#dev 2026-03-26
2026-03-26 UTC
strugee, [0x3b0b], [0x3b0b]_, ax562, grufwub and [Al_Abut] joined the channel
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[Al_Abut] Had some pretty sophisticated scammers hit up my family recently, hyper customized ones that knew a lot of personal detail, like ones pretending to be medical authorities that described my mom’s upcoming knee surgery and her doctor’s name, or that my wife was an NP and where she practiced.
# [Al_Abut] These kind of things were reserved in the past for high profile targets of “spearphishing” but now cheap LLM compute scales it to the masses.
# [Michael_Kupiet] That's scary that they're getting that much detail.
# [Michael_Kupiet] out to be scammers.
# [Michael_Kupiet] I've notice a huge uptick in weird scams. Somebody got ahold of my debit card number the other night and started ordering things with it. That card never leaves my house. And I've noticed a lot of recent posts on social media from friends about really elaborate scams and phishing and stuff. One friend of mine put up a post on a dating site a couple months ago and got 600 replies in 2 hours. Narrowed it down to 2 and they both turned
# [Michael_Kupiet] And let's not even talk about the ParseStream spambots on Reddit, who can now tailor there spam to specifically respond to individual comments before shilling ParseStream.
[Paul_Lieberman], thegreekgeek__, [tantek], [KevinMarks], [morgan], [Trevor_Morris], oodani, lars_the_bear and barnaby joined the channel
# [Trevor_Morris] I've been getting spam emails about my Apple Cloud storage and that it is full. How do they know *that*?!
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# [Trevor_Morris] Just came over discussion about adding humans.json to WordPress - https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/03/adding-human-json-to-wordpress/
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[KevinMarks] xfn is baroque? I'll take it - baroque like Bach. minimal but expressive and enduring for years
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CrowderSoup Is this the right place to ask about the right process for updating the Microsub spec? https://indieweb.org/Microsub-spec
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# CrowderSoup I updated the "Searching for Content" section (https://indieweb.org/Microsub-spec#Searching_for_Content) but I'm curious if there's actually a formal process. Should I revert my update and make a proposal somewhere?
# CrowderSoup I've been working on that bit for a while because I want to have more robust support for searching and filtering while still operating within the spec.
# CrowderSoup I think the updates I made match the rest of the spec pretty well. The thing I think that needs the most feedback is on the `kind` parameter. I tried to keep the vocabulary small and limited to only what you can infer from an `entry`'s properties.
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[tantek] [edent] FYI re: humans.json (also, really?), XFN is factually not "baroque" (also not sure why you would use that adjective), it is part of https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6350 — XFN is an open standard
# [tantek] why are you wasting time with so much PHP and JSON when a simple list of hyperlinks with XFN rel="met" would literally solve the same problem? (claiming you've met this human is also much better than an abstract claim that someone "is" a human, which have tricked many people in the past online)
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# CrowderSoup I have seen humans.json but agree with you [tantek], XFN solves the same problem in a better way.
# [tantek] There's some sort of "techno-philia" in some folks that leads them to just want to try/adopt every random overly complicated format someone proposes. I don't understand this phenomenon but pretty sure it's more psychological than technical or certainly than solving any particular problem.
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[schmarty] i'd say there's a big social element to it.
# [Michael_Kupiet] I've said this before and I'll say it again: It is the nature of the creative child to find more complicated solutions than a problem requires.
# [Michael_Kupiet] (And, before someone points out out, it may also be the nature of other kinds of children too.)
# [Michael_Kupiet] HAY websitez iz SERIOUS BIZNESS
# [schmarty] tantek: by "social element" i mean that folks are doing what they see other people doing, right now. going along with the crowd. that doesn't require any understanding of history. in fact, it often precludes that work. 😄
# [schmarty] extreme bonus when this is happening around social protocols that, as aaronpk pointed out, allow you to make a few changes and then see results.
# [schmarty] "i'm socializing!"
# [Michael_Kupiet] [gRegorLove] Add to that a house full of musical instruments you barely play...
# [schmarty] edent may be following the blogs or social media of other folks publishing these and talking about them, see them by visiting /humans.json at various sites, etc.
# [schmarty] my point is that "because a lot of other people are doing it right now" can drive behavior despite (and in spite of) history of similar things not working.
# [schmarty] and humans.json can bit rot along with the rest. good feels were already had.
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Loqi It looks like we don't have a page for "cargoculting" yet. Would you like to create it? (Or just say "cargoculting is ____", a sentence describing the term)
# Loqi It looks like we don't have a page for "cargocult" yet. Would you like to create it? (Or just say "cargocult is ____", a sentence describing the term)
# [tantek] cargocult is /cargo-cult-antipattern
# [tantek] cargoculting is /cargo-cult-antipattern
# Loqi ok, I added "https://chat.indieweb.org/dev/2026-03-26/1774548609899700" to the "See Also" section of /cargo-cult-antipattern https://indieweb.org/wiki/index.php?diff=109639&oldid=47908
# [schmarty] not the same as a cargo cult
# [schmarty] cargo culting is mimicking behaviors thinking it will create specific results. in the original problematic examples: building pretend air traffic control towers and doing rituals like air traffic controllers thinking it will make the planes come back.
# [schmarty] i would argue that people making random JSON files expect something _new_ to happen.
# [schmarty] which is different :}
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# [schmarty] less cargo culting and more field of dreamsing
# [schmarty] i don't believe that edent (or others) believe that "things will magically work". there is an understanding that people have to build tools to use the information.
# [schmarty] 100%
# [schmarty] sure. plenty of "finding out" to happen later, maybe. but right now i would say they are having fun, and people having fun together don't necessarily think about what "witnesses" think
# [schmarty] witnesses? probably not. potential converts? absolutely.
# [schmarty] what is audience?
# Loqi audience is an experimental property of a post that indicates the intended recipients (readers) of the post https://indieweb.org/audience
# [schmarty] what are publics?
# Loqi publics are the combined set of people who make up the readership or audience of a post https://indieweb.org/publics
# [schmarty] I feel like the whole convo has kind of been centered around the question of _why_ folks are re-inventing a wheel and i think my answer boils down to "they are having fun and therefore not thinking about it."
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# btrem Found this: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/blog/html-details-exclusive-accordions/ Worth checking out. [artlung] maybe worth a mention at a FreSH?
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# [morgan] [artlung] Regarding the question about reinventing the wheel, my approach is strongly informed of my experience with web components. Like there is this section in the spec about drawbacks of using them https://html.spec.whatwg.org/dev/custom-elements.html#custom-elements-autonomous-drawbacks . I found I had to put in a lot of extra attention before I taught anything about web development using web components to like "set
# [morgan] expectations" like its hard to emphasize how basic but important some of these drawbacks are
# [morgan] It can be gratifying to learn stuff that reinvents something but also works against the grain to a degree
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