My bird pics not as good as @craignewmark, but I’m just a novice birder.

Also snapped a pic of a robin redbreast. #BirdsOfMastodon

To distract you on this stressful day, please enjoy this great tit. Seen in my back yard today. #BirdsOfMastodon

In the latest instalment of my Web 2.0 memoir, I reflect on the final quarter of 2010 — including another trip to Silicon Valley. 2010 was, in hindsight, peak ReadWriteWeb. As you'll read in following instalments, 2011 got... tumultuous. But you never quite know what will hit you next in the tech industry, so I was feeling cautiously optimistic at the time. As I note at the end of this post, in December RWW had its best-ever traffic month. https://cybercultural.com/p/056-parc-visit-2010/ #InternetHistory

I'm working on a post about Bluesky protocol and I found this video helpful (I must admit, I didn't realize Dan Abramov actually worked for Bluesky until watching this...no wonder he's so active over there). The comparisons to the way the early web worked are interesting. I do like the idea of having a domain I own verify my profile. Dev space is very early right now, but worth watching. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1sJW6nTP6E

@GIFmodel @julienbidoret @stgiga In another of my very early RWW posts, I quoted this from TBL’s book: "the browser would decode URIs, and let me read, write, or edit Web pages in HTML". https://web.archive.org/web/20031224014501/http://www.readwriteweb.com/2003/05/15.html#a10

@GIFmodel I agree he never phrased it like that. Fwiw I was definitely inspired by TBL to name my blog Read/WriteWeb (per my launch post in April 2003: https://web.archive.org/web/20030809061335/http://www.readwriteweb.com/2003/04/20.html), but I don’t think he used that exact term. I had always thought that was his vision, as his original browser was read/write. It was Mosaic and the browsers that came after that took away that functionality. Blogging did essentially bring it back, in that it made writing to the web easier.

YES, this is what I want. I don’t want to run my own AP server, but I do want to control my identity and content AND I want to be part of the fediverse. Not too much to ask, surely https://mastodon.online/@ilyess/113414869306697938

Came across this today on Bluesky, by @tomgauld.bsky.social. Have to admit, it does sum up the present situation. We are all quite medieval when it comes down to it, lots of room for both kingdoms to grow (as long as Meta doesn’t nuke ours and the blockchain VCs don’t blow up theirs).

@EnglishMobster Thanks, that’s a good explanation. I guess we shall see, as currently decentralization in Bluesky is more theoretical than current reality. So right now the only way to connect to others is through its central “search engine” service. That gives them a lot of power. But I do agree it’s a fascinating experiment and so I’m keen to see how it turns out.

If you’re still not convinced that Bluesky is a high risk of enshittification, imagine in 5 years time Matt Mullenweg replies to a post by a Bluesky founder with the words “I’ll buy it!”

(To be fair, I do think Bluesky is really interesting technically and even culturally, so I am hoping for the best for them. But it’s not truly open as long as VCs are investing in it.)

I expect to see a chorus of “well actually” skeets about this post by @pluralistic about Bluesky (https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/), but we have seen this movie before. Remember when the narrative about Twitter was that it was an “open” platform, circa 2007-08? We believed it then, because the API was freely available and didn’t have many restrictions at that time. But when Twitter needed to show more revenue growth, the screws began to be turned. https://cybercultural.com/p/twitter-in-2007-the-open-platform/

Perhaps proof that we can, in fact, all just get along? @marypcbuk on OpenNext — an open source way to deploy Next.js on something other than Vercel — and the involvement of Netlify, Cloudflare *and* (latterly) Vercel. https://thenewstack.io/opennext-gets-closer-to-making-next-js-truly-portable/

@miramarmike @Br3nda Trip down memory lane. Makes me homesick too…Supreme coffee, mmmm.

I can tell you one thing, ReadWriteWeb bloggers in its prime would not be touting Threads as their favorite social media app! I think it would’ve been a split between Mastodon and Bluesky — the former because it’s open, the latter because it’s technically interesting/exciting. So I don’t know what The Verge is thinking publishing this… https://infosec.exchange/@frankie/113409031689586136

@sia Here’s mine, but I sure hope Mastodon stays the home for the 11ty community. Open source software should stick together. https://bsky.app/profile/cybercultural.com

@jonathan @tomgauld.bsky.social Turns out I was already following him! Great stuff, that bridge.

Good luck to all the #NaNoWriMo participants this year (National Novel Writing Month). It's now 21 years since I did it, along with making the somewhat unwise decision of blogging my progress all through November 2003 on ReadWriteWeb. I did complete the 50,000 word challenge by the end of November, although the resulting scifi novel — about an interplanetary internet and extraterrestrials — was very bad and shall never be seen again.

Tom Gauld (@tomgauld.bsky.social ) on the ultimate writing machine – cartoon from The Guardian. #AI #writing

@artlung @molly0xfff I love what Molly is doing, but I’m not sure how to apply POSSE to a long-form narrative project like mine. But that’s ok, I am really writing for posterity (hope that doesn’t sound too pompous) and so I have to accept that short-term gains will be much harder to come by.