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My 2026 Open Social Web Predictions
Predictions for 2026 include growth forecasts for various social media platforms, advancements in federated technologies, and anticipated shifts in how organizations and governments engage with decentralized networks. Continue reading →
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The Seven Deadly Fediverse UX Sins Part 2: The Road To Redemption
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The Seven Deadly UX Sins of the Fediverse Web Experience (To Fix)
So, confession time: I was recently helping a new client get set up on the Fediverse—guiding them through their first steps into our glorious decentralized galaxy. And seeing it all again through fresh eyes? Reader, it was brutal. So much of what should be table stakes for any social media UX in the year of our Lord 2025 still is missing or deeply broken still. I know progress has been made and a good fight, fought. Continue reading →
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Indieweb.Social and the Upcoming #BlueSkyBridge
This is a brief announcement announcing Indieweb.social’s future software bridge work by BridgyFed - fed.brid.gy - will enable interoperability between ActivityPub networks and AT Protocol/BlueSky users. Read the announcement at snarfed.org/2024-02-1… As a server, Indieweb.social will NOT fediblock this effort; rather, to the contrary, we will assist users in understanding how to engage with BlueSky users if they choose to do so via this new offering. This is akin to our server’s position on Threads federation as well. Continue reading →
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2024 Fediverse Predictions
These are fun and like seeing the tech predictions starting to pop up in a lot of other places. Figure I should add mine about the Fediverse. All of these predictions are based on how FediDB will measure them in the next year: ▶️ The overall Fediverse as measured by FediDB will cross 25 million registered users, and by year’s end over 3 to 5 million monthly active users. The Fediverse will cross over 35,000 servers in 2024. Continue reading →
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How to Verify your Twitter Account as Owned by You, Without Paying Twitter for #TwitterBlue or for a $12K a Month
This solution for Twitter verification without paying Elon is easy to use, adheres to web standards, and works efficiently. First, include the following in your (or your organization’s) Twitter bio: This account can be verified at timothychambers.net/verified/ You can also (like I did) add the key or ID emoji to your bio. Twitter will not let you add the emoji for check marks. This URL must lead to a page you create on your own website or the official website for your organization. Continue reading →
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Indieweb.Social: on the Fediverse - Looking for New Patreon Support
So for several years, I’ve been running Indieweb.Social - It is a Mastodon instance/community that unites the interests of developers working on the “#Indieweb,” “#Distributed social,” and “#Fediverse” worlds. We created a space where supporters of each endeavor could communicate and exchange information as they are all linked initiatives with comparable objectives. It’s now the 6th largest of all Tech #Mastodon instances. It is the main host for emerging platforms like [Bonfire] (https://indieweb. Continue reading →
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Newsletters and Podcasts as new Open Content Platforms
I agree, Podcasts and Newsletters (functionaly blogs) give me great hope and are some of the best digital content I find these days. Main comerical social networks remain wastelands. From the Creator of Ruby on Rails, Founder & CTO at Basecamp & HEY: “There’s something incredibly beautiful about the rise of both podcasts and newsletters in an age dominated by the walled gardens of big tech. Two basic forms of distribution that rely not on proprietary platforms, but on free and open standards, devoid of corporate lock-in " Continue reading →
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Email as a Key Element of the Open Web -- And Hey! Review
I agree with this: email is a key function of the #openweb. Very important that we keep it so. Looking forward to trying out Hey.com…. Email is the rare open platform that works for everyone. But it’s changing. Three companies — Google, Microsoft and Verizon (which owns Yahoo and AOL) — control the overwhelming majority of the email universe. Google is particularly powerful, growing as the others slowly fade. Jacob Bank, Gmail’s product manager, told me in 2017 that Gmail was already powerful enough to be able to set standards in a supposedly open ecosystem, and that power has only increased since then. Continue reading →
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Filtering Social Feeds: and Unwanted Content as a Feature or Bug
Filtering social feeds. And Unwanted Content as a Feature or a Bug Just a note on filtering out your social feed for unwanted things - like I tried to do to avoid spoilers of Star Wars. I just wanted to temporarily mute posts from friends, etc, that used the words “Star Wars” or “Skywalker” for 24 hours. So that was a test for the various social nets. Of course: the open source Mastodon Social network gave users the most control to filter out posts with certain key words, and for how long to block them. Continue reading →
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Feels way too true. Let’s rebuild a better web.
“Alienated, Alone And Angry: What The Digital Revolution Really Did To Us…We were promised community, civics, and convenience. Instead, we found ourselves dislocated, distrustful, and disengaged.” www.buzzfeednews.com/article/j…
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Agreed: Problems from Faceook and the others Can Be tweaked but ultimate solution is much bigger....
Agreed: this won’t change until we build the web we want. “Platforms that have as many problems as Facebook does can always be improved, but by design they can never be good enough because their size alone is one of the problems…. The good news: it’s up to us. We can choose to reject these platforms and move to a more distributed web of indie microblogs. We can choose to reject the attention power-grab of the algorithmic timeline. Continue reading →
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Interoperablity and Social Silos: Access Act Thinking the Right Way
Interoperability - not just data portability but set API’s for communication by different accounts across social media silos would make a huge difference. For the better. www.theverge.com/2019/10/2… Continue reading →
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Yahoo Groups Shutting Down: All Content from 115 Million Groups to be Permantently Deleted Dec 14th
Why owning your own content and syndicating it to external platforms is key. “Yahoo has made the decision to no longer allow users to upload content to the Yahoo Groups site,” the company said in a notice to users. “Beginning October 28, you won’t be able to upload any more content to the site, and as of December 14 all previously posted content on the site will be permanently removed.” Continue reading →
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A Good Review of Zuck's Speech
Agree completely: “The speech began with a major tactical and factual error, in which Zuckerberg attempted to awkwardly retcon the founding of Facebook into a story about giving students a voice during the Iraq war. (“I remember feeling that if more people had a voice to share their experiences, maybe things would have gone differently.”) All previous reporting on the subject suggests that the truth was much, much hornier, and the fact that Zuckerberg’s speech began so disingenuously caused lots of the folks I read to tune out the rest… Continue reading →
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How to Have Your Twitter Username Extorted From You
Crazy story: “My $50,000 Twitter Username Was Stolen Thanks to PayPal and GoDaddy. I had a rare Twitter username, @N. Yep, just one letter. I’ve been offered as much as $50,000 for it. People have tried to steal it. Password reset instructions are a regular sight in my email inbox. As of today, I no longer control @N. I was extorted into giving it up.” medium.com/@N/how-i-… Continue reading →
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How do you communicate when the government censors the internet? You route around it.
Hong Kong Protesors going “Mesh Network” to communicate & circumvent the government: “60K installations in just the past seven days, most of them from Hong Kong.” www.forbes.com/sites/joh… Continue reading →
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Launching a New Mastdodon Instance Focused on the OpenWeb
So with a few friends, just launched this new instance: INDIEWEB.SOCIAL is a home for those who build, study, promote - or are just fascinated by - a wide variety of #openweb, #indieweb, #federated and #humanetech practices and technologies. We seek to promote innovation and shared evolution and promotion of such technologies as well as to offer this instance itself as a platform to experiment with integration and early implementations… Continue reading →
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Gizmodo on NetNewsWire's Relaunch: "One of the Best RSS Readers Is Back"
Great Gizmodo write up on the relaunch of #NewNewsWire: “Despite what companies like Apple and Facebook claim, you don’t need a giant corporation telling you what news stories you should read every morning. Nearly every website (worth reading) still operates an RSS feed. And now one of the oldest and most robust RSS readers, NetNewsWire, is back from the dead and worth your consideration again.” gizmodo.com/one-of-th… Continue reading →
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"Why Freedom of Thought Requires Attention"
He opens with “Freedom of thought requries media that don’t listen to and watch and survielle us as we use them…media that consumes us, in the end consumes freedom of thought.” A friend’s review: “I really liked his point that it’s not required to invent new stuff to fix what’s wrong today but “just” to undo stuff that went wrong in last years. Aligned very well with the idea of #indieweb and the fediverse. Continue reading →
