Catching up on reviewing my Christmas reading: Unbelievably dystopian

Latest episode of Eat This Podcast is up now. Bread as it ought to be.

It is always interesting to read of someone else deciding to give the IndieWeb a try. I like what Michael Singletary has to say, especially this

Most of my online friends and acquaintances will never understand or participate in the IndieWeb, and so I require a bridge between these worlds. On one side I choose what content to post and how it is stored, and it exists mainly on an island that few visit regularly. On the other side is nearly everyone I know, blissfully ignorant of my real home on the web and unable to see any content shared there without manual intervention or working plugins.

What really struck me, though, was the line in his bio: “Blogging since 2002, taking control of my content since 2018.”

I lost some of my pre–2002 posts, not through the actions of any evil silo (were there any, then?), but through my own idiocy in misplacing a crucial backup. And I never really got on board the silo first band-wagon, so in a sense I have always owned the content I care about owning. Most of my friends do consider it kind of weird that I didn’t see the photo they posted only to FB, but they’re only too happy to show them to me one on one. So yes, for now few people visit this island, and that’s OK. I enjoy the ones who do.

I'm using the IndieWeb in an attempt to make it easier for everyone to visit, and that works too.

My friend Jason was recently musing on the possibility of legislating firms to employ a certain number of people, based on revenue, in order to slow the pace of automation and the joblessness it leads to. I get that there's a problem,because no matter how good state provision for joblessness might be, firms contribute only a small part (if any) to the costs of supporting the workers they fire. Jason's idea is essentially an additional tax on firms to offset the costs of joblessness by creating unnecessary jobs. In my view there's a far better way; tax firms more, and spend some of the proceeds on a universal basic income.

One million webmentions. Very pleased to have played my own tiny part in this.

@cn suggested I use the date as the title of a Post in Known, to ensure that the contents of the post gets through to micro.blog intact, and, as so often, he is correct.

All I have to do now is remember to salute him next #micromonday

For all the joy of the #indieweb, and the pleasure of civil discourse, I am becoming incredibly confused by aspects of micro.blog. There’s the question of titleless posts, of which is this is one as an experiment, versus status updates. There are posts that appear to be contributions to an interesting conversation but aren’t because they have been cross-posted automatically from elsewhere. And there is the lack of a scroll back, which means that as I follow more people and choose not to check in the middle of my night, stuff vanishes irretrievably from my timeline. 

There are also issues with Known that are nothing to do with micro.blog.

None of this is insurmountable. For me, though, it does add friction. 

During the virtual IWC tonight, we were discussing third-party clients for publishing to websites, essentially Micropub clients and MarsEdit. And it occurred to us more or less simultaneously, that I do not use Micropub for the site that supports it out of the box, whereas I do use a client for the site that does not support Micropub out of the box. And that is because the post-creation UI is nice and simple for Known, and a right mess for WordPress.

So, just to be difficult, I'm using Quill for the first time in a long while to create a Post in Known.

#IndieWeb

A cup of coffee here, a cup of coffee there, pretty soon you're talking about a bottle of wine. Nevertheless, I thought it worth dropping 2.5 coffees to check out fsnotes, which bills itself as a "lightweight notational velocity reinvention".

I depend totally on nvALT as my general place for keeping scraps, vital information, inchoate thoughts and more besides, and the one thing that has always bugged me has been the inability to have more than one folder. Mainly, I envisage using an additional folder as an archive; notes that I truly believe I have finished with but that I really do not want to throw away because there might be something in them I need later. NvALT's blazing search speed would be fabulous for that kind of treasure hunt, but I honestly don't want currently dead notes cluttering up my view of all that stuff.

I asked about multiple folders 21 days ago and a couple of days ago the developer, Oleksandr Glushchenko, delivered just that. Definitely deserving of my support.

First impressions are that fsnotes is every bit as fast as nvALT. I haven't been able to give multiple folders a good workout yet, because I only have one big folder of notes. My minor niggle is that the display of links is different from nvALT's. A well-formed Markdown link is clickable in the preview mode, but not in "native" mode. I suppose I could fix that easily enough in my existing notes, and it need not be a problem going forward, but it is an annoyance right now that might stop me switching completely over to fsnotes.

Maybe I'll raise an issue on github for that.