Untangling Threads - Erin Kissane's small internet website
"survivable futures require that we all have access to better ways to be together online"
Large Language Publishing
"There are a hundred and one reasons to worry about Elsevier mining our scholarship to maximize its profits. I want to linger on what is, arguably, the most important: the potential effects on knowledge itself. At the core of these tools—including a predictable avalanche of as-yet-unannounced products—is a series of verbs: to surface, to rank, to summarize, and to recommend. The object of each verb is us—our scholarship and our behavior. What’s at stake is the kind of knowledge that the models surface, and whose knowledge."
Open Infrastructures and the Future of Knowledge Production, part 1 – Platypus
"We also want to encourage our users to rethink the purposes and the dynamics of publishing altogether, in ways that might allow for the development of new, open, collective, equitable processes of creating and sharing knowledge that re-center agency over the ways that scholarly work develops and circulates with the scholars themselves"
How Google perfected the web
clear, well-written overview of the positive feedback/signalling game of SEO
Tiny Awards, a celebration of the small, playful, and heartfelt web - Waxy.org
finalists for the Tiny Awards, honoring websites that 'best embody the idea of a small, playful and heartfelt web.'"
How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse)
"By competing against Meta in the brainless growth-at-all-cost ideology, we are certain to lose. They are the master of that game. They are trying to bring everyone in their field, to make people compete against them using the weapons they are selling."
Epicycle Clock by Sophie Houlden
brilliant
soulellis.com/writing/badarchives
stirring presentation on early lgbt digital spaces (including printouts of Community Memory) and the concept of leaky/imperfect/expansive archives
Web3 is not Decentralisation — it’s a Ploy to put Crypto Bros in Charge | by Ross Stalker | Nov, 2021 | Medium
"Imagine if someone were to suggest that all web infrastructure should share the same database. That would rightly be seen as an absurd idea — but that’s what Web3 advocates are essentially suggesting. A blockchain is a distributed append-only database, spread across multiple nodes, but it is still one single database. In the name of decentralisation, Web3 advocates in fact seek to create a new form of centralisation around the blockchain."
Web3 is Bullshit
"We’ve gone from the world of abundance in cloud computing where the cost of compute time per person was nearly at post-scarcity levels, to the reverse of trying to enforce artificial scarcity on the most abundant resource humanity has ever created. This is regression, not progress."
What if PageRank Was a Mistake? — Sympolymathesy, by Chris Krycho
"All curation grows until it requires search. All search grows until it requires curation." see also Halt and Catch Fire syllabus week 13 https://bits.ashleyblewer.com/halt-and-catch-fire-syllabus/classes/13.html
Creative Computing and Network Culture ~ Joachim Despland-Lichtert
"Imagine you go back in time to the 1970s to change the history of the internet to your own liking. Based on the events described in the reading, how would you do it? How much funding would you need to achieve the changes you seek? Where do you get that funding from at the time, and how difficult is it to obtain? What does your answer to these questions say about the “great man theory” of history?"
The Languages Which Almost Became CSS
"While these languages are obviously not in common use today, we find it fascinating to think about the world that might have been. Even more surprisingly, it happens that many of these other options include features which developers would love to see appear in CSS even today."
Why did the web take over desktop and not mobile? - by Gordon Brander - Subconscious
"The basis of performance shifted from small binaries to smooth interaction. [...] Navigation shifted from keyboard to springboard. [...] Log-in disappeared completely. [...] Discovery shifted from search to app store. [...] Engagement shifted from links to icons. [...] Business models expanded to IAP, subscriptions, and app purchase. [...] Security shifted from sandbox to app review...."
INTERFACE CRITIQUE — Olia Lialina: FROM MY TO ME
"But the smartest and most effective move the industry made (the aforementioned measures wouldn’t work without it) was to push people from My to Me. To introduce forms that would motivate people to see themselves as the main – and then the only – content of what they do online. I’d like to stress that although early web pages (or home pages) are remembered as personal, the person who made it was not the initial content; that turn took place later."
My current HTML boilerplate - Manuel Matuzović
Alt-Text as Poetry
"Alt-text is an essential part of web accessibility. It is often overlooked or understood through the lens of compliance, as an unwelcome burden to be met with minimum effort. How can we instead approach alt-text thoughtfully and creatively?" (presented at wordhack dec 2020)
thwidge/brutalcss: Lovely as a rock
"Brutal CSS is an immature expression of my frustration with other brutalist website nerds who don't include the one meta tag that makes your website work on mobile."
Gemini Gateway
"Gemini is a new internet protocol which: Is heavier than gopher; Is lighter than the web; Will not replace either; Strives for maximum power to weight ratio; Takes user privacy very seriously"
Fraidycat
"Fraidycat is a desktop app or browser extension for Firefox or Chrome. I use it to follow people (hundreds) on whatever platform they choose - Twitter, a blog, YouTube, even on a public TiddlyWiki."
58 bytes of css to look great nearly everywhere
namely, main { max-width: 38rem; padding: 2rem; margin: auto; }
Markdown.css - make HTML look like plain-text
css stylesheet that displays html as markdown. brilliant