- Take the power back is about how we can work our way back to the independent decentralised internet we were supposed to get. The method? "Changing from passive, to active. From scroll to search, from react to rethink, from like and retweet to write and link." Also, turns out that teenagers today don't know what browsers or URLs are. To them, a browser is this weird app that sometimes pops up, and URLs are these cryptic things you have to write to go somewhere, it's just bad UX really. Proprietary apps is where the internet is, according to them [insert "old man yells at cloud" image here].
- Want to leave Facebook, but don't want to lose the easy access to your friends, relatives and acquaintances? Do you also find it a bit FOMO inducing to leave it all behind? How about making it not worth going there in the first place? I followed a tip on Quora to effectively unfollow everybody in my newsfeed. Now, even when I load Facebook, my feed is empty, but I can keep Facebook as my interactive, self-correcting address book, which it is still very good at.
- Last time I recommended installing EFF's Privacy Badger. I should have also recommended the Disconnect browser extension, which stops a lot of trackers from working on the sites you visit.
- In Cuba, where internet penetration is at 5%, the Sneakernet is one of the most efficient ways of getting information to the rural areas. It's pretty much a weekly "Best of the Internet" on a USB stick that gets distributed around the country. It's called "El Paquete Setimanal", and shows what a curated, infrastructure-less internet can look like. You can see a directory of what was in the one from October 10th, 2016. Informational 7 mins YouTube video on the topic. Academic paper on Cuba's offline internet.
- Do you think it's ok for your 9-year old to take public transport on their own? If you do it in the US, you might end up getting the Child Protection Services sprung on you by concerned citizens, while in Japan, your kid could be part of a TV show about sending kids on their first errand. The reason? A larger sense of social trust and self-reliance in the latter.
How I Quit Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Amazon
Interesting article on what steps to take to ditch the services of the big five. Spoiler alert, ditching them all is doable but not straightforward.
Facebook for Bridgy seizes to exist, thanks for all the goodness. Unfortunately, Facebook tightening up their APIs results in a step back for interoperability. https://
#indieweb
Sticky links - May 7th, 2018
2 min read
Profile engine
The Profile Engine has now been donated to the Internet Archive (31st March 2018)
Knowledge is power and all the power is concentrated in the hands of a malevolent force - corporate Facebook.
We sued Facebook, fought hard in a David and Goliath battle and won a good settlement. One day, maybe we'll have time to tell the whole story - you'd be utterly shocked what goes on inside Facebook - what you've already heard is just the tip of the iceberg. If you have a Facebook account, we strongly recommend that you delete it completely, without delay. Learn more about Facebook
We are freely and lawfully transferring this database to the Internet Archive (archive.org) as they have a long track record as a suitable, responsible long term custodian and we have the legal right to do so.
Making this data freely available and preserving it serves many purposes. Here are a few:
* Helping to reunite old friends with powerful search tools (Facebook don't provide powerful search tools because if you have to search through hundreds of pages of profiles then you view more ads than if the tools take you straight to who you want).
* Helping you to find and meet new people with common interests
* Exposing the interests and group memberships of politicians and public figures (What did they really like ten years ago before they were famous?)
* This snapshot of the early days of social networking will be invaluable to Genealogists, Social Historians and perhaps even Archaeologists in ten, fifty or even 1000 years time.
* Most importantly, this will break Facebook's monopoly over social data. People chose to make this data free and public, yet Facebook still charge for it. Not any more!
I'm not sure what to make of this. Terrible move or great move, and for who? Are these really the reasons they donated the content to archive.org?