Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web.
Great idea! I'm more of a fan of the #indieweb style of linking where you use a link tag or Link header instead of a prescribed URL, but I like this too. I'll probably do both on my site.
In which I embark on a quixotic quest to make a physical book using web rendering technology.
That was an amazing write up and it's awesome that you could do most of that with just HMTL and CSS!
How do we improve JavaScript usage, teach progressive enhancement and reconcile the community?
Super agree! There was a transition to get here and we have to transition away from it. We can't expect everybody to jump on board, especially when jumping on board means becoming an advocate for your whole team to have to relearn everything they know. We have to get real learning material out there (beyond just basic tutorials, like you say) and help these devs learn the patterns they need to transition their teams toward progressive enhancement.
I’m not sure I’d recommend doing what I did, but I do think RSS is an incredibly powerful, under-appreciated, and under-utilized technology.…
Is the design of other users' webmention displays the only part that confuses you or is there something else? If that's the only thing, it seems like webmentions solve the problem of community building for you. Since it's your site, you get to decide if you display them and how. You could choose not to display likes/reposts but to display replies like a comment thread.
Small communities federated together using the same underlying standards feel obvious to me as the future of social. But I'm neck-deep in it and have
The silos have conditioned everyone to want maximum reach, which is always going to be harder with decentralized services. Interoperability between decentralized services is always piecemeal; see Mastodon's reliance on ActivityPub + WebFinger + other subtle heuristics. That slows any attempt to build a cohesive decentralized platform that works for everyone/every media type.
TL;DR: iOS' Web Push implementation kind of defeats a key point of the web.
Paul is a Developer Advocate for Chrome and the Open Web at Google and loves to help make web development easier.
Thinking through a “share with Mastodon” button that anyone could embed on a website. It’s a harder problem than a “share with Twitter” button, because
Mastodon has a feature to move accounts from one instance to another instance. I spent some time recently exploring how this works so that we could support it in Micro.blog. I used this to consolidate my ActivityPub presence from multiple Mastodon accounts to just @manton@manton.org, powered by my blog and Micro.blog. From what I can tell, this feature is not well-documented. It does not exist in the ActivityPub spec. The “Move” activity examples in the companion ActivityStreams spec also do not cover moving accounts.
Most #IndieWeb capable services allow you to log in with just your domain name, which is pretty awesome. But then they display login info like
Logged in as https://adhoc.systems
which looks strange to most people. Since they're also parsing the h-card, I think we could make this look nicer. We could display the person's name instead of their domain. Or if we wanted to make it look closer to the fediverse, we could use nickname@domain. Of course, we could always fall back to using the domain if none of the above are available.
I'll be making this change on my personal services soon.
…and I don’t mean a single-user one for your own personal use. This is happening Hi! I hope you had a great weekend. While you were off, you know, having
This is Mastodon’s moment, and it has a very serious chance of succeeding. The thing that will help it (and the internet, and the concept of actual decent, social social networks) is more, smaller instances.
This is the fediverse's moment. I think the fediverse and the Web would be better served if more people learned about the wider fediverse instead of just mastodon. Just like with web browsers, we need a plurality of software. Chrome being the largest, most dominant browser isn't good for the Web and mastodon being the largest, most dominant fediverse software isn't good for the fediverse.
