#indieweb 2022-04-26
2022-04-26 UTC
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[chrisaldrich] I'm seeing lots of people sharing this link today: https://twitter.com/settings/download_your_data 😜
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[tw2113_Slack_] sorry, i’ll slow down
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# [tw2113_Slack_] [timothy_chambe] how are the mastodon numbers today?
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# [timothy_chambe] ↩️ At Indieweb social: we are seeing a very big spike...
# [timothy_chambe] At the Mastodon/Fediverse overall: think it will take a day or two to tell... but the most prominent Mastadon instance mastodon.social maintained uptime, (with some slowness at tmes) but was clearly was being hammered by traffic...
# [timothy_chambe] I'll say this, #POSSE strategies feeling a good deal more wise today.
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# [tw2113_Slack_] nice!
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# [chrisaldrich] I know there used to be a gateway for Twitter quitters to find/follow their friends on Mastodon, but I think it "broke" with API changes. Is there a newer way anyone has used lately that works for finding and discovering your social connections?
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petermolnar I'd love to know if twitter was to actually shut down, temporarily or longer, how many people would actually consider it a loss after a few weeks
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Zegnat Interesting post type that The Verge calls a “Stream”. Sort of a meta post that links to all the other posts about the same topic in a time ordered list, with its own follow (RSS) button: https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/11/23019836/elon-musk-twitter-board-of-directors-news-updates
# Zegnat Great example of /collection, I guess? Would The Verge be a “Silo Example” though? The Verge does not sound like a silo.
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# IWDiscordGateway <marksuth> It looks like Apple have pulled indigenous from the App Store as part of them removing older apps. I really need to crack on with getting IndiePass sorted
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@kevinmarks Hi, if you're sharing your mastodon account, do it with the real url rather than the weird thing with 2 @'s in that twitter doesn't link. So http://xoxo.zone/@KevinMarks rather than @kevinmarks@xoxo.zone - mastodon understands both versions, the 2 @'s one is for autocomplete (twitter.com/_/status/1518881722754027520)
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# [timothy_chambe] A good read on the various likely ways a Musk era Twitter may go: https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/galaxy-brain/6267078012500c0020c9b4ad/elon-musk-buy-twitter-outcome/
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AramZ-S[m] @Zegnat Yeah, a lot of folks in media have put work into "live blogs" in that style. The Post has spent a bunch of time and work on a similar format - https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/04/26/biden-clemency-pardons/
# AramZ-S[m] It's not a totally innocent or coincidental move. A little while back Google started supporting a metadata structure for live updating pages along with better crawling support and a badge that can show up on Google News so it is also an SEO strategy, especially for news sites.
# AramZ-S[m] It looks like this - https://www.clickseed.com/liveblogposting-schema/ and is dependent on this - https://schema.org/LiveBlogPosting
# AramZ-S[m] Yeah, I think that is a typical pattern, though I agreee the Verge's version is more clearly a feed of posts than others which usually (like WashPost does) have larger story updates on the single page and a smaller link to another post. (Sorry about the paywall!)
# AramZ-S[m] NYT's is very mix and match if you can see that one - https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/04/26/world/ukraine-russia-war-news
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# AshMcAllan[m] Thinking about switching from WordPress to something like microblog.pub just to get a cleaner lighter single user experience
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[KevinMarks] thread (read up) https://twitter.com/kevinmarks/status/1518992498638602240
# @kevinmarks @cstross @rickg @RevPriest @fiddlersgreen92 @Richard_Kadrey Yay. Sadly, @twittereng dropped support for rel="me" in profiles a couple of years back, but I'm pitching @bluesky to restore it, so we can hope. https://twitter.com/bluesky_commons/status/1517957107705810944 https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FRSLJWvXoAEta9t.png (twitter.com/_/status/1518992498638602240)
# lkhrs[m] Ash McAllan: I'm actually playing with the idea of moving back to WordPress from Hugo at some point, haha. MicroBlog is appealing though.
# AshMcAllan[m] WordPress ain't bad for what it is but I have a habit of disliking things that are more than they need to be which WordPress is for me personally
# AshMcAllan[m] Also there's something alluringly self destructive about the idea of getting rid of all my old crufty posts
# lkhrs[m] oh it's a such a good feeling to clean all that stuff up, I recently purged about a hundred posts from my blog
# lkhrs[m] and updated the tags on what remained
# [KevinMarks] I did like your webmentions/salmentions implementation though
# AramZ-S[m] Yeah, the rel prop is sadly underused and t/f tends to be undersupported. Mby we'll see Mastodon's push towards using it have some impact with greater support.
# AshMcAllan[m] <[KevinMarks]> "I did like your webmentions/..." <- Oh if I switch to microblog.pub I'll absolutely be hacking it to support salmentions
# AramZ-S[m] I don't know microblog, but I have been interested in doing webmentions on my static site generator-built sites. Do you know if there are good example implimentation, esp in Node, I could look at @[Ash McAllan] ?
# AshMcAllan[m] GWG: Aye! Work takes up a lot of my energy these days. Not a lot left over for this kind of stuff
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# [KevinMarks] The event is this Friday and it's me and DID peeps. So I can make that case.
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[tantek] Has anyone else heard of the phenomenon of "shadow sites"? This seems like especially a challenge for the IndieWeb, as if some "BigCorp" can hire a team to make clones/simulacra of "official sites" using their own domain names, then it's a vulnerability that everyone with a personal site shares. e.g. Lieferando supposedly did this (does this?) by registering 120,000 domains in Europe alone:
# [tantek] Here's an actual example I happened upon while searching for the real one: https://www.secretgardenberlin-vegansushi.de/
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[aciccarello] I know google was auto-generating websites for some businesses from maps data but those were presumably only ones without a website.
# [aciccarello] Registering 120,000 domain names is a lot!
# AramZ-S[m] They prob can. I own too many domain names and it prob isn't even 100 and my registrar was already offering me a bulk deal
# AramZ-S[m] I investigated the shadow site thing from a bunch of different angles. I threaded a version at https://twitter.com/Chronotope/status/1040711948827021312 and here https://twitter.com/Chronotope/status/1051864692149415940 looking at how shadow news sites get built for grifter ad campaigns
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@Chronotope A brief story about an ad. For some reason this new 'omg your socks are so tight YOU GONNA DIE' ad has been following me around the web lately. So being me I was like... I wonder where they stole that image from because there's no way they made it themselves. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DnFZY_JWwAECIr8.jpg (twitter.com/_/status/1040711948827021312)
# AramZ-S[m] lol yeah, that's not even the worst of the photos from the site they stole them from >.<
# AramZ-S[m] There is a version where it is an SEO strategy. There's actually a guide to it I encountered that lays out this dark optimization strategy https://twitter.com/Chronotope/status/810698714285309953
# @Chronotope Also, tho it sounds like he's uncovering a crazy set of sites, networks of linked sites has long been gray-hat SEO http://lionzeal.com/pbn-guide/ (twitter.com/_/status/810698714285309953)
# AramZ-S[m] It depends on what they do and how deeply they do it. :/ a lot of them are not doing anything that is strictly illegal. A lot will rip off news sites but do so as indirectly as possible so it isn't actually breaking the laws.
# AramZ-S[m] Some good examples here: https://twitter.com/Chronotope/status/735605725351796737
# @Chronotope There's the entire SocialHolic network, which appears to be, at best, working in bad faith w/advertisers by just running duplicative content (twitter.com/_/status/735605725351796737)
# AramZ-S[m] Of course sometimes they cross the line into outright illegal which is a lot easier to get a host to take down like this case - https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/17/broken-internet-ad-system-makes-it-easy-to-earn-money-with-plagiarism.html
# AramZ-S[m] Yeah, I mostly try not to link to the actual real bad stuff. Though the poor blogger who got photos of his leg hijacked for an ad campaign for a scam is pretty bad, though more on the sad side than anything else.
# AramZ-S[m] The whole scam of a lot of these is to build realistic looking links to each other so linking to them just gives them what they want
# AramZ-S[m] And there is a whole universe of grey and blackhat SEO site types. Shadow Sites, "Private Blog Networks", arbitrage sites, click launderers, and fake search sites.
# AramZ-S[m] @[tantek]:libera.chat Lemmie know if you put up a page and I'd be glad to add detail.
# AramZ-S[m] I guess "shadow websites" no capitalization works best and is clearest.
# [tantek] I was wondering about site vs website. The https://blog.rankingcoach.com/en/lieferando-makes-shadow-sites-of-listed-restaurants article seemed to consistently use "shadow site" which is why I asked
# AramZ-S[m] Or at least Twitter threads haha. I dunno I think prob the most commonly used and referred to term is just the more general "fake websites" or "fake sites" and maybe that makes more sense plus subtopics underneath on terms like shadow sites and private blog networks. And for clarity's sake prob "fake websites" or "shadow websites" are the easiest. It's hardly a term of art at this point, in that article's case they are intentionally using
# AramZ-S[m] a term specifically relevant to resteraunt websites b/c it references "shadow kitchens".
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Loqi zombie is in the context of the web a website that had died (site-deaths), perhaps due to domain registration neglect, and has been brought back by some other looking sorta like it did before, but oddly broken, often with spam pages/links added, and eats a lot of CPU likely due to abusive scripts https://indieweb.org/zombie
# AramZ-S[m] Yeah, that's a good one! I guess the question is how far does it differ from the original 'real' site and still be considered a shadow? The semi-cloned news websites are clearly just scrambling text they pull after crawling pages listed in the feeds but they're not quite as directly a shadow of the news site they are ripping off, even if sometimes that is all they do
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# [tantek] I'd say there's a solid expectation that the casual viewer would think it's the original entity, e.g. https://www.secretgardenberlin-vegansushi.de/ looks like a legit indie restaurant site (except for the favicon lol)
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