Excursions

Email indeed is the perfect, and oldest, decentralised social network for communication. You do not need a particular platform to be part of it. But that is also what makes it terrible. If you can’t control the inlet, it has to flood the house - bring it to stand still.

That’s the one reason that completely negates all the positives for the e-mail as communications platform. So many smarter people have tried making this a usable system. Alas. No success till now. Getting a decentralised platform up and taking it mainstream with its innate complexities is a huge ask, especially amidst the pull of the simplicity of silos. Just look at mastodon.social.

Simplicity matters. I struggled for days explaining to my dad why he need not have a “www” in his e-mail address. And not have a “@” while typing in the webaddress for Gmail. After a point, he stopped using e-mail, nudging me every now and then on why I wasn’t on Facebook where he could just @ me. Apparently, “it’s a closed silo” is not a reason enough.

Given the recent focus on the working on Micro.threads, I hardly had any spare time for working on exploring Blot. Micropub remains a distant dream. In line with the first update, I thought the best way to get going would be to IndieWebify the site first.

So I took some time out today and started with incorporating the basic principles. Some were addressed without much hiccup. Some have left me with some questions.

1. Web Sign In is enabled. However, it did throw a curveball. Given that I already have my primary site active, how can I include rel=me links point to any of the Twitter/Github services? Concern is primary as I cannot link my Twitter/Github profiles to multiple homepage. May have to identify a different unused profile?
2. h-card microformat is incorporated; so the site provides information on me now.
3. h-entry microformat is added to all the post entries. There is one issue though. I could not find any way to format the published date that gets displayed on the posts. The post properties exposes just , which gets the default format of MMM DD, YYYY. And I do not think it’s a valid ISO-8601 as expected by the microformats2.

Stuff to sort out next

• Webmentions, both send and receive. I think I may keep this for later. I do not think I want to bring in the interactions at this point
• Support for different posts types - replies, likes and reposts. I need to be able to add these posts type. However, more I think about it, I come to realise biggest benefit is going to be once Micropub is setup and site is able to send the Webmentions at the least. So even this might take some time.

A wonderful essay on what’s “obvious” to human and how the fallacy that “obviousness is driven by human bias”, which in itself is error prone, can lead to ungrounded, optimistic euphoria, especially around AI.

Knowing what to observe, what might be relevant and what data to gather in the first place is not a computational task — it’s a human one. The present AI orthodoxy neglects the question- and theory-driven nature of observation and perception. The scientific method illustrates this well. And so does the history of science. After all, many of the most significant scientific discoveries resulted not from reams of data or large amounts of computational power, but from a question or theory. (…)

Computers can be programmed to recognise and attend to certain features of the world — which need to be clearly specified and programmed a priori. But they cannot be programmed to make new observations, to ask novel questions or to meaningfully adjust to changing circumstances. The human ability to ask new questions, to generate hypotheses, and to identify and find novelty is unique and not programmable. No statistical procedure allows one to somehow see a mundane, taken-for-granted observation in a radically different and new way. That’s where humans come in.

The essay is loaded with astute observations and arguments, made me thing. A must read.

Update on Micro.threads User Discovery section. Rolled out some performance improvements. Added some context around the user recommendations.

I was seriously considering buying a domain name in my daughter’s name today, who is still 5. I do not know if I plan to use it now, but I think if she ever needs one, she may not have it available. But then I also do not want to push my choice on her. I am being too crazy?

I just carried out my customary buy on Amazon Prime Day. And of course it is for an Amazon device. That’s the only stuff with good deals.

h/t Daniel Goldsmith

A nice post. Early this year, I too followed a similar path to take my web and social presence Indie - something that I control. The journal section on my website became the primary destination for microposts. I (selectively) route to Twitter via Micro.blog cross-posting feature. I receive and display all the interactions on the posts from different platforms using webmentions.

I make Hugo process and render such microposts differently. It’s custom now, and may follow any solution in future. But the intention would be my microposts would exist here.

This structure has also lent me the flexibility of the posting interface. My posts, social and long ones, originate from the app that’s convenient and relevant at the time of posting. Some originate at Micro.blog iOS app, some at quill, most replies and likes directly from Microsub clients (like this one from Monocle) and at times in text editor of my choice (iA Writer, Drafts). And that in itself is a huge benefit.

I like ring of “social” subdomain that Dan uses, especially for the reason that it can always act as the destination for my microposts, irrespective of what hosts them. I may explore that.