Public Service Internet monthly newsletter (Jan 2024)

Six mascots are sitting around a tree, but this one is shaped with colored nodes like the Fediverse logo. They represents a sample of Free/Libre software that can interchange communication via the activityPub protocol, shaping the Fediverse. It's a photo of a drawing done on paper with pencil and with a bit of watercolor while traveling in family. With mascot of Mastodon, Pleroma-tan of Pleroma, Ai of Misskey Lemmy Sepia of sloth mascot by Anna Abramek for Fediverse logo, License CC-BY-SA 4.0

We live in incredible times with such possibilities that is clear. Although its easily dismissed with potential planned obsolescence of trains by the maker, the promise of Matter a bit of let down for now and the first but not last devastation of a country due to climate collapse.

To quote Buckminster Fuller “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

You are seeing aspects of this with Meta’s threads testing fediverse interoperability, roof tops being taken seriously as a source for renewable power and planned obsolescence on public transport.


Beeper interoperability exposes Apple’s closed ecosystem

Its easily overlooked by most Apple users but there is a bigger story raised by Senator Elizabeth Warren and Cory Doctorow. Apple’s reply must have the EU stretching for their law books? Here is the latest update on everything.

Parents sharing data without knowledge

Ian thinks: This short video from one of the Netherlands public broadcasters, highlights the big problem parents and new children have when it comes to social media and the internet. The punch line weighs heavy in minds afterwards.

Surveillance in the ebooks you are reading?

Ian thinks: Although this is mainly focused on the American market, its concerning and a sign of the commercialisation of everything possible. I naively thought the well established laws around libraries would apply but obviously not. Maybe they should!

University monetising their students now up to 11

Ian thinks: Following on from the previous link, reading the experience of students again in the states is simply terrifying from a privacy point of view. Like schools, a number of companies have come in at such a low price to collect as much data as possible in return for little. I don’t even think some of the universities are fully aware of the bigger problem?  The case for University is eroding away every day, sadly.

Do we digitally own anything at all?

Ian thinks: There has been a number of news stories about the hostile problem of online streaming and subscription of digital goods. I found Wendy’s related post honest and realistic.

The driving licence line up

Ian thinks: The Omni-Surveillance society wants more data, and all those driving licences are a rich store of data. Will this bill go through? I’m unsure but honestly I’m conscious of how far you can get with “think about the children”.

What the platforms do so badly, local community

Ian thinks: In this TEDx talk, Shani outlines what she did for her local area to encourage people to build a community. Its a wonderful talk and points to just enough internet rather than centring it. Just wonderful.

Proton’s CEO grilled for 2 hours and comes out fresh as a daisy

Ian thinks: Andy Yen, answers question for 2 hours and some of them are cutting and tricky. I know its a long time for most people but you really get a sense of Proton’s future and their part in the public service internet. Well worth turning on and mainly listening to.

Match group will own love now and into the future?

Ian thinks: Most people care less about online dating and don’t see the connection with the public service internet. However this video demonstrates the almost complete monopoly of the Match group, buying new platforms as they pop their heads up. This is critical with a pandemic of loneliness across the developed world.

Just one more… final victory for free, libre and open source

Ian thinks: Podcasting is going through a rough time with advertising recently. FLOSS weekly is another one ending. However its a great final episode and all 761 episodes makes a great archive documenting the many projects and achievements from the FLOSS community over the last 17 years.


Find the archive here

Some interesting Indieweb developments

Person with chromebook
Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash

Update with more conference details

I’ve been keeping an eye on whats happening in the next/web3/fediverse/indieweb space, here are a few things I found interesting

Theres a virtual conference about everything Activitypub.

Activitypub.rocks

A conference about the present and future of ActivityPub, the world’s leading federated social web standard.

Looks like a good virtual conference, and don’t forget to register for it.

One to mark the calendar and another one…

I  noticed there is a Fediverse #SummerSchool, sessions and sign up here.

I was mentioning webmentions to someone the other day and wondering if there was other places webmentions could work beyond the typical scenarios. So when I saw Whim (a command-line utility for sending, receiving, and working with webmentions) with these features

Daemon to receive and store incoming webmentions
Webmention verifier, suitable for scheduled operation
A tool for sending webmentions, individually or en masse (given a source URL)
Commands to query a local database of received webmentions
Simple webserver to display webmention-powered comment sections as HTML, suitable for JavaScript-driven insertion into an otherwise static webpage

Talking about indieweb and fediverse software, I’m impressed the long list of other software projects. Theres some neat projects there including

  • dokieli looks good as its hits so many of the standards I’m interested in, especially the web annotations.
  • reel2bits looks like funkwhale but maybe more webby
  • gath.io is a quick and easy way to make and share events. Events are public with the special link, its like what doodle.com does.
  • bookwyrm is a federated book reviewing system, aka a fedi-goodreads

Lastly a couple of things, although loosely indieweb/fediverse related.

I was interested to hear Kaliya Young on Floss weekly recently. Kaliya I have met a few times at the Mydata conference. Self-sovereign identity and the use of verifiable credentials and decentralized identifiers is a interesting area. I get the concept but haven’t had the chance to set one up yet. Last year after going to the Indiewebcamp, I setup indieauth which works in a similar way? In actual fact, it finally worked for me on retrying it.

I felt Kaliya did a reasonable job of explaining it but you can tell by the questions she was getting, people were not following. I recommend the Mydata 2018 talk although its moved on quite a bit. Don’t get me wrong its a very difficult thing to get, especially with audio only.

However I did catch Kaliya saying how important standards are and some kind of implementation. I very much agree, this is why I love what the indieweb community do. It also reminded me of something I heard on the twit podcast network too. Protocols not platformsProtocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech.

Lets also not forget the experiment I’m part of with Web Monitization. So far its pretty good without having to block access to my postings. I’m sure there will be an update in a future blog post.