan hast.

Die Gruppe, die jetzt zu Bluesky gewechselt ist, wäre sicher in der Lage, Einrichtung und Betreuung eines kleinen Mastodon-Servers zu organisieren. Ich weiss aus den Erfahrungen bei graz.social, dass der Aufwand überschaubar ist. Es gibt in Österreich Organisationen wie den Presseclub Concordia, die die Trägerschaft übernehmen könnten.

Heinz Wittenbrink

I flipped the switch yesterday on my one remaining Twitter account, @tonzylstra, my original one. I registered in December 2006, so the account didn’t quite make it to 18 years. My Mastodon activity started spring 2017, so let’s see where that will be 11 years down the road.

I had stopped using my Twitter account (posted a redirect to my Mastodon account in 2018) and a year ago deleted the other ones I had (including that of my company), but held on to this one for nostalgia I think. Because even if at the end of 2006 I felt I was late to Twitter (I was an avid Jaiku user, a European better alternative that got acquired and was immediately killed by Google), my user ID and first (SMS!) message were well within the early phase of Twitter.

Last time I looked at my following timeline even that had deteriorated. Bad enough certainly to overcome any lingering nostalgia.

My user ID is number 59923, registered on Tuesday December 12th, 2006. Judging by the time, 10:36am, I registered during my regular 10:30 coffee break.

One minute later I posted my first message. It had ID 994313, so my Tweet was just within the first million messages on Twitter

Me in Everyone’s So Nice Around Here! (Best Before: See Back), after Musk acquired Twitter in November 2022.


A last look over the shoulder


Gone.

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In reply to It is bigger than a tiny little textbox by Dave Winer

What is biggger than a tiny little textbox, like the ones we get on social platforms, and a full blown CMS, like the editing back-end of my WordPress site? Asks Dave Winer. My current answer to that is: where I’m writing this reply now.

Mid 2022 Dave Winer talked about two-way RSS, which morphed into textcasting by the end of 2023. Now he’s looking at an editor that would work like that.

In my personal feed reader I added a form to post responses. You see Dave Winer’s posting that I’m responding to, and the response form.

The editor I am writing this in, is a simple webform underneath an entry in my feed reader. See the image above. Allowing me to respond while I’m reading feeds, and then move on to reading the next bit.

The editor allows me to set a title, keep the the title of the thing I’m responding to, or have no title. It can cater to different types of response (bookmark, favourite, reply). It can send to several WordPress sites (my blog, my company’s, the Dutch IndieWeb community site, and my company’s internal team site. As a post or a page.

Me writing this post in the response form in my feedreader.

But not just post to a website. It can post an online annotation to my Hypothes.is (the ‘H.’ response option at the top), and it can post to my local Obsidian markdown notes (the ‘obs’ site option underneath the edit boxes).

It accepts categories and tags as the same thing. The receiving site or location determines if one of the key-words is a category locally and treats the rest as tags.

It doesn’t use RSS except as source of the item I respond to, it uses the Micropub standard to talk to websites. It could use RSS or OPML. It accepts HTML and posts as Markdown to my notes. I just started tinkering with my feed reader and response form again, so I can take Dave’s question into account while doing that.

Now, the question: What’s between a tiny little text box and a full-blown content management system?
The question we intend to answer.
That’s what textcasting is for, to identity the essential features. This editor supports them.

Dave Winer

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Bookmarked Commission opens non-compliance investigations against Alphabet, Apple and Meta under the Digital Markets Act (by European Commission)

With the large horizontal legal framework for the single digital market and the single market for data mostly in force and applicable, the EC is initiating first actions. This announcement focuses on app store aspects, on steering (third parties being able to provide users with other paths of paying for services than e.g. Apple’s app store), on (un-)installing any app and freedom to change settings, as well as providers preferencing own services above those of others. Five investigations for suspected non-compliance involving Google (Alphabet), Apple, and Meta (Facebook) have been announced. Amazon and Microsoft are also being investigated in order to clarify aspects that may lead to suspicions of non-compliance.

The investigation into Facebook is about their ‘pay or consent’ model, which is Facebook’s latest attempt to circumvent their GDPR obligations that consent should be freely given. It was clear that their move, even if it allows them to steer clear of GDPR (which is still very uncertain), it would create issues under the Digital Markets Act (DMA).

In the same press release the EC announces that Facebook Messenger is getting a 6 month extension of the period in which to comply with interoperability demands.

The Commission suspects that the measures put in place by these gatekeepers fall short of effective compliance of their obligations under the DMA. … The Commission has also adopted five retention orders addressed to Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft, asking them to retain documents which might be used to assess their compliance with the DMA obligations, so as to preserve available evidence and ensure effective enforcement.

European Commission