#indieweb 2019-07-12

2019-07-12 UTC
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[xavierroy] [snarfed]++
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Loqi [snarfed] has 26 karma in this channel over the last year (80 in all channels)
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GWG Enjoying it, [xavierroy]
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[xavierroy] Stranger Things? Or FB backfeed?
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GWG Backfeed
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GWG Never seen stranger things
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[xavierroy] Backfeed opens up owning comments from a silo. Caveat is that getting people to move out of the silo. 🙂
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[xavierroy] The way FB email backfeed works right now is not a turnkey affair. Some people might be put off by forwarding mail process. But it is good enough for me
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[xavierroy] [snarfed] if someone comments and then deletes the comments, what does brid.gy do?
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[snarfed] [xavierroy] right now, nothing, for any silo. some background in https://github.com/snarfed/bridgy/issues/9
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[snarfed] technically it should 410 the source page and re-send the webmention. i doubt you get facebook notif emails for comment edits or deletes though, so that's probably not possible for them at least
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[snarfed] more: https://indieweb.org/deleted
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klez good morning. indieweb discussion on hn, if anyone wants to join. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20418091
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[jgmac1106] in many ways Stranger Things is a backfeed...from the upside down
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[jgmac1106] @kletz good article it is from last year and wonder if jmac has the same thoughts now
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[jgmac1106] ...and I am suspended by Twitter again, this is getting to be impossible to POSSE, these were not unsolicited @ mentions but in the middle of a conversation stream,
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[jgmac1106] I think I might just have to permenantly walk away, they are making it it too hostile for me to keep up with auto flagging bots....can't be filing appeals once a month
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[tantek] Clearly I need to spend some time updating /IndieMark 😂
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[tantek] is reading the comments
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[tantek] TIL you can see what someone on HN has posted over time, and all their comments over time, to see for example, are all their comments "angry" or just this one? etc.
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jacky I think there's just one "angry" comment (IndieWeb needs to "do it this way or it's dead" level)
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[tantek] that's the one
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klez jacky, you missed the one in reply to the one saying indieweb should ask help from the software conservacy, as it's been killed and flagged. that was... weird to put it mildly
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[tantek] that was a bit odd. no examples were given where "help from the software conservacy" made any (positive) difference
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klez [tantek], the one in reply to that (which I don't know if you can see)
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[tantek] ah didn't see it
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klez the one saying indieweb should not get help from liberals/commies/SJWs
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[kimberlyhirsh] yikes
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[tantek] lol too late. 😂 "They're inside the room!"
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[tantek] clearly they haven't read our Code of Conduct
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klez heh
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[tantek] klez, if you're looking to start some discussion around that, I recommend posting [benatwork]'s recent article to HN and seeing what happens: https://werd.io/2019/trumps-social-media-summit-and-me
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[benatwork] Fun fact: I’m shadowbanned on HN. No idea why
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[tantek] It must be a (insert rando othering group) conspiracy!
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klez [tantek], I just skimmed, but it seems like a surefire way to get it flagged
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klez @[benatwork], what's your username there? I can vouch a couple of comments (ones I think should be vouched, of course) so maybe I can restore you
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[tantek] It's an honest, well-written, and personal blog post. Why would it get flagged?
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klez (god, sorry for the "@", force of habit)
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[benatwork] @klez benwerd
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[KevinMarks] HN flags politics as inflammatory
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klez [benatwork], unless your last actual comment is from 6 months ago, I'm afraid I'll need to find one in the wild to vouch for you
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klez if it's the one from 6 months ago, you're not shadowbanned
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[KevinMarks] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20421453
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klez [tantek], what [KevinMarks] said
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[tantek] politics is inflammatory? wow
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Loqi [epeus] If you want to get replies working across the blogosphere, try brid.gy which has support for various blogging platforms. If you want to transform atom/rss to microformats, there's unmung.com If you want conversion between lots of formats there's htt...
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[KevinMarks] Enough sheds there to handle any number of bikes
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klez well, commute time. see you guys another time
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[KevinMarks] Also HN defines anything that doesn't fit PGs ideology as politics.
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[tantek] so if you write it in PG-essay-style, with citations of PG, then it'll pass?
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[tantek] that's a pretty big loophole/vuln
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[tantek] seems reasonable to hack hackernews with that
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[KevinMarks] I think Maciej already found that exploit
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[tantek] lolol
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annadane HN is baffling, the hostility of the comments sometimes
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annadane i want to like them but it's difficult sometimes
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[jgmac1106] Flagging politics as inflammatory is a way to ensure the dominant narrative stays dominant. Tech, like all, iant neutral
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[tantek] privilege is as privilege does
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[KevinMarks] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20414721
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Loqi [idlewords] So storytime! I worked at Twitter as a contractor in 2008 (my job was to make internal hockey-stick graphs of usage to impress investors) during the Fail Whale era. The site would go down pretty much daily, and every time the ops team brought it back...
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annadane every single thing that gets posted to HN is, "this article isn't accurate for such and such reason" and the reply to that is "you've misunderstood the article..." and the reply to THAT is "no, i haven't, you've misunderstood my reply..." and then "no, i didn't, the article says..."
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annadane i find tildes.net a lot better
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[tantek] 😂
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annadane (no affiliation, i'm not part of their management)
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annadane completely useless to get any kind of conversation going on HN
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[jgmac1106] Needs to be a comic annadane
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[tantek] yes that reads like an xkcd
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annadane i would not be surprised if there's a certain amount of shilling going on
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annadane or else people really are that hard headed... but oh well
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jacky def loads of shills
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jgmac1106[m] Give folks a keyboard and connection and assumed knowledge follows. Find folks who actually build things rarely have time to debate things others build
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[fluffy] I generally only read HN via n-gate. The editor of that is a jerk who often doesn’t know what they are talking about either but at least they wear their bias on their sleeve.
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annadane you *want* to read comments to an article to find out the facts about something, what the article got wrong, etc etc. so when the comments themselves are shills or just clueless... it's frustrating, especially a tech community you feel you ought to be able to trust
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annadane and i'm not saying they're all shills or all like that but it's a bit of a trend
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annadane i've found out a lot of things i didn't know about before through HN so it's disheartening when the comments suck
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jgmac1106[m] It is a forum of a VC incubator. Shill has to built into DNA... Anadane we try to use IndieWeb News as similar service. Find publishing from your own Domain improves syndication
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jgmac1106[m] People less likely to spew nonsense or vulgarity from own front door. Maybe a bit of friction (and of course smaller in scale) helps
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jgmac1106[m] Could use something like indieweb.xyz to syndicate and discuss stuff... Might be interesting
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annadane by the way i'll just add that relying on comments is a terrible idea, you can easily know an article got something wrong or right by cross referencing other things you read
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annadane an article also doesn't have to be 100% correct for you to get the general thrust of something
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jgmac1106[m] Authors have more Authority than Audience. Like it.
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annadane my first contribution to this channel is a rant... lovely
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jgmac1106[m] Not a rant more good meta advice pn how best to improve pur channels thank you
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jgmac1106[m] annadane++
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Loqi annadane has 1 karma over the last year
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sknebel good morning indieweb!
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[KevinMarks] I wonder if we could replace the idea here with a microsub reader competition https://hnpwa.com/
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jacky oooooh
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jacky tbh lol
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jacky I'd just hijack one of these into a microsub reader
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Loqi friendly reminder [KevinMarks] jacky, that's a lot of dev jargon! can you move to #indieweb-dev?
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jacky grumbles at Loqi
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[tantek] 😂
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[tantek] I believe the user-friendly term is "social reader" 🙂
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jmac Good afternoon! Yes indeed the hackernewses found my article from last year, fun times
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[KevinMarks] I look forward to a summary in this style: http://n-gate.com/hackernews/
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jmac To answer [jgmac1106]'s question, over the last 14 months I have certainly come around to the official IWC position that it's the role of the core group to develop, maintain, and document the IW technology, and if *others* want to go ahead and build stuff (be it more technology or new organizations) using IW tech, well, don't let us stop you
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jmac I also continue to think that more organized groups do have to form to carry the technology forward. (And that is starting to happen! Gradually! And I hope I can help, someday soon...)
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jmac Man I have a friend who quotes the funniest bits of n-gate in a chat but reading the raw source is pretty bleak. Eat some ice cream, dude. See a movie.
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jmac strikes "hackernews" as a noun from his active vocabulary
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annadane jesus christ! what is this "about" page on n gate, lmao
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[tantek] "incorrecting one another" 😂
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[benatwork] Big fan of that about page, may write new Known template in that style
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[benatwork] Rainbow blurs ftw
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gRegorLove Haha, the CSS comment about the fonts: /* if you don't want to use it, why is it on your computer? */
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[jgmac1106] Opportunity: https://www.recurse.com/blog/149-10000-fellowships-for-women-trans-non-binary-programmers
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[snarfed] following up on yesterday re using unlisted posts to approximate private posts, i put together a few examples for us to play with:
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[snarfed] simple unlisted post: https://snarfed.org/2019-07-11_something-quiet
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[snarfed] unlisted, blocked in robots.txt, unguessable URL: https://snarfed.org/unlisted-something-quieter-eelea9aingai5eih
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[snarfed] password-protected, the password is indieweb: https://snarfed.org/2019-07-12_something-quietest)
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Loqi [Ryan Barrett] Protected: something quietest
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[snarfed] (wikified here: https://indieweb.org/unlisted#IndieWeb_Examples)
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j12t FYI: First MyData Silicon Valley event this coming Tuesday in San Francisco. (I have been helping to organize.) Very consistent with IndieWeb ideas (but broader) and would be great to have some IndieWeb representation. http://mydatasv.org/
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[eddie] snarfed++
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[eddie] for exploring with unlisted posts
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Loqi snarfed has 27 karma in this channel over the last year (80 in all channels)
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[fluffy] I’ve used semiprivate/unlisted posts for a while. I don’t feel quite confident with putting truly private stuff behind that especially since URL unfurlers seem to do a bunch of sketchy caching.
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[fluffy] Also blocking in robots.txt only tells people there’s something there. :)
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[fluffy] Publ unlisted posts send an X-Robots header now since it has the same effect without being as leaky.
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[snarfed] [fluffy] you can block a prefix in robots.txt and still have unguessable URLs inside it
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[snarfed] but agreed overall, yes. the tradeoff is, unlisted posts aren't hard strong private, but they're 80%, like for your use cases, and way more accessible than any kind of login.
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[snarfed] more: https://indieweb.org/unlisted#Similarity_to_private_posts
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sknebel I'm really curious to see if Google picks up the existence of the robots.txt protected one through the links to it or not
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[snarfed] sknebel: that should be pretty well understood, right? tons of sites/pages are linked to but blocked in robots.txt
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[snarfed] [fluffy] do you have any data on X-Robots support in crawlers? first i've heard of it
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sknebel well, my understanding was that if a page is blocked in robots.txt but linked elsewhere, search engines will pick it up and just not show any content to it, but e.g. match on words in the ur
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sknebel l
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sknebel they know about it's existence, they don't fetch it to learn more, but also are not told to not index it
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sknebel because that'd require seeing a noindex meta tag
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sknebel which they can't if they don't fetch it
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[fluffy] I believe archive.org respects X-Robots
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[fluffy] oh, Google does too. https://developers.google.com/search/reference/robots_meta_tag
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[snarfed] sknebel: if they don't index or return it in results, what's the user-visible effect of "know about its existence" otherwise?
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sknebel [snarfed]: they return it in results. Google shows results where it says instead of a snippet/summary something like "page does not allow showing content"
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[fluffy] The user-visible effect I worry about is: you post something private and link to it in robots.txt, and then a bad actor who’s trying to dig up dirt looks at your robots.txt to see what you’ve hidden. Matching a prefix helps, I guess, but it still alerts Certain Types to the fact you have something to hide.
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[fluffy] I say this as someone who’s been doxed/harassed/stalked multiple times.
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[snarfed] sknebel: wow, really?! that's really surprising. not at all how i understood robots.txt. i'd love to see an example if you know of one offhand
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sknebel let's take this to dev
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[snarfed] fluffy: understood. unlisted as private is not a good tool for strong anti-harassment. "good enough" private is a more common use case, though, and the accessibility tradeoff is meaningful and valuable.
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[snarfed] and within "good enough," unguessable URLs + robots.txt prefix is definitely still a useful mechanism
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[snarfed] yes! indicating to readers that a private post is private is very valuable. fortunately you can do that on unlisted posts too
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[fluffy] reposting for the log: [snarfed] Oh I agree that “good enough private” is good enough for most uses of privacy. There’s just been things that I’ve posted as unlisted things that I’m still worried that someone decides to share the link with others without my knowledge/approval.
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[snarfed] eg a loud visible banner, or a password that anyone who knows you will know
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[fluffy] and sure, I’ve done that with my unlisted posts too
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[fluffy] and people who are going to act in bad faith aren’t necessarily going to not copy-paste the content either
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[snarfed] right. threat models are useful for security and privacy, and if you choose unlisted, you're effectively saying your threat model doesn't include bad actors. which is ok! and worth knowing explicitly
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[fluffy] but like, at least in Publ, a hidden URL is still guessable because of the way it redirects things that have moved.
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[snarfed] sure, implementation detail
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[fluffy] I do absolutely use unlisted URLs for certain things, in any case.
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[snarfed] btw [fluffy] your experience w/unlisted as "good enough" private sounds really valuable! mind adding it to https://indieweb.org/unlisted#IndieWeb_Examples ?
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[fluffy] Like a lot of my URL redirectors are done using that, and I also have a catch-all “hey sorry this blog entry is gone, ask nice and I’ll bring it back” page.
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[fluffy] and yeah I was planning on adding my unlisted experiments to that section.
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[fluffy] there are definitely a bunch of entries I’m going to make Actually Private as soon as I’ve rolled that functionality out in Publ though. like, stuff I need to share with others about an ongoing issue.
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[fluffy] FWIW I’ve not actually had robots.txt cause information leakage but I’ve absolutely seen it happen to others, because of what certain toxic communities do when they’ve decided to make a target of someone else
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[fluffy] and these are people who think that sharing ANY private details they can uncover is worthwhile, like collating public records about people or their family members or whatever, or finding people to use as leverage.
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[fluffy] there’s a lot of terrible people online. 😕
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[snarfed] right. bad actors. we each get to choose whether/how much we want to protect against them, and how much accessibility we want to give up to get that protection
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[snarfed] vive la difference, one of my favorite indieweb features
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[fluffy] Yeah. I’m not saying there’s one right approach of course.
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[fluffy] But like for a concrete example: a month ago I used an unlisted entry for information about my birthday party, which included my address and phone number. I sent it out to specific people on Mastodon, and all their instances immediately retrieved and cached the data and I also saw random third-party access to it. So I’m not sure who’s ended up with that data.
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[fluffy] Sidechannel sharing of private URLs still leaks data in a lot of unexpected ways.
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[asuh] I’d never heard of unlisted posts until more recently. I wish there was a way to have encapsulation with how I share posts, similar to a one to one connection between Facebook friends so that certain content can be shared with those connected people. Without introducing a private/public key scenario, it seems like every other solution is too leaky. But these are interesting thoughts
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[fluffy] Yeah, I feel like authenticated access to entries is enough of an improvement that I’ll be comfortable with that when I finally release it in Publ.
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[snarfed] definitely looking forward to seeing your experience on https://indieweb.org/unlisted#IndieWeb_Examples !
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[tantek] hmm, seeing lots of jargon here especially about robots. maybe some of the implementation details (headers, robots.txt) could be discussed in # dev instead?
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[fluffy] The dev parts of it were already moved over.
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[tantek] thank you!
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[tantek] re-reads
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[tantek] [fluffy] agreed. Targeted discovery is definitely a problem worth addressing
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[tantek] somewhat related
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[tantek] I'm now having trouble distinguishing /login_wall and /registration_wall
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[tantek] when I initially thought there was (perhaps?) a meaningful distinction, now I can't seem to re-remember it, nor can I tell from looking at the two pages
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[tantek] does anyone else have or know of any distinction between login vs registration wall(s)? or should I "just" go ahead and merge?
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[tantek] (the one distinction I thought I'd noted now feels artificial: "When presented immediately (upon first visit), this is a registration wall. ")
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sknebel hm... maybe registration wall suggests you can just sign up (paid or unpaid) to access content, vs login wall would be also in front of private posts etc?
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[tantek] interesting distinction sknebel. I think what you're referring to as "login wall" may be a bit more precisely expressed as "identification wall" - assuming that the wall is there to make you identify yourself to see if you are authorized to view that private post
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[tantek] as opposed to say a "captcha wall" or "antirobot wall" use of login / http authentication
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sknebel yep, loginwall is quite ambigious
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[tantek] there are a few people today who I think show private posts behind an "IndieAuth" wall
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[tantek] however that's a specific technology and I'd prefer a more user-friendly generic term, so maybe "identification wall" would be a better way of expressing that?
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[fluffy] hmm maybe
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[tantek] either way, so far it sounds like I could merge the existing /login_wall and /registration_all and that wouldn't lose anything nor add any confusion
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[tantek] WDYT fluffy? Do you see or understand a meaningful distinction between the two?
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cameron1 hey
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cameron1 I'm the guy who submitted that article to HN earlier today - I only discovered IndieWeb stuff this week and I've been very interested in implementing a lot of these things on my website, anyone got any advice on where to start?
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[tantek] welcome cameron1!
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[tantek] what is start?
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Loqi Get started on the indieweb by connecting with the indiewebcamp community, getting a personal domain, a place for your content, and setting up your home page and other indieweb essentials https://indieweb.org/start