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1. Strypey (strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jul-2024 13:32:51 JST Strypey

   #TIL about #Weird;

   "Independent 'social sign-in' for the alt-web."

   "Weird wants to be "the Google-login button of the people's web", powered by people's websites instead of totalitarian mega-platforms. By making (or connecting) your website with Weird you will soon be able to access and interact with the small, open and indie web just as easily as the regular web works today. Same conveniences, without the dark patterns, spying and data theft."

   https://weird.one/

   • Zergling_man (zergling_man@sacred.harpy.faith)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jul-2024 13:32:45 JST Zergling_man

     in reply to

     • djsumdog
     • Pawlicker
     @PurpCat @strypey @djsumdog rss is still pretty great, wordpress has it enabled by default so I can often get feeds from there because the admins didn't even know about it.
     But like 99% of my feeds are just mangadex via my own proxy tool.
     And then there's this guy: https://www.hokkaido-np.co.jp/output/7/free/index.ad.xml
   • Pawlicker (purpcat@clubcyberia.co)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jul-2024 13:32:46 JST Pawlicker

     in reply to

     • djsumdog
     • Zergling_man
     @djsumdog @strypey @Zergling_man >Do you really think any new federation signon system will catch on, outside of truly open source distributed projects? In the 90s they might have, but today, we have way too many commies who have personal missions to push Code-of-conducts and documentation changes in projects they've never written a single line of code for. The frothing morons on Hackernews will praise such people (the ones who don't are banned) and we watch everything turn to shit under a blanket of ideological luxury beliefs.
     
     Here's an example: the problem with Big Tech single sign ons is very, very simple.
     
     If you are banned from your Google account (like with the Jordan Peterson saga that pushed him into fame, along with many less relevant people online), you just lost access to every single website you used to sign in. You now have to contact each and every site to explain the situation and hoping they will transfer your e-mail over, because you're locked out of that single sign on feature and your gmail account (if you used that for Google and not a different one).
     
     Now imagine something like J6 or Charlottesville happens again, or some election they don't like, and the activist employees who work in the dark are giddy at the idea of banning undesirables and making their lives hell.
     
     They will want there to be a way to ban you. Nothing like that could happen again without this to stop "harassment" because some unfunny kids decided to keep making alts to post the same shit.
   • Pawlicker (purpcat@clubcyberia.co)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jul-2024 13:32:46 JST Pawlicker

     in reply to

     • djsumdog
     • Zergling_man
     • Pawlicker
     @djsumdog @Zergling_man @strypey The other problem, aside from politics in Mozilla and the like, is very simple.
     
     Big tech companies and journalists worked to kill RSS in the mainstream (compare how everything in the late 00s had it to even 5 years later) for a very good reason; it eliminates a locus of control.
     
     The death of RSS was talked about in Trust Me I'm Lying, and for a good reason. RSS was a firehose feed of news stories. Google News (and similar social media feeds), aside from being able to blacklist any news source that is unapproved by the employees and Google themselves, is also slanted towards whoever writes the most bombastic, clickbait, fear mongering or sensational headlines.
     
     Sure, people like LFJ will talk about how it's your duty in big tech to nip it in the bud and do something, and Google will have documents like the Good Censor PDF file leak, yet this entire format of media is at it's core flawed.
     
     You can't go link a CNN RSS feed anymore aside from a bitrotted XML file that is stuck with news stories from 2018, and other sites have buried away or have dead feeds. Or they'll want you to use some shit like feedly to get the feed. You're instead normally expected to use Google News or Facebook to pull the latest news feeds.
     
     Look how often people share fake stories here or stories that are out of date as if they came out today or yesterday, the same shit goes on over in the normiesphere and this is all because what gets people pumped is scary news stories or crazy ones.
     
     This is just one example. They will never let something like OpenID succeed, if they can have people tied into the walled gardens of Google/MSFT/FB, and when it's not about control it's about money and datamining.
   • djsumdog (djsumdog@djsumdog.com)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jul-2024 13:32:47 JST djsumdog

     in reply to

     • Zergling_man
     The shift away from open standards did not hurt these companies in the slightest, and only benefited them. StackOverflow, whose community is most developers, had less than a 2% OpenID usage. Mozilla Persona wasn't ahead of it's time, it was a regression to the mean; a project Mozilla gave up on just like they gave up on ... not being a total piece of shit company that forced resignations of a Christian because of his private religious beliefs.
     
     Do you really think any new federation signon system will catch on, outside of truly open source distributed projects? In the 90s they might have, but today, we have way too many commies who have personal missions to push Code-of-conducts and documentation changes in projects they've never written a single line of code for. The frothing morons on Hackernews will praise such people (the ones who don't are banned) and we watch everything turn to shit under a blanket of ideological luxury beliefs.
     
     I don't want to be negative. I want to believe. But my negative comes from what I've seen with my own eyes. It's a moral panic that is not going away. It will only grow like a cancer.
     xianc78 likes this.
   • Strypey (strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jul-2024 13:32:49 JST Strypey

     in reply to

     • djsumdog
     • Zergling_man

     @djsumdog
     > all of this will happen again .. but shittier

     I see no reason for such cynicism. I'm sure the creators of Weird are aware of these precedents.

     OpenID, like XMPP, faced the headwinds mentioned in the article; a general shift away from open standards by dominant companies. Those winds have clearly started blowing in the opposite direction since it was written in 2018. Mozilla Persona/ WebID was ahead of its time.

     @Zergling_man

     xianc78 repeated this.
   • djsumdog (djsumdog@djsumdog.com)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jul-2024 13:32:50 JST djsumdog

     in reply to
     all of this has happened before:
     
     https://battlepenguin.com/tech/the-decline-of-openid/
     
     https://github.com/mozilla/persona
     
     and all of this will happen again .. but shittier
   • djsumdog (djsumdog@djsumdog.com)'s status on Tuesday, 09-Jul-2024 13:20:44 JST djsumdog

     in reply to

     • Zergling_man
     How do you get non-tech people to care? That's not "cynicism," it's just the reality. I stopped trying to get non-tech people to try Linux back before 2010. If people want it, they'll demand it.
     
     I run my own e-mail, my own Matrix/XMPP servers, my own CardDav/CalDav (radicale), my own website and this instance. I have zero Google/Apple services on my phone (Lineage + FDroid/Auora). But the 90% is not you or me. Some people are upset about the way things are, but none of them know what to do about it, and even fewer feel they have the time to learn how to break away from what the megacorps offer for cheap.
     
     I write tutorials whenever I can, but it's not like blogs show up on Google anymore. Hell, my website is shadow banned from Hackernews and most of Reddit, and explicitly banned from Ello, Lobsters and phuks.co.
     
     The goal of all media is to limit the reach of the individual. This video is from over a decade ago about network neutrality. What they say about newspapers/radio is true, but I do think they miss the bigger picture of what has happened:
     
     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66PbSzwnLes
     
     I did get a bunch of friends to sign up for my old Mastodon instance back in 2018. A small amount of them even used it for a few years. But I doubt any of them do now.
     
     It's up do individuals to make a difference in their own life. I'm not wasting my time advertising, or being anyone's tech support.
     
     Do what you can. But don't overly concern yourself with it. None of this matters. What you do in real life on the weekends with your friends: going to plays, seeing local bands, hanging out with your friends, having BBQs, making time for your family, working in your garden .. all those things matter than any of this shit.
   • Strypey (strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz)'s status on Tuesday, 09-Jul-2024 13:20:46 JST Strypey

     in reply to

     • djsumdog
     • Zergling_man

     Sorry @djsumdog. I'm getting very grumpy with knowing cynicism at the moment, but that kind of dismissive response is beneath me.

     I am genuinely interested though in any proposals you might have for how to improve the situation we're commiserating about. Eg any suggestions for the Weird folks about how to avoid the fate of OpenID or the marginalisation of the IndieWeb.

     @Zergling_man

   • Strypey (strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz)'s status on Tuesday, 09-Jul-2024 13:20:47 JST Strypey

     in reply to

     • djsumdog
     • Zergling_man

     @djsumdog
     > The shift away from open standards did not hurt these companies in the slightest

     No. It hurt OpenID and WebID (Mozilla Persona).

     > I don't want to be negative

     I'd certainly prefer not have this wall of pointless whinging in my @mentions. If you have any actionable suggestions on how to solve any of the well-known problems you're describing, I'm all ears.

     @Zergling_man

   • Ethical Pedophile (blinkrape@posting.lolicon.rocks)'s status on Tuesday, 09-Jul-2024 13:21:05 JST Ethical Pedophile

     in reply to

     • djsumdog
     • Zergling_man
     @djsumdog @strypey @Zergling_man The problem has historically been approached wrong.
     
     You need to target children with exposure to other operating systems. The children are the ones who are gonna see something different and be interested in it. I didn't learn computers as a teen or adult, I saw computers as earlier as 2nd/3rd grade in school in the early 90s and I was using them regularly by the 4th grade. My grandfather had a computer, my first computer was handmedowns from him and that shit was from the 80s, but it didn't matter because I was just a kid having fun.