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As more and more social publishing platforms decide to sell user content to the hypercapitalist hyperfunded AI data ingestion machines, I'm seeing people in agonies over feeling the need to delete, for example, a beloved Tumblr blog with a decade's effort invested.
I feel their pain too keenly to say this at their faces, but all I can think of is my first rule. I coined it before this kind of AI was a thing, but that doesn't make me wrong:
erosblog.com/2013/06/11/bacchu…
Bacchus's First Rule Of The Internet - ErosBlog: The Sex Blog
Bacchus's First Rule Of The Internet: Anything worth doing on the internet is worth doing on your own server that you control.Bacchus (ErosBlog: The Sex Blog)
Reply to Trying Real™ Websites in the SerenityOS Browser by Linus Groh
Most of these are pages that blur the line between “document” and “app”, containing many interactive controls. Being concerned about them is valid; however, I think the concern is misplaced at this stage.
For an independent engine, I’m more interested in simple “web documents”. Those need to work well before tackling “Web 2.0” territory. Specifically: articles progressively enhanced with images, stylesheets, and maybe a script or two. Understanding how well Web 2.0 sites render isn’t really useful to me without first understanding how well documents render.
When testing my site, my main pain points are: a lack of support for <details>, misplaced <figcaption> elements, my SVG profile photo not rendering (it renders when I open it in a new tab), and occasional overlapping text. The only non-mainstream independent engine I know of that supports <details> is Servo.
#POSSE note from seirdy.one/notes/2022/07/08/re…
Linus Groh
I'm a self-taught developer interested in many things! These days most of my open source work is related to SerenityOS in one way or another, where I'm a maintainer and help building its very own JavaScript engine and web browser :^)linus.dev
I just rolled out breadcrumbs for my website. Now, any page that is not linked directly from the navbar or site footer will have a breadcrumb list in its header. The breadcrumb list shows how to reach the page, starting from a navbar link. The first item is the navbar or footer link; the second link is the current page.
I made this change because simply emphasizing a navigation link with <strong> isn’t enough to convey the current section to assistive technologies. With this change, I’ve done more than the bare minimum to meet WCAG 2.2 SC 2.4.8: Location.
With the presence of breadcrumbs, there are now more navigation-related links before the main content. Before, adding a skip-link would have saved a user five keystrokes; now, it could save a user seven. I’ll probably add a skip-link next.
#POSSE note from seirdy.one/notes/2022/07/07/in…
Reply to Dark Mode Color Palettes and APCA by @ayushnix:
This feedback has been helpful for me too; I incorporated the discussion around the Helmholtz–Kohlrausch effect into the “contrast is complex” section of my web best practices article.
I think the Helmholtz-Kohlrausch effect also ties into my concerns regarding overstimulation, also described in the same section of that article. Over-saturation of perceptually “light” colors that also look like “warning” colors (e.g. yellow, which contains the perceptually-bright green along with red) can be psychologically stressful.
I’m beginning to think that a single scalar value might not be the best way to represent all these different axes. Designers should try to strike different balances between different sets of values, depending on responses to media queries.
On the other hand, the “default” values should still try to “even-out” potential harms and conform to existing norms, because fingerprinting-averse users (and users who just need to borrow someone else’s un-personalized machine) should still receive some accommodation.
#POSSE note from seirdy.one/notes/2022/07/03/mo…
Dark Mode Color Palettes and APCA · Discussion #74 · Myndex/SAPC-APCA
I've been using APCA to check several color palettes for the dark mode colors on my website and I noticed that I get halation if I read high contrast text on a dark background. I wrote a post a...GitHub
The core elements of a people-focused (as opposed to a community-focused) social network are subscribing to people for content and interacting with their content. Atom (and RSS) feeds already provide “subscription” functionality; what if we went further?
Atom feeds can serve as the foundation for distributed social media. The OStatus protocol suite describes how Salmon, ActivityStreams, and threading extensions can turn an Atom feed into a “social media feed” that people can interact with. Throw in WebSub for real-time push-based updates. This OStatus + WebSub system was the precursor to the current ActivityPub-based Fediverse.
The IndieWeb has similar concepts. The IndieWeb community uses microformats for metadata, including the h-feed feed format. It also uses Webmentions for interaction between sites.
Just out of curiosity, I implemented everything except for the Salmon protocol and WebSub. I prefer Webmentions to Salmon, though extensions to the former seem to overlap with the latter. I’ve tried and failed to get WebSub working in the past; I might have to run my own hub (perhaps using the websub-server Go package).
The best part of this approach is the simplicity. Besides a Webmention receiver and a WebSub hub, all you need is a static server to deliver markup files. A separate program on your machine (i.e. not necessarily your server) can ping your WebSub hub and send Webmentions; I happen to like the command-line program Pushl. Once all the pieces come together, you start to wonder why we let social media companies flourish instead of lowering the barrier to join something like the IndieWeb. This is what the Web is made for.
I wrote more about this site’s social features in a section of the site design page.
#POSSE note from seirdy.one/notes/2022/06/28/fe…
GitHub - PlaidWeb/Pushl: Push notification adapter for feeds
Push notification adapter for feeds. Contribute to PlaidWeb/Pushl development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHub
New #blog post: Two types of privacy. I define and compare the terms “Tracking reduction” and “Tracking avoidance”.
Excerpt:
When qualifying privacy recommendations with context, I think we should go further than describing threat models: we should acknowledge different types of privacy. “Privacy” means different things to different people. Even a single person may use the word “privacy” differently depending on their situation. Understanding a user’s unique situation(s), including their threat models, can inform us when we select the best of approach. How do we choose between reducing a footprint’s spread and size?
Feedback welcome, now matter how insignificant.
Two types of privacy
"Privacy" can mean different things in different contexts. Tracking-reduction and tracking-evasion represent different goals with some conflict and overlap.Seirdy's Home
Following the recent SCOTUS ruling, many have been trying to publish resources to help people find reproductive healthcare. They often wish to do this anonymously, to avoid doxxing.
There’s no shortage of guides on how to stay anonymous online. I recommend using the Tor Browser in a disposable Whonix VM. The Whonix Wiki has a good guide to anonymous publishing.
Few guides cover stylometric fingerprinting. Stylometric fingerprinting is one of the most common techniques for de-anonymization, used by adversaries ranging from trolls to law enforcement.
Common advice is to use offline machine translation to translate works to and from another language. Argos Translate and Marian are two options that come to mind.
Adversarial stylometry: Circumventing authorship recognition to preserve privacy and anonymity shows that machine translation alone isn’t nearly as strong a method as manual approaches: obfuscation (hiding your writing style) or imitation (mimicking another author). These approaches have excellent success rates, even among amateur writers. The aforementioned Whonix wiki page lists common stylometric fingerprinting vectors for manual approaches to address.
Limiting unusual vocabulary and sentence structure make for a good start. Using a comprehensive and highly-opinionated style-guide should also help. The Economist has a good one that was specifically written to make all authors sound the same: The Economist Style Guide, 12th edition (application/pdf).
For any inexperienced writers: opinionated offline grammar checkers such as LanguageTool and RedPen may supplement a manual approach by normalizing any distinguishing “errors” in your language, but nothing beats a human editor.
Further reading: How we authenticate a document, by OrphAnalytics SA.
#POSSE note from seirdy.one/notes/2022/06/24/st…
GitHub - languagetool-org/languagetool: Style and Grammar Checker for 25+ Languages
Style and Grammar Checker for 25+ Languages. Contribute to languagetool-org/languagetool development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHub
I’m thinking about coining a term to reflect a non-toxic alternative to “search engine optimization” (SEO). Working name: “agent optimization”.
MDN has SEO guidelines because people often find MDN articles through general-purpose search engines. I noticed that a subset of their advice is directly beneficial to readers.
For example: imagine two pages have almost the same content (e.g. pages on the width and height CSS properties). Nearly-identical pages confuse search engines. To avoid duplicate content, authors are encouraged to differentiate the pages by using different examples. This is actually great for readers: when a reader navigates from one page to the next, it’d be unhelpful to present the same example again. Perhaps the width example could describe adaptation to a narrow viewport, while the height example could describe the trick for handling image aspect ratios with height: auto.
Lots of SEO is actually just basic design and accessibility guidelines: use good link names, remember alt-text, be mobile-friendly, use headings, don’t require tons of JS to display content, prefer semantic HTML, etc. Stuff like structured data also helps improve reader-mode implementations and makes content-blocking easier.
SEO gets toxic when it veers into copywriting guidelines, tricks like adding the current year to your heading (“Best products to buy in CURRENT_YEAR”), backlink-building, etc. Much of this does include so-called “white-hat SEO”. I think that I should distinguish “agent optimization” from “search engine optimization” by making it about accommodating the tools people use to find information, rather than about ranking high in search results or getting clicks. Once I finish my current WIP blog post (it’s about how to make privacy recommendations for different audiences), I think I’ll write about this. In the meantime, any ideas you have are welcome; please share them.
#POSSE note from seirdy.one/notes/2022/06/23/ag…
How to write with SEO in mind on MDN Web Docs - The MDN project | MDN
This guide covers our standard practices, recommendations, and requirements for content to help ensure that search engines can easily categorize and index our material in order to ensure that users can easily reach what they need.developer.mozilla.org
Reply to Am I on the IndieWeb Yet? by Miriam Suzanne
Welcome to the IndieWeb, Miriam!
“I’ve struggled to categorize what on my wite is a “post” worth syndicating vs a “page” vs ???”
I had this struggle too, and solved it with per-section and combined feeds. My combined feed contains every page on my site that includes a publication date in its metadata; my sections for articles and notes have their own respective feeds.
“If I want live updates (this is a static site) there’s still more to learn.”
Remember that pretty much all IndieWeb features are optional. You only have to implement what interests you. You can get really far when it comes to bringing a static site to the IndieWeb, so I’d suggest against jumping onto a dynamic site immediately.
You can also push live updates using WebSub. Your main site can still be static, but you can pint a (first- or third-party) WebSub hub to push content as soon as you update your site. I plan on using this approach soon.
I like the “static site with ancillary services” model: it keeps the core fast and simple, and makes extra modules easy to add and replace.
#POSSE note from seirdy.one/notes/2022/06/20/we…
Welcome to the IndieWeb
Welcome to the IndieWeb, Miriam! I’ve struggled to categorize what on my wite is a “post” worth syndicating vs a “page” vs ??? I had this struggle too, and solved it with per-section and combined feeds.Seirdy's Home
What if Firefox and Chromium placed a year-long moratorium on all new browser features unrelated to security, accessibility, and internationalization? Effort not spent on those initiatives could be re-directed towards bugfixes.
Defining the word “major” might be hard but I think it’s an interesting idea.
I’m not too worried about including Safari since it could spend those months catching up.
Inspired by a similar article by Peter-Paul Koch: Stop pushing the web forward
#POSSE note from seirdy.one/notes/2022/06/18/br…
Dillo’s domain name has expired, making it impossible to fetch its Mercurial repository from its canonical location. Fortunately, Mercurial is a distributed version control system, and I had a copy. I pushed my copy to hg.sr.ht; you can see it there.
The Wayback Machine also has recent snapshots of dillo.org from May.
I imagine that at least a few people have copies of the mailing list archives.
#POSSE note from seirdy.one/notes/2022/06/14/di…
Dillo repository mirror
Dillo’s domain name has expired, making it impossible to fetch its Mercurial repository from its canonical location. Fortunately, Mercurial is a distributed version control system, and I had a copy. I pushed my copy to hg.sr.ht; you can see it there.Seirdy's Home
Armchair speculation: how can we learn from Reddit, Lemmy, “Hacker” “News”, et al?
- A vote should be part of a reply with at least
Nwords.Ncould be increased by mods and admins. Instances could federate votes conditionally based on the length or activity of a comment. Word counts can be problematic; I don’t know a better alternative (maybe clause-count?). Flagging doesn’t need a minimum word count. - Forums shouldn’t host their own top-level posts and comments. Those should be links from authors’ own websites with microformats (think IndieWeb). The forum should be Webmention-enabled.
- Larger communities should have ephemeral chatrooms (“ephemeral” in that public history has a retention limit if it exists at all) to incubate posts. Authors (yes, original authors) could share their work and collect feedback/improve it before it’s “ready”. They could then post with increased visibility.
- One reason to flag a top-level comment could be “didn’t look at the post”. I say “look at” instead of “read” because certain posts are huge essays that could take hours to read. Top level commenters should at least be expected to skim.
These qualities will make a forum less active, since the quality of content will be higher and some validation and attention-seeking will be filtered out. Low activity means higher visibility for good content. Forums could “get of the ground” by starting invite-only, gradually enabling these rules one-by-one before opening to the public.
(psst: I might be working on “a thing”).
#POSSE note from seirdy.one/notes/2022/06/14/be…
Better vote-enabled forums
Armchair speculation: how we can learn from Redit, Lemmy, "Hacker" "News", et al to build forums for discussion rather than validation and attention-seeking.Seirdy's Home
ncurses is fine for certain specific purposes, like querying terminal characteristics.
I think if you’re building a TUI it should generally be one of multiple options that share a library/backend or it should be something with many alternatives that are at least equivalent, given the poor accessibility of TUIs in general. If one of those things is true, then it should be fine to use ncurses for the TUI.
There’s a Python library called “Textualize” for building TUIs and CLI shells. They’re working on a web target which they claim can get much better accessibility.
#POSSE post from seirdy.one/notes/2022/06/11/tu…
TUIs and accessibility
ncurses is fine for certain specific purposes, like querying terminal characteristics. I think if you’re building a TUI it should generally be one of multiple options that share a library/backend or it should be something with many alternatives that …Seirdy's Home