It worries me when I see “end of the open web” commentary, especially when the fediverse is trying to provide a moral solution to open web tech going forward. I can’t disagree with this guy’s pov… but from an indie publisher pov, I DO NOT want to hide away my work (eg for Cybercultural), I want it to be freely available. My current strategy is to make my posts as human-centered as possible, based on my own experiences and perspectives. Will that be enough to get click-thrus from AI search tho?
There is a case to be made that we are due a ‘Napster moment’ very soon, and Perplexity may well be the Napster. In that scenario, Google especially will be compelled by legal pressures to find a way to compensate the humans who create the content that the open web relies on to continue. I guess I am hoping for that to happen, but I also don’t want to be a Lars Ulrich about it. I just want to be able to survive (and if I’m fortunate, thrive) on the open web!
I started this account on Mastodon.social 7 years ago today :) As my first post points out, I had previously joined Mastodon.technology, but I think that instance folded not long after. Btw this is the search I used to find my first post: from:me before:2017-06-08 #MastoBirthday
@frozencanuck It’s way better now, because there’s an active community and you can find lots of people to connect to in your chosen topics of interest. As for what I’d like to see get done, well it’s being done: fediverse development on ActivityPub. Now it’s a matter of encouraging more people to jump over from the centralized platforms (X, and dare I say it, Threads too).
Let Perplexity do the blogging for you? No thanks, but I suppose an AI blogging tool was inevitable. “Perplexity Pages”: yet another reason to support indie publishers and the human-focused fediverse. https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/blog/perplexity-pages
Mark Hinkle, who is really on top of the AI tech, makes this interesting comparison re Perplexity Pages:
“This reminds me of Seth Godin's website, Squidoo.
Squidoo was a revenue-sharing article-writing site. Articles were called "lenses." In 2010, the site consisted of 1.5 million lenses.”
Quantum computing has taken over from AI as the tech that seems highly promising, but also has been not quite there for years now. I did a series of posts 2 years ago, and I still receive a stream of news in my inbox about it, but it still seems a ways off. e.g. "...today announced a significant milestone on the path to commercially relevant quantum systems. While many existing quantum architectures achieve entanglement within modules, [this co] has demonstrated entanglement between modules."
"The Verge and 404 Media are building out new functions that would allow them to distribute posts on their sites and on federated platforms – like Threads, Mastodon and Bluesky – at the same time. Replies to those posts on those platforms become comments on their sites."
If you're not looking at @theverge and @404mediaco as social web platforms that are hosting hand-picked content creators with a publisher's infrastructure, you're not paying attention. #Fediverse
@artlung@quillmatiq@theverge@404mediaco I’ll have to go back and check how that ended up…it probably just stopped when Facebook bought FriendFeed! But I do remember it was great from a publisher pov, to have social comments coming back to the origin of the story.
@jon thanks Jon :) Yes, pretty soon after that went down, I realized I'd dodged a bullet. RWW had a lot more organic growth to go — including a bunch of great people I hired in the years to come (your good self included, of course!)
@pluralistic@judell I did a big archive project on my old ReadWriteWeb articles back in 2017, linking them all to @internetarchive versions. And that was before RWW got onsold to a scammer gambling company! So glad the Wayback Machine exists. I also have offline backups of all my articles. But of course, I wish I had backed them up at the time, instead of many years later. https://ricmac.org/2017/07/12/creating-an-archive/
Any #Bear users here? I've just started testing it to see if it's better than Apple notes. I've created a couple notes and tagged them, but the tags aren't showing on the sidebar.
What am I doing wrong? This isn't a great first impression…
@kev I use Bear, but more as a way to draft my Cybercultural posts in Markdown, as it has a nice WYSIWYG interface for MD. I've had no issues with hashtags; is this what you're doing in the notes?
Jason Fried from 37Signals announces a “web-based books” product, which I must admit does sound intriguing, even though I already made my own custom book serialization site with Eleventy + Buttondown. Sounds like business books is their main use case, but still, good idea. -> “Workbook […] They have covers, they can have title pages, they can have picture pages, and they can have text pages. Each book gets its own URL, and navigating and keeping track of your progress is all built right in.”