#indieweb 2024-09-09

2024-09-09 UTC
[manton], to2ds, [schmarty]1, Xenguy and Dryusdan joined the channel
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[morganm] https://www.morganwebdev.org/ I updated my website a little bit today, gave it a little bit of a ✂️ and changed some page labels.
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[tantek] What is a carousel
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Loqi A multi-photo (also called a carousel on Instagram) is a photo post with multiple adjacent photos, either in a series, or tiled / arranged in some layout https://indieweb.org/carousel
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[tantek] carousel << great example use of a carousel to represent a single very wide image: https://www.instagram.com/p/C_qPO9IP-1x/ (or also check https://www.ddinstagram.com/p/C_qPO9IP-1x/)
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Loqi ok, I added "great example use of a carousel to represent a single very wide image: https://www.instagram.com/p/C_qPO9IP-1x/ (or also check https://www.ddinstagram.com/p/C_qPO9IP-1x/)" to the "See Also" section of /multi-photo https://indieweb.org/wiki/index.php?diff=96919&oldid=83290
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Loqi [indienews] New post: https://modem.io/blog/blog-monetization/ (from https://foreverliketh.is/bookmarks/how-to-monetize-a-blog.html)
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[tantek] ^ ok that looks like spam or AI generated
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[tantek] cc: aaronpk do we have a dashboard for removing things from IndieNews?
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gRegor https://github.com/aaronpk/IndieNews/issues/58
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Loqi [preview] [aaronpk] #58 Create admin UI to remove posts
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gRegor Don't think it belongs on indienews, but scrolling down it does appear to be kind of a spoof page, it gets increasingly wild haha
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gRegor Which seems more in line with something foreverlikethis would bookmark. Maybe errant syndication
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Loqi [indienews] New post: https://foreverliketh.is/bookmarks/how-to-monetize-a-blog-02.html
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aaronpk This is becoming more relevant every passing week
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Loqi [indienews] New post: https://modem.io/blog/blog-monetization/ (from https://foreverliketh.is/bookmarks/how-to-monetize-a-blog-03.html)
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Loqi [indienews] New post: "How to Monetize a Blog" https://modem.io/blog/blog-monetization/ (from https://foreverliketh.is/bookmarks/how-to-monetize-a-blog-04.html)
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catgirlin.space [woozycat](https://cdn.discordapp.com/emojis/1183246214595092561.webp?size=48&quality=lossless&name=woozycat)
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catgirlin.space [edit] [woozycat](https://cdn.discordapp.com/emojis/1183246214595092561.webp?size=48&quality=lossless&name=woozycat)
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wet.soil Hello! My name is Kodiak, I'm an aspiring independent researcher starting up a blog to share what I learn in my studies. My website is https://www.kodiakpinel.micro.blog , and I hope to find a community amongst the people here :)
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epoch uh. that link isn't working for some reason. I'll poke at it and try to figure out why.
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epoch I removed the 'www' from the link and it seems to work: https://kodiakpinel.micro.blog/
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[tantek] www--
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Loqi www has -1 karma over the last year
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wet.soil Thanks for figuring that out, I’ll omit the www next time I type it out
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stella hello
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stella i guess i'll share my website here as well
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stella https://coffin.ir/
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capjamesg[d] wet_soil[d] I love your website design!
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Loqi [indienews] New post: "Comment Day - Let's Make it a Comment or Email Day?" https://sarajaksa.eu/2024/09/comment-day-lets-make-it-a-comment-or-email-day/
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GWG People keep using the contact form on my site to offer me content writing services and other business services. I keep being tempted to hire someone to write my notes for me. "Today I went to work... churn out a masterpiece guys."
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[tantek] GWG, one way to think about writing notes is, copy from what you put in IRC
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[tantek] I literally did that to start the note I posted yesterday, and then I couldn't help myself with writing out all the subsequent brainstorm thoughts in two steps. 1. write them all down in whatever order they came out of my head, just to get them out of my head. 2. re-order the sentences/paragraphs for better subtopic clustering, flow across subtopics. 3. edit it down to shorten, simplify, and hopefully make it more "fun" to read.
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[tantek] er, three steps I guess 🙂 two more "compositional steps" and then editing which is definitely a different mindset / step
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GWG I should write more off the cuff
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GWG For now... I was just contemplating if I should mess with the spammers
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Loqi agreed.
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[tantek] GWG, not worth your time compared to so many other things you could be writing or doing!
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GWG I agree l.. but the fantasy sometimes
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[tantek] If you want you could put a notice on your contact form requesting no solicitors please like those signs people have in front of their homes
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[tantek] and then if you really wanted to mess with them, you could put "fee schedule for solicitations", $ amounts to read an email regarding 'content writing services' or other specific business services. And then verbage like by using this form you agree to these terms and immediate invoicing for Net-30 payment. Then next time they contact you, say no thank you and per terms on your contact page, send them an invoice
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[tantek] ^ honestly curious if anyone has done that
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to2ds Might be a nice tactic for those training their LLMs without permission 😄
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[snarfed] alternatively, public shame them, a la https://snarfed.org/2023-01-07_gdpr-troll-shakedown-from-mustafa-sisic-of-europe-data-protection
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[tantek] to2ds, yes, charge extra for contact made with LLM generated content
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to2ds It might be fun to create a ficticious personal website abuses from 3rd parties fee schedule.
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to2ds Ignoring robots $$. If training LLM and faking user agent $$$$.
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[tantek] I mean heck, have a pop-down menu with the fee schedule options and if they choose one of the "business solicitation" options, provide fields to enter their CC # etc to get charged along with submitting the form 😂
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[tantek] give them a prepayment discount of course, while charging full price for the "service" of being invoiced
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to2ds 😂
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[tantek] ^ look GWG, a whole bunch of coding you can do for your Contact page!
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to2ds It's not unreasonable given the current crop of complex cookies dialogs.
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GWG I think I need to change my contact page to make it harder to script
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[tantek] nah, make it easier to charge them if they script
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gRegor haha
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to2ds 😂
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to2ds Don't forget the additional scripting fee.
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[tantek] GWG, get in the habit of invoicing people for wasting your time and who knows, you might build up enough of a side-gig to pay for flights to IWCs!
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[tantek] And then you can start a series of webinars on how to setup your contact page to make money while you sleep
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[tantek] I keep forgetting the 🙂
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GWG [tantek]: I have 8 days of vacation to use in 2024. Trying to figure out how many to save for an IWC
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aaronpk Do be careful of putting up CC forms because scammers *will* run $1 charges through it to test stolen CC numbers
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[tantek] aaronpk, should that be a warning documented on /pay ?
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[tantek] On another topic, this seems adjacently relevant to our interests: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/sep/08/goodbye-tinder-hello-strava-have-hobby-apps-become-the-new-social-networks — as in, whatever is motivating people to migrate from those mass networks to smaller sites, is there something there we can learn from in the design and use of our own websites?
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[tantek] ^ [KevinMarks] this reminded me of danah's essay(s)/paper(s) on previous 2000s era migration from MySpace to Facebook
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aaronpk I think I might have already put it there?
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gRegor Yeah, there's a Hazards section with credit card fraud
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[schmarty] oh dang 😕 https://cohost.org/staff/post/7611443-cohost-to-shut-down (h/t to mattl in another slack)
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[tantek] ^ yeah, this kind of operational risk is one of the reasons I myself at least have always been resistant to calls for an "indieweb foundation" or whatever, because it felt like something that would be *less* sustainable (and lots more busywork for those involved in running anything "official" = path to burnout). perhaps better topic for #indieweb-meta
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[aciccarello] I wrote down some [thoughts for my own site](https://github.com/aciccarello/ciccarello.me/issues/161) on those http://manualof.me pages. I'd like to incorporate them into my site but don't necessarily want the "manual of anthony" format. "Communication protocol" also sounds clunky to me, but I do want to communicate those things clearly. It might motivate me to actually make a contact page rather than just linking my email everywhere.
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Loqi [preview] [aciccarello] #161 Manual of Me Questions
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[fluffy] I’m very unsurprised that cohost is dying but it’s sad to see. My original design for Publ was something more Tumblr-esque and I always had designs on maybe making an indieweb Tumblr replacement, and I was always super disappointed that Cohost’s financing model made them beholden to keeping their source proprietary and deprioritizing interop.
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[fluffy] But also they had philosophical objections to interop as well.
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gRegor Yeah. Appreciate their transparency with finances, I know it's been rough for a while now so hopefully most using it aren't too surprised.
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[fluffy] Reading between the lines it seems like they actually defaulted on their loans and the site was collateral
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Loqi [indienews] New post: "Publ v0.7.30" https://publ.beesbuzz.biz/blog/39-Publ-v0-7-30
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[snarfed] [fluffy] minor nitpick, afaik the anonymous funder was an investor, not really a lender, so I don't know that it was defaulting on loans per se
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[snarfed] (even if the investment was structured as a SAFE or convertible note etc)
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[snarfed] regardless, minor quibble
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[fluffy] Yeah that part wasn’t super clear. In any case they definitely set themselves up for failure from a financial standpoint, in ways that might have gone better if it were an opensource project that could take community contributions especially in terms of code.
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pcarrier Should there be a data migration tool? I know nothing of what they delivered
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[jacky] agreed
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[fluffy] Like to me the writing was on the wall when they kept on saying that basic features were “on the roadmap” but then kept getting pushed back further and further.
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[snarfed] yeah they'd previously talked about this anonymous investor a bit more
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[fluffy] Their RSS support was super half-assed (and had issues that they blamed on the library they were using to format feeds), they never shipped scheduled posts, and the entire moderation structure was built to cause 100% burnout.
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jimw In the comments, they mention that the "loan" from their funder was secured by their source code, which is why they didn't just release it as open source.
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Loqi hey [fluffy], jimw: would you mind moving this more technical conversation (RSS, open source) to #indieweb-dev? thanks!
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[fluffy] not this time Loqi
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[fluffy] But I also had a very low level of confidence in their technical abilities due to a lot of the fundamental ways that the site was designed, and a lot of it reeked of them making things harder on themselves because that is How Software Is Made Today and not because of any insight into how to build something sustainable and maintainable.
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[jacky] If anything, it's a lesson for anyone (or anything) that comes next
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[jacky] Keep it Boring and keep it bootstrapped
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[fluffy] yeah. Cohost was yet another site that was built like an app but absolutely didn’t need to be, and the app-like design led to a lot of major technical challenges.
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[fluffy] And I could go into a bunch more technical details but that *would* be #indieweb-dev material.
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jimw yeah, not that familiar with cohost, but it certainly seems like the sort of thing where your major costs (especially long-term) are going to be T&S and customer service and media storage, the underlying technology shouldn't be terribly complicated.
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[fluffy] It was massively overcomplicated for what it needed to be.
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[fluffy] But some of the fundamental design stuff had some serious deficiencies too.
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[jacky] God, I'm curious to see the feedback on fedi and bsky
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[jacky] I'm taking a week away from those spaces but between this and JEJ passing, the week is off to a rough start
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[fluffy] It’s sad that JEJ is gone but at least he lived to be 93 and had a rich life full of a lot of impact on others.
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[fluffy] But that doesn’t make it less sad to lose one of the few Black icons to find reach in the general population.
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[jacky] Yeah, very rare tbh for them to live that long 😞
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