#indieweb 2026-05-04
2026-05-04 UTC
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[Al_Abut] Just had an in-person movie club meetup! [gRegorLove] and I went to see Project Hail Mary, so good.
# [Al_Abut] Thumbs so far up that it's down (makes sense if you've seen it)
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# Rocky Amaze amaze 👎
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# Argo Hey
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gRegor Speaking of the IndieWeb Movie Club, if anyone is interested in selecting a movie for June, especially if you haven't chosen one for the movie club before, please sign up! https://indieweb.org/IndieWeb_Movie_Club
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Loqi [indienews] New post: "Indieweb Movie Club May 2026 announcement: Network (1975)" https://michaelkupietz.com/indieweb-movie-club-may-2026-announcement-network-1975/
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[capjamesg] Is there a “UI junk” equivalent to Tufte’s “chart junk” concept?
# [capjamesg] I was comparing two note taking UIs yesterday and realised one had buttons I almost never press whereas the other had so much more space.
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[tantek] capjamesg, I agree it would be useful to have a concept of UI junk akin to chartjunk. However, with that phrase/term what comes to mind are things like skeuomorphic interfaces or overly ornate interfaces, like in some video games. Where the decoration is seemingly more important than the functionality.
# [tantek] capjamesg, the reference example for the "buttons I almost never press" problem is what MS Word turned into. https://blog.zamzar.com/2019/06/05/celebrating-30-years-of-microsoft-word/
# lain` wait, people disliked clippy?
# lain` that was my favorite thing about microsoft word
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# [Kupietz] I think I dated Clippy for a short while
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mahboubine Heyy everyone!!
# mahboubine I am making a video in my native tongue to encourage friends to move off big tech social media and onto decentralized platforms
# mahboubine does anyone have an article on why normies should care about privacy that I can get some talking points from?
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# [tantek] hey mahboubine, I prefer "people in general" rather than "normies", however here's an example of communicating the importance of privacy on the web / in the browser that perhaps you can use for inspiration: https://www.firefox.com/en-US/user-privacy/
# mahboubine thanks!
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# [Kupietz] Hey, this looks neat: another app for music discovery and recommendations based on listening to self-hosted music collections, for those moving away from the music streaming apps but still want recommendations. http://jasontucker.blog/explo-self-hosted-discover-weekly-for-your-music-library/ @mattl maybe you'd want to reach out to the dev about integrating with http://libre.fm
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# schmudde mahboubine - this is how my company tries to make the case: https://yorba.co/why-yorba
# schmudde We also do an annual report on “the cost of convenience” - https://yorba.co/state-of-clutter
# Loqi Privacy on the IndieWeb spans multiple aspects, from keeping your own information private on your personal site like private posts, to respecting the privacy of those who interact with your site, perhaps within an explicit privacy policy https://indieweb.org/privacy
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# [capjamesg] tantek You’re right re: differentiating between interface junk and skeuomorphic, etc.
# [capjamesg] I agree that the problem is one of complexity.
# [capjamesg] And I think one of customisation too.
# [capjamesg] I think the general principle is a UI should only have what is essential for someone to do the work they need to do.
# [tantek] I think that's a good start for a principle capjamesg. I think what happens is as the number/variety of "someones" and "the work" grows, typical designs grow in complexity to include all those possibilities. there's a need to include a Pareto principle filter perhaps, like 80% of someones doing the 80% most common work they need to do.
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# waples Hi guys- I'm planning my first ever website! I bought my domains from squarespace a few years ago and haven't done anything with them, but I'm ready to now! My question for you guys is-- has anyone used Squarespace just as a domain registrar? Or do I need to port it somewhere else to disentangle myself from their design limitations? Any advice is appreciated--- I am a huge noob at this point!
# gRegor Welcome! You should definitely be able to use it as only a registrar and host the site elsewhere. I think the domain pricing is a bit higher than other options, so that might be a consideration. Might find more info on https://indieweb.org/Squarespace
# [Al_Abut] [Kupietz] that's a great writeup!
# [Al_Abut] Excited to watch Network with all that extra context surrounding it about the tipping point of media going into the 80’s
# [Kupietz] Thanks [Al_Abut], glad you liked it. Yeah, I tried to strike a balance: give some context and get the conversation started, but without giving away spoilers or taking away from the experience of getting to see it for the first time.
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# [Al_Abut] [Kupietz] also that Explo thing looks really smart. It made me wonder - what would it take to build a similar kind of recommendation engine for indie blogs? Like if your feed reader is like your music library and could act like a blog scrobbler that learns your tastes, it could recommend new “tracks” for you to listen to from outside of your library.
# [Al_Abut] I tinkered a bit with a similar idea for putting a widget on my blog posts that links to other related articles around the web based on the 4k+ that I've saved into my readwise/reader app.
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# [Kupietz] I haven't looked real close at @mattl's project http://libre.fm but according to the page copy it seems to do that.
# [Kupietz] I mean with music, not blog posts.
# [Al_Abut] So you could hook it up to Explo and your favorite downloaded to automatically build local libraries of playlists with recommended music?
# [Al_Abut] That would be so sweet. But even sweeter if I can figure out how to do it for movies.
# [Kupietz] Dunno, haven't used it... I don't really use music discovery services, because my friends and the stuff I read in my day to day life are already that for me.
# [Al_Abut] Some kind of unholy duct taped together stack of scanning my Letterboxd feed and then firing up my Transmission torrents whenever it notices I've watched something new
# [Al_Abut] I can already imagine building in filters for rotten tomatoes rankings
# [Al_Abut] Is there such a thing as a scrobbler with recommendations for movies?
# [Kupietz] Ah! Neat idea. Yeah, I haven't talked about it much but recommendation engines are something I've given a *lot* of thought to. It's tough. Building a working taxonomy for recommending things is hard, for one simple reason: most recommendation engines are based on similarities. I'm not convinced that's how human tastes entirely work.
# [Kupietz] Please like *contrast.* They like something that has familiar attributes, but presents them in a novel way. No recommendation engine (that I know of) accounts for that.
# [Kupietz] sp. "people like contrast"
# [Kupietz] I mean No recommendation engine (that I know of) accounts for that second part.
# [Kupietz] Pandora is very cool but I think their fundamental model is flawed. Calling their model a "music genome" is like saying my "genome" is "curly hair", "man", "5 feet six inches tall", "big nose"
# [Kupietz] Yeah, would be cool if there is a service that's better at recognizing the kind of similarities vs differences that people like
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# waples Thanks for the advice, gRegor!
# [Kupietz] It's funny, it's similar to how LLMs work. I fed a couple of different LLMs a very big corpus of my writing, and asked them to design a set of instructions to get an LLM to produce writing in my voice. They did an amazing, incisive job of describing my writing voice... really such a good job it was a little embarassing to read... but were 100% unable to produce instructions that would produce that voice. All these processes are great
# [Kupietz] understand what they like about it.)
# [Kupietz] at categorizing and classifying things... not so good at extrapolating to what else might be legitimately the same as those things, in the way a human does. (I mean, humans fail at this too... try recommending music to someone whose tastes you understand but don't necessarily agree with. It's very difficult to pick something they will like, even if you listen to something they like and understand their tastes well enough to totally
# [Kupietz] e.g. I have a friend who likes country-rock music. He's a very good music critic and writer and can explain what he likes about it in a way I totally understand, and I even learned to appreciate country-rock from it. But after knowing him for 35 years, I still can't pick out a country-rock song that he will like.
# [Kupietz] I could actually—this will no doubt come as a complete shock—bend your ears at length about this. I have a whole aesthetic theory about what makes people like or dislike something. It has to do with both content and context, and the context part is a tough nut to crack.
# [Kupietz] Familiar ideas in unfamiliar settings are more appealing that too much familiarity or too much unfamiliarity.
# [Kupietz] But I have yet to see a machine make the distinction in an algorithmic way. They can guess, but that's it.
# [Kupietz] </rant>
# [Al_Abut] Haha, tapped a nerve
# [Al_Abut] Yeah I think I could duct tape something together with the following caveats:
# [Al_Abut] 1) it's just for movies for starters
# [Al_Abut] 2) the recommendations are just for me to view and customize over time, not some kind of globally correct megabrain algorithm that works for everyone else
# [Al_Abut] E.g. I could get it to ignore almost all horror movies, cut it off at a certain RT rating threshold, etc.
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# [Kupietz] Well, theoretically, you could do this with bayesian filtering, similar to how spam filters learned before the AI era. Similar, I believe, to how netflix's recommendations system worked back when they let you give 1-5 stars.
# [Kupietz] You come up with an intricate classification system that tries to describe numerous attributes of something, then someone ranks the results of the filter, and the weights are adjusted by their ranking
# [Kupietz] Anyway... I have many ideas on the subject but will refrain from ranting further unless someone cares enough to move it to another channel
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