Category: social networking

subscribe to this category with rss

Posted on
by

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?

Posted on
by
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.

Posted on
by

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

Posted on
by

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

Posted on
by

LinkedIn irritatingly has introduced a new ‘pay us or we’ll purposefully cripple your experience more than before’ scheme. Another step towards the inevitable leaving behind of LinkedIn, other than perhaps for search. How long until they get to the Ecademy-point of no return (which was in 2004, enshittification is not a recent ‘innovation’)?

Events take preparation w.r.t. who you’ll meet as well as ‘after care’ one element of which is to affirm conversations and connections started at the event. Yesterday morning an event around digital ethics committees in the public sector took place, of which I was the instigator though not the organiser. I talked to many new people, taking notes of my conversations, and afterwards did what I usually do: invite those I met to connect on LinkedIn. LinkedIn for a long time has suggested to add a note because it will help the other person know better who is reaching out and why. Just as they used to stress you need to only connect to people you met. I always use that feature because it also conserves the context of a meeting for myself (although I keep those in my notes these days too). The note allows you to be human, passing the Reverse Turing test, or helpfully shows someone up as a cold sales approach. It suggested that this time too:

In the past weeks I noticed that there was a counter attached to that suggestion, ‘you have x personalised invites left’. Yesterday’s event being one where I met more than a few new people, I exceeded the limit of 5 invites for this month (The webarchive shows the limit and premium feature wasn’t mentioned at the end of January).

Paying gets you past that limit towards unlimited.
Out of curiosity I clicked the ‘renew’ button (at some point in the past I used the free trial period to be able to see and download some specific data that LinkedIn had about me, hence ‘renew’).
The following question curiously did not have ‘no interest’ as an option, ‘no’ being folded into ‘other’.

Selecting ‘other’ led to an overview of types of subscriptions, conspicuously not mentioning any prices.

Another click further revealed the lowest price point being 40 Euro’s a month.

40 Euros buys me a month of 1Gb glass fiber internet and television at home. It buys me 7 months of reduced railroad fares in the Netherlands. About a month of reading fiction daily. A year of digital services and tools I actually care about. And the removal of a newly introduced barrier in a deteriorating platform to extract value, aiming to make you pay to allow you to behave like a human being on LinkedIn. I’ll pass up on the ‘opportunity’ offered.