Maybe for you, it didn’t start on Twitter. Maybe was forums or the blogosphere or Reddit. Maybe it was Facebook with terrible people from high school or TikTok with people who hate you for liking a thing, or not liking it enough. But we built the machines around our weird amygdalas and then we went inside them and now the machine is no longer confined to a stack of software + policy + vibes; we carry it in ourselves. We haunt each new place we enter. We can feel this happening in our bodies, which is why touch grass is so accidentally real.
We shape our structures and afterward our structures shape us, but the we of the first clause and the us of the second are not the same.
We proposed this project in the fall of 2023 based on our shared sense that the Fediverse’s history of resilience and expansion positions it as one of our best chances to allow more people to maintain strong social connections online while escaping the behavioral manipulation, pervasive surveillance, and capricious governance that characterizes large-scale centralized social platforms.
Initial research question: “What are the most effective governance and administration models/structures in place on medium-to-large sized Fediverse servers, and what infrastructural gaps (human and digital) persist?”
Our rationale at the project’s outset: “The Fediverse’s rapid expansion brings both opportunities and multifaceted risks. Our research seeks to identify current server administrators’ most promising models for mitigating those risks and outline the biggest and most important gaps in risk mitigation, with the aim of helping the broader Fediverse level up governance quickly, safely, and collaboratively.”
Looks like old school buttons!
This is a HUGE archive of livejournal icons I saved/collected between 2006 to 2011. It's definitely an internet time capsule of sorts. (I used to collage these into pages to decorate my 3-ring binders for school.) These were my first introductions to graphics editing, super early internet jokes, and things that would evolve into aesthetic moodboards that would later appear on tumblr.
Someone on IRC was talking about the origin of the name Dreamwidth Studios. I think this has never been posted before, so I went and dug up some old emails. These are all from March and very early April of 2008. I pulled out relevant sections, too, so they're slightly diced up.
Anyway, I hope people enjoy this. This all took place on the "Project Crazy" mailing list, which is what I called it. Because really, we all had jobs and lives, this was kind of an insane proposition. Yet here we are today.
In the beginning, there was the pure thing. Then came corruption, commercialization, normies, and death. We're all walking around with these little creation myths about every domain we care about, and they all end the same way: with us as witnesses to a decline that began right after we showed up. How convenient that the golden age always ended just as we aged into it…
Another banger as always!
I said that taking weeks to reply to an e-mail is like writing letters. Depending on how long they take to get from sender to receiver, it can be weeks between letters. And since we are on pretty much the opposite sides of the planet, that would actually be the case with us!
I don't think that just because e-mails take no time to reach their destination it means we have to reply immediately. It's like with instant messaging: Just because it's instantly delivered does not mean you have to instantly reply. You can if you are able and want to. But you do not have to. I send messages at a time that is convenient to me. And so should you.
I like this idea! But I also like that they said they'd be taking a while to reply. If you're not expecting it to be weeks or months later from when you sent your email, then not getting a reply in a few days feels like being ignored/rejected. Next time I email someone directly I'll put a note that I may be slow to respond, and they can be slow, too, and no hard feelings. Something like that.
But the Internet Archive is much more than a website, it's a physical place right here in the Richmond District. If you walk down Clement Street until you hit Funston, you’ll see a building that looks like a Greek temple with white columns. On the roof you can see the number 1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion), the number of web pages they've archived. Every Friday at 1pm, they open their doors for a public tour.
Write-up of what it's like going on the Internet Archive tour, with photos! They also have a "Big Free Library" book exchange out front, too.
Gemini is a new internet technology supporting an electronic library of interconnected text documents. That's not a new idea, but it's not old fashioned either. It's timeless, and deserves tools which treat it as a first class concept, not a vestigial corner case. Gemini isn't about innovation or disruption, it's about providing some respite for those who feel the internet has been disrupted enough already. We're not out to change the world or destroy other technologies. We are out to build a lightweight online space where documents are just documents, in the interests of every reader's privacy, attention and bandwidth.
I want to make a Gemini version of my site! For fun!
“I felt like Jason and the mods cared more about Claude than the welcoming community they built. Considering Jason is the owner of the server, I wouldn't trust him to be able to put the community first before putting AI first,” ML told 404 Media.
(Need free account to read full article or else here: https://archive.is/Ypur6)
I want to emphasise here that I am replanting a) articles that I originally wrote and published; and b) only in cases where the original article has either disappeared from the web or is currently in a neglected state on the original site. This is about saving heritage web pages. It's also about reclaiming something that is important to me, but clearly is not important to the current operator of my old site.
This is a cute idea! Wordpress has some plugins that shows old posts based on date; I have "On This Day (by Room 34)" installed but I haven't had the blog for a year yet so there's nothing to replant, ha.