Journal tags: ia

I really like the newly-launched website for this year’s XOXO festival. I like that the design is pretty much the same for really small screens, really large screens, and everything in between because everything just scales. It’s simultaneously a flyer, a poster, and a billboard.

Trys has written about the websites he’s noticed using fluid type and spacing: There it is again, that fluid feeling.

I know what he means. I get a similar feeling when I’m on a site that adjusts fluidly to any browser window—it feels very …webby.

I’ve had this feeling before.

When responsive design was on the rise, it was a real treat to come across a responsive site. After a while, it stopped being remarkable. Now if I come across a site that isn’t responsive, it feels broken.

And now it’s a treat to come across a site that uses fluid type. But how long will it be until it feels unremarkable? How will it be until a website that doesn’t use fluid type feels broken?

The European Union’s Digital Markets Act is being enforced and Apple aren’t happy about it.

Most of the discussion around this topic has centred on the requirement for Apple to provision alternative app stores. I don’t really care about that because I don’t really care about native apps. With one exception: I care about web browsers.

That’s the other part of the DMA that’s being enforced: Apple finally have to allow alternative browsing engines. Hallelujah!

Instead of graciously acknowledging that this is what’s best for users, Apple are throwing a tantrum.

First of all, they’re going to ringfence any compliance to users in the European Union. Expect some very interesting edge cases to emerge in a world where people don’t spent their entire lives in one country.

Secondly, Apple keep insisting that this will be very, very bad for security. You can read Apple’s announcement on being forced to comply but as you do you so, I’d like you to remember one thing: every nightmare scenario they describe for the security of users in the EU is exactly what currently happens on Macs everywhere in the world.

This includes risks from installing software from unknown developers that are not subject to the Apple Developer Program requirements, installing software that compromises system integrity with malware or other malicious code, the distribution of pirated software, exposure to illicit, objectionable, and harmful content due to lower content and moderation standards, and increased risks of scams, fraud, and abuse.

Users of macOS everywhere are currently exposed to all the risks that will supposedly overwhelm iOS users in the European Union. Weirdly, the sky hasn’t fallen.

It’s the same with web browsers. I just got a new Mac. It came with one browser pre-installed: Safari. It’s a good browser. But I also have the option of installing another browser, like Firefox (which I’ve done). A lot of people just use Safari. That’s good. That’s choice. Everyone wins.

Now Apple need to provide parity on iOS, at least for users in the EU. Again, Apple are decribing this coming scenario as an absolute security nightmare. But again, the conditions they’re describing are what already exist on macOS.

All Apple is being asked to do is offer than the same level of choice on mobile that everyone already enjoys on their computers. Rather than comply reasonably, Apple have found a way to throw their toys out of the pram.

As of the next update to iOS, users in the EU will no longer have homescreen apps. Those web apps will now launch in a browser window. Presumably they’ll also lose the ability to send push notifications: being a homescreen app was a prerequisite for that functionality.

This is a huge regression that only serves to harm and confuse users.

I have a website about traditional Irish music. Guess where a significant amount of the audience is based? That’s right: Ireland. In the European Union.

There is no native app for The Session, but you can install it on your phone nonetheless. Lots of people have done that. After a while they forget that they didn’t install it from an app store: it behaves just like any other app on their homescreen.

That’s all about to change. I’m going to get a lot of emails from confused users wondering why their app is broken, now opening in a regular browser window. And I won’t be able to do anything about it, other than to tell them to take it up with Apple.

Presumably Apple is hoping that users will direct their anger at the EU commission instead. They’re doing their best to claim that they’re being forced to make this change. That’s completely untrue. A lie:

This is emphatically not required by the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA). It’s a circumvention of both the spirit and the letter of the Act, and if the EU allows it, then the DMA will have failed in its aim to allow fair and effective browser and web app competition.

Throughout all their communications on this topic, Apple are sticking to their abuser logic:

Look what you made me do!

This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you.

Apple’s petulant policy of malicious compliance is extremely maddening. What they’re about to do to users in the EU is just nasty.

This is a very dark time for the web.

I feel bad for the Safari team. They’ve been working really hard recently to make Safari a very competitive browser with great standards support with a quicker release cycle than we’ve seen before. Then it all gets completely torpedoed at the level of the operating system.

I really hope that Apple won’t get away with their plan to burn down web apps on iOS in the EU. But hope isn’t enough. We need to tell the EU commission how much damage this will do.

If you’ve ever built a web app, then your users will suffer. Remember, it’s a world wide web, including the European Union.

Create a PDF with the following information:

• Your company’s name.
• Your name.
• That your company operates or services the EU.
• How many users your service has in the EU (approximately).
• The level of impact this will have on your business.
• The problems this will cause your business.
• Whether or not the submission is confidential.

The submission can be as short or long as you want. Send it to contactus@open-web-advocacy.org, ideally before Monday, February 19th.

I know that’s a lot to ask of you on your weekend, but this really matters for the future of the web.

At the very least, I encourage to get involved with the great work being done by the Open Web Advocacy group. They’re also on Discord.

Please don’t let Apple bully an entire continent of users.

Cory has published the transcript of his talk at the Transmediale festival in Berlin. It’s all about enshittification, and what we can collectively do to reverse it.

He succinctly describes the process of enshittification like this:

First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

More importantly, he describes the checks and balances that keep enshittification from happening, all of which have been dismantled over time: competition, regulation, self-help, and workers.

One of the factors that allows enshittification to proceed is a high switching cost:

Switching costs are everything you have to give up when you leave a product or service. In Facebook’s case, it was all the friends there that you followed and who followed you. In theory, you could have all just left for somewhere else; in practice, you were hamstrung by the collective action problem.

It’s hard to get lots of people to do the same thing at the same time.

We’ve seen this play out over at Twitter, where people I used to respect are still posting there as if it hasn’t become a cesspool of far-right racist misogyny reflecting its new owner’s values. But for a significant amount of people—including myself and anyone with a modicum of decency—the switching cost wasn’t enough to stop us getting the hell out of there. Echoing Robin’s observation, Cory says:

…the difference between “I hate this service but I can’t bring myself to quit it,” and “Jesus Christ, why did I wait so long to quit? Get me the hell out of here!” is razor thin.

If users can’t leave because everyone else is staying, when when everyone starts to leave, there’s no reason not to go, too.

That’s terminal enshittification, the phase when a platform becomes a pile of shit. This phase is usually accompanied by panic, which tech bros euphemistically call ‘pivoting.’

Anyway, I bring this up because I recently read something else about switching costs, but in a very different context. Jake Lazaroff was talking about JavaScript frameworks:

I want to talk about one specific weakness of JavaScript frameworks: interoperability, or the lack thereof. Almost without exception, each framework can only render components written for that framework specifically.

As a result, the JavaScript community tends to fragment itself along framework lines. Switching frameworks has a high cost, especially when moving to a less popular one; it means leaving most of the third-party ecosystem behind.

That switching cost stunts framework innovation by heavily favoring incumbents with large ecosystems.

Sounds a lot like what Cory was describing with incumbents like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon.

And let’s not kid ourselves, when we’re talking about incumbent client-side JavaScript frameworks, we might mention Vue or some other contender, but really we’re talking about React.

React has massive switching costs. For over a decade now, companies have been hiring developers based on one criterion: do they know React?

“An expert in CSS you say? No thanks.”

“Proficient in vanilla JavaScript? Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”

Heck, if I were advising someone who was looking for a job in front-end development (as opposed to actually being good at front-end development; two different things), I’d tell them to learn React.

Just as everyone ended up on Facebook because everyone was on Facebook, everyone ended up using React because everyone was using React.

You can probably see where I’m going with this: the inevitable enshittification of React.

Just to be clear, I’m not talking about React getting shittier in terms of what it does. It’s always been a shitty technology for end users:

React is legacy tech from 2013 when browsers didn’t have template strings or a BFCache.

No, I’m talking about the enshittification of the developer experience …the developer experience being the thing that React supposedly has going for it, though as Simon points out, the developer experience has always been pretty crap:

Whether on purpose or not, React took advantage of this situation by continuously delivering or promising to deliver changes to the library, with a brand new API being released every 12 to 18 months. Those new APIs and the breaking changes they introduce are the new shiny objects you can’t help but chase. You spend multiple cycles learning the new API and upgrading your application. It sure feels like you are doing something, but in reality, you are only treading water.

Well, it seems like the enshittification of the React ecosystem is well underway. Cassidy is kind of annoyed at React. Tom is increasingly miffed about the state of React releases, and Matteo asks React, where are you going?

Personally, I would love it if more people were complaining about the dreadful user experience inflicted by client-side React. Instead the complaints are universally about the developer experience.

I guess doing the right thing for the wrong reasons is fine. It’s just a little dispiriting.

I sometimes feel like I’m living that old joke, where I’m the one in the restaurant saying “the food here is terrible!” and most of my peers are saying “I know! And such small portions!”

I read 25 books in 2023. That’s exactly the same amount that I read in 2022.

15 of the 25 books were written by women—a bit of a dip from last year.

I read a lot more fiction than non-fiction this year. I’m okay with that.

There was plenty of sci-fi as usual, but 2023 was also the year I went down a rabbit hole of reading retellings of the Homeric epics. I’ve had a copy of The Odyssey on my coffee table while I’ve been diving into the works of Madeline Miller, Natalie Haynes, Pat Barker, and more. I’m really enjoying this deep dive and I don’t intend to stop anytime soon.

It’s funny; reading different takes on the same characters and interweaving storylines is kind of like dipping into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, just a few millennia older. In some ways, it feels like reading fantasy, but as Ursula Le Guin points out, things aren’t so black and white:

The Trojan war is not and you cannot make it be the War of Good vs. Evil. It’s just a war, a wasteful, useless, needless, stupid, protracted, cruel mess full of individual acts of courage, cowardice, nobility, betrayal, limb-hacking-off, and disembowelment. Homer was a Greek and might have been partial to the Greek side, but he had a sense of justice or balance that seems characteristically Greek—maybe his people learned a good deal of it from him? His impartiality is far from dispassionate; the story is a torrent of passionate actions, generous, despicable, magnificent, trivial. But it is unprejudiced. It isn’t Satan vs. Angels. It isn’t Holy Warriors vs. Infidels. It isn’t hobbits vs. orcs. It’s just people vs. people.

I’ve been reading some Ursula Le Guin this year too, and that’s something else I intend to keep on doing. Like the retellings of Troy, her work just keeps on giving.

Anyway, in my usual manner, here’s my end-of-year summary of what I’ve read, along with a pointless rating out of five.

To recap, here’s my scoring system:

• One star means a book is meh.
• Two stars means a book is perfectly fine.
• Three stars means a book is a good—consider it recommended.
• Four stars means a book is exceptional.
• Five stars is pretty much unheard of.

The Star Of The Sea by Joseph O’Connor

A nautical tale of The Great Hunger. It’s a tricky subject but this book mostly tackles it well. It’s fairly dripping in atmosphere.

★★★☆☆

Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor

Another rivetting tale from Nnedi Okorafor, this one set in a world that seems quite different from ours, where magic is a powerful force.

★★★☆☆

The Rosewater Insurrection by Tade Thompson

The second book in the trilogy—this time it’s war. Once again, the setting and the vibe are unlike any other alien invasion story. I’m looking forward to reading the final installment.

★★★☆☆

Understanding Privacy by Heather Burns

On the one hand, this book feels like homework because it really is required reading for any web designer or developer. On the other hand, Heather does an excellent job in making what could be a very dry topic as interesting as possible. The contrasts between the US and Europe are particulary eye-opening.

★★★☆☆

Children Of Time by Adrian Tschaikovsky

Absolutely top-notch hard sci-fi! It feels like two of the biggest characters in the book are time and evolution. For a tale that’s told over thousands of years, the pace never lets up. Now I get why this book won so many awards. It’s quite a feat of story-telling. I loved it!

★★★★☆

The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier by Bruce Sterling

A fairly by-the-numbers retelling of the early days of computer hackers. To be honest, I found the pre-computer part (detailing telephone hacks) to be the most interesting bit.

★★☆☆☆

Circe by Madeline Miller

Everyone was going on about how great this book was so my expectations were high. They were exceeded. This book is just wonderful. When I finished it, I found myself craving more. That set me on the path of reading other retellings of Homeric characters, but none of them could quite match the brilliance of Circe.

★★★★☆

Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in his own words by The Steve Jobs Archive

An assembly of speeches, memos, and emails. It’s refreshingly un-hagiographic, given the publisher. And of course it’s beautifully typeset.

★★★☆☆

The Song Of Achilles by Madeline Miller

After reading and loving Circe, I went back to Madeline Miller’s previous story of the Trojan War. The Song Of Achilles didn’t quite match Circe for me, but it came very close. Once again, everything is described vividly and once again, it stayed with me long after I finished reading it.

★★★★☆

A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes

Another retelling of the Trojan war. This is an episodic book that weaves its threads together nicely. Sometimes it’s a little on-the-nose about its intentions but it mostly works very well.

★★★☆☆

Rocannon’s World by Ursula K. Le Guin

Le Guin’s first novel is far from her best work but it’s still better than most sci-fi. A good planetary romance.

★★★☆☆

The Intelligence Illusion by Baldur Bjarnason

Refreshingly level-headed and practical. If you work somewhere that’s considering using generative tools built on large language models, read this before doing anything.

★★★☆☆

Planet Of Exile by Ursula K. Le Guin

The second of Le Guin’s Hainish books. Another planetary romance that’s perfectly fine but not in the same league as her later work.

★★★☆☆

City Of Illusions by Ursula K. Le Guin

The third of the Hainish novels, this one gets pretty trippy. I enjoyed the sensation of not knowing what was going on (much like the protaganist).

★★★☆☆

Babel by R.F. Kuang

This was such a frustrating read! On the one hand, the world-building as absolutely superb. The idea of magic being driven translation is brilliant. So is the depiction of a British empire that exploits and colonises foreign languages. But then the characters in this world are not well realised. The more the book went on, the less believable they seemed.

There’s also a really strange disconnect in the moods of the book; one minute it’s gritty revolutionary fare, the next it’s like Harry Potter goes to Oxford.

It didn’t work for me. And I know that my opinion can be easily dismissed as that of a mediocre middle-aged white man, but I really wanted to like this. I was totally on board with the politics of the book, but the way it hammered me over the head constantly didn’t do it any favours.

A message like “racism is bad” or “colonialism is bad” might work as subtext, but here, where it’s very much the text-text, it doesn’t succeed.

★★☆☆☆

That Old Country Music by Kevin Barry

A collection of short stories set in the west of Ireland. Good stuff.

★★★☆☆

The Silence Of The Girls by Pat Barker

Back to the Trojan war in the first of a series by Pat Barker. She takes a naturalistic tone with the dialogue, modernising it. It works quite well. By this time, having read Madeline Miller’s The Song Of Achilles and Natalie Hayne’s A Thousand Ships, I really felt like I was looking at the same series of events from different angles.

★★★☆☆

An Immense World by Ed Yong

Another great accessible science book from Ed Yong, this time about senses in the animal world. It sometimes feels a bit like a series of articles rather than a single book, but when the articles are this good, that’s absolutely fine.

★★★☆☆

The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi

Okay, this might get a bit ranty…

The plot and the writing style in this book are perfectly fine, gripping even. It’s got that Gibsonesque structure of having two or three different characters in very different settings being propelled towards an inevitable meeting point (it happens pretty much exactly at the half-way point in this book).

But this is a cli-fi book that fails. It will not encourage anyone to take action other than turn into a doomer. Instead of asking what the future might actually be like, it instead asks “what’s the absolute worst that could happen?” Frankly, it’s a cop-out.

The book takes a similar tack with its characters. It assumes everyone’s terrible and will do terrible things. It’s lazy.

So you’ve got an unrelenting series of people behaving terribly in a horrific setting. It gets boring.

I was trying to cut the book some slack, but when there was a rare scene of actual consensual sex, it quickly turned into an adolescent male fantasy.

Reading this was like reading the opposite of Kim Stanley Robinson. Avoid.

★★☆☆☆

The Women Of Troy by Pat Barker

Back to Troy we go for the second in Pat Barker’s series. More good stuff.

★★★☆☆

How to Make the World Add Up: Ten Rules for Thinking Differently About Numbers by Tim Harford

A recommendation from Chris. He thought I’d enjoy this and he was not wrong. Tim Harford strikes just the right tone as he relays stories of statistics gone wrong as well as statistics done right.

★★★☆☆

Translation State by Ann Leckie

I’ll read anything by Ann Leckie. I loved her Imperial Radch series and this book is set in the same universe. There’s a strange juxtaposition of body horror in places with a Becky Chambers style cosiness. It’s partly a courtroom drama, but one where the courtroom gets very dramatic indeed. And there are lots of questions around identity and belonging. I liked it.

★★★☆☆

Trespasses by Louise Kennedy

Full disclosure: the author is a cousin of a friend of mine. She told me how much of this book was based on actual family history. It’s set in Belfast in the 70s and it is very vivid in a very kitchen-sink kind of way. It feels all-too real. Recommended.

★★★☆☆

Children Of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky

The sequel to Children Of Time doesn’t quite hit the same high bar, but it’s still an excellent rip-roaring space adventure that continues the themes of evolution and time. Thoroughly enjoyable.

★★★☆☆

Clytemnestra by Costanza Casati

My final foray to ancient Greece for the year. This is a debut novel that’s absolutely on par with the other Homeric writers I’ve been reading. Even though you know where things are headed, you can’t turn away. In other words, it’s a classic Greek tragedy.

★★★☆☆

Extra(ordinary) People by Joanna Russ

I had’t read any Joanna Russ before, which was something I’ve been meaning to rectify. I picked up a second-hand copy of this slim volume of short stories that was published by The Women’s Press back in the 80s but which is now out of print. Stories are vaguely connected and they all explore identity, gender, disguises and passing. But it’s the opening award-winning story Souls that’s the real stand-out. Well worth reading.

★★★☆☆

So that was my reading year. There were some disappointments in the sci-fi category, with both Babel and The Water Knife, but generally the quality was high.

I didn’t really read enough non-fiction to choose a best one of the year.

When it came to fiction, there was a clear winner: Circe by Madeline Miller.

If you fancy reading any of the books I’ve reviewed here, there’s a list of them on bookshop.org. Or go to your local library.

If you’re interested in my round-ups from previous years, here they are:

• Books I read in 2022,
• Books I read in 2021,
• Books I read in 2020,
• Books I read in 2019,
• Books I read in 2018, and
• Books I read in 2017.

I was doing some housekeeping on my website recently, tidying up some broken links, that kind of thing. I happened on the transcript and video for the talk I gave two years ago called “Sci-fi and Me.”

I really enjoyed preparing and giving that talk. It’s the kind of topic I’d love to speak/podcast about more.

Part of the structure of the talk involved me describing ten topics that might be encountered in the literature of science fiction. I describe the topic, mention some examples, and then choose one book as my pick for that topic.

For the topic of post-apocalypse stories, I chose Emily St. John Mandell’s Station Eleven. I love that book, and the equally excellent—though different—television series.

I’ve written in the past about why I love it:

Station Eleven describes a group of people in a post-pandemic world travelling around performing Shakespeare plays. At first I thought this was a ridiculous conceit. Then I realised that this was the whole point. We don’t have to watch Shakespeare to survive. But there’s a difference between surviving and living.

You’ve got a post-apocalyptic scenario where the pursuit of art helps giving meaning to life. That’s Station Eleven, but it also describes a film currently streaming on Netflix called Apocalypse Clown. Shakespeare’s been swapped for clowning, the apocalypse is set in Ireland, and the film is a comedy, but in a strange way, it tackles the same issue at the heart of Station Eleven: survival is insufficent.

I really enjoyed Apocalypse Clown, mostly down to Natalie Palamides’s scene-stealing performance. It very much slipped by under the radar, unlike the recent Netflix production Leave The World Behind

If you haven’t watched Leave The World Behind yet, stop reading please. Because I want to talk about the ending of the film.

SPOILERS

I never read the Rumaan Alam novel, but I thoroughly enjoyed this film. The mounting dread, the slow trickle of information, all good vibey stuff.

What I really liked was the way you can read the ending in two different ways.

On the large scale, we hear how everything that has unfolded is leading to the country tearing itself apart—something we see beginning to happen in the distance.

But on the smaller scale, we see people come together. When the final act was introduced as “The Last One” I thought we might be in for the typical trope of people turning on one another until there’s a final survivor. But instead we see people who have been mistrustful of one another come to help each other. It felt very true to the reality described in Rebecca Solnit’s excellent A Paradise Built In Hell.

The dichotomy between the large-scale pessimism and the smale-scale optimism rang true. It reminded me of The Situation. The COVID-19 pandemic was like a Rorscharch test that changed as you zoomed in and out:

I’ve noticed concentric circles of feelings tied to geography—positive in the centre, and very negative at the edges. What I mean is, if you look at what’s happening in your building and your street, it’s quite amazing how people are pulling together.

But once you look further than that, things turn increasingly sour. At the country level, incompetence and mismanagement seem to be the order of the day. And once you expand out to the whole world, who can blame you for feeling overwhelmed with despair?

But the world is made up of countries, and countries are made up of communities, and these communities are made up of people who are pulling together and helping one another.

Brighton has a thriving Irish music scene. Some sessions are weekly—every Sunday afternoon in The Bugle and every Wednesday evening in The Jolly Brewer. Some are every two weeks, like the session in The Fiddler’s Elbow. Others are monthly, like the session in The Dover Castle and the session in The Lord Nelson.

So it sometimes happens that if the calendar aligns just right, there are many sessions in one week. This was one of those weeks. I managed a streak of five sessions in a row.

The first was the regular Sunday afternoon session in The Bugle.

Then on Monday, it was The Fiddler’s Elbow.

The night after that there was a one-off session in the Hand in Hand, which will hopefully become a regular monthly occurrence.

On Wednesday it was the regular session at The Jolly Brewer.

Finally on Thursday it was the monthly session at The Lord Nelson.

I’m very lucky to have so many opportunities to play the music I love with my fellow musicians. I don’t take it for granted.

John Willshire has been pondering web marginilia AKA stuff you put in your sidebar.

He has a particular fondness for the good ol’ blogroll. I’ve still got my analogue equivalent on my homepage—the bedroll. It’s a list of links to people who’ve stayed over. Maybe I should also have a regular blogroll, but I suspect it would just be a reproduction of feeds I’m subscribed to.

Then there’s marginalia at the level of a blog post, rather than a whole blog. Kevin Marks points out that this is something that Vannevar Bush described his theoretical memex doing—a device I was just talking about. Kevin created a proof of concept showing outbound and inbound links.

Outbound links are annoted versions of the A elements in a blog post. Inbound links are webmentions (which should now include this post of mine).

Kevin has those links in the margins on either side of the blog post. I’ve also got links that go with my blog posts, but they’re displayed linearly:

1. the post itself,
2. any responses (webmentions),
3. related posts, something I only recently added, and
4. posts from the same day further back in time.

Do they still count as marginalia when they’re presented vertically rather than alongside? For mobile devices, I’m not sure there’s any alternative.

When Mathew Modine’s character first shows up in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, I figured the rest of the cinema audience wouldn’t have appreciated me shouting out “VANNEVAR BUSH IN THE HOUSE!” so I screamed it on the inside.

The Manhattan Project was not his only claim to fame or infamy. When it comes to the world we now live in, Bush’s idea of the memex has been almost equally influential. His article As We May Think became a touchstone for Douglas Engelbart and later Tim Berners-Lee.

But as Matt Thompson points out:

…the device he describes does not resemble the internet or anything I’ve ever found on it.

Then he says:

What Bush was describing sounds to me like what you might get if you turned a browser history — the most neglected piece of the software — into a robust and fully featured machine of its own. It would help you map the path you charted through a web of knowledge, refine those maps, order them, and share them

Yes! This!! I 100% agree with the description of browser history as “the most neglected piece of the software.” While I wouldn’t go as far as Chris when he says web browsers kind of suck, I’m kind of amazed that there hasn’t been more innovation and competition in this space.

If anything we’ve outsourced the management of our browsing history to services like Delicious and Pinboard, or to tools like Obsidian and Roam Research. Heck, the links section of my website is my attempt to manage and annotate my own associative trails.

Imagine if that were baked right into a web browser. Then imagine how beautiful such a rich source of data might look.

Like Matt says:

I don’t think anything like this exists. So Bush’s essay still transfixes me.

I had a lot of fun making the website for Patterns Day.

If you’re interested in the tech stack, here’s what I used:

1. HTML
2. CSS

Actually, technically it’s all HTML because the styles are inside a style element rather than a separate style sheet, but you know what I mean. Also, there is technically some JavaScript but all it does is register a service worker that takes care of caching and going offline.

I didn’t use any build tools. There was no pipeline. There is no node_modules folder filling up my hard drive. Nothing was automated. The website was hand-crafted the long hard stupid way.

I started with the content. I wrote out the words and marked them up with the most appropriate HTML elements.

Time to layer on the presentation.

For the design, I turned to Michelle for help. I gave her a brief, describing the vibe of the conference, and asked her to come up with an appropriate visual language.

Crucially, I asked her not to design a website. Instead I asked her to think about other places where this design language might be used: a poster, social media, anything but a website.

Partly I was doing this for my own benefit. If you give me a pixel-perfect design for a web page and tell me to code it up, either I won’t do it or I won’t enjoy it. I just don’t get any motivation out of that kind of direct one-to-one translation.

But give me guardrails, give me constraints, give me boundary conditions, and off I go!

Michelle was very gracious in dealing with such a finicky client as myself (“Can you try this other direction?”, “Hmm… I think I preferred the first one after all!”) She delivered a colour palette, a type scale, typeface choices, and some wonderful tiling patterns …it is Patterns Day after all!

With just a few extra lines of CSS, the basic typography was in place.

I started layering on the colours. Even though this was a one-page site, I still made liberal use of custom properties in the CSS. It just feels good to be able to update one value and see the results, well …cascade.

I had a lot of fun with the tiling background images. SVG was the perfect format for these. And because the tiles were so small in file size, I just inlined them straight into the CSS.

By this point, I felt like I was truly designing in the browser. Adjusting spacing, playing around with layout, and all that squishy stuff. Some of the best results came from happy accidents—the way that certain elements behaved at certain screen sizes would lead me into little experiments that yielded interesting results.

I’m not sure it’s possible to engineer that kind of serendipity in Figma. Figma was the perfect tool for exploring ideas around the visual vocabulary, and for handing over design decisions around colour, typography, and texture. But when it comes to how the content is going to behave on the World Wide Web, nothing beats a browser for fidelity.

By this point I was really sweating the details, like getting the logo just right and adjusting the type scale for different screen sizes. Needless to say, Utopia was a godsend for that.

I was also checking back in with Michelle to get her take on design decisions I was making.

I could’ve kept tinkering but the diminishing returns were a sign that it was time to put this out into the world.

It felt really good to work on a web page like this. It felt like I was getting my hands into the soil of the web. I don’t think it’s an accident that the result turned out to be very performant.

Getting hands-on like this stops me from getting rusty. And honestly, working with CSS these days is a joy. There’s such power to be had from using var() in combination with functions like calc() and clamp(). Layout is a breeze with flexbox and grid. Browser differences are practically non-existent. We’ve never had it so good.

Here’s something I noticed about my relationship to CSS; my brain has finally made the switch to logical properties. Now if I’m looking at some CSS and I see left, right, top, or bottom, it looks like a bug to me. Those directional properties feel loaded with assumptions whereas logical properties feel much more like working with the grain of the web.

Being in Croatia last week got me thinking about the country’s history.

I remember the break-up of Yugoslavia, but I was quite out of touch with the news for a while back in 1991. That’s because I was hitch-hiking and busking around Europe with my musical partner Polly from Cornwall. I had my mandolin, she had her fiddle.

We went from Ireland to England to France to Germany to Czechoslovakia (still a single country back then), to Austria to Italy, back to France, and back to England. A loop around Europe.

We set off on August 21st, 1991. The only reason I know the date is because I remember we had been to a gig in Cork the night before.

Sonic Youth were playing in Sir Henry’s (a great venue that no longer exists). The support band was a group from Seattle called Nirvana. I remember that some of my friends decided to skip the support band to stay in the pub next door until Sonic Youth came on because the pints were cheaper there.

By the time Polly and I got back from our travels, Nirvana were the biggest band on the planet. It all happened very quickly.

The same could be said for the situation in Yugoslavia.

I remember when we were stuck for a day at a petrol station in the alps trying to get from Austria to Italy. There was a bureau de change listing currency exchange rates. This was before the euro came in so there were lots of different currencies; pounds, francs, lira, deutsche marks. Then there was the listing for the Yugoslav dinar. It read:

• We buy: 00.00
• We sell: 00.00

That really struck me, seeing the situation summarised so clinically.

But what really got to me was an encounter in Vienna.

Polly and I did well in that city. On our first evening of busking, not only did we make some good money, but we also met a local folk singer. This young man very generously took us in and put us up in his flat.

At some point during our stay, we were on one of the city’s trams. That’s when we met another young couple who were on the road. Somehow there was always a connection between fellow travellers. I can’t remember who spoke to who first, but we bonded straight away.

It soon became clear that our situations were only superfically similar. This was a young couple deeply in love. One of them was Serbian. The other was Croatian. It wasn’t safe for either of them back where they used to call home.

I could return home at any point. I always knew that when I was sleeping rough, or struggling to make enough money to eat.

They couldn’t return. All they wanted was to be together somewhere safe. They started asking us about Ireland and England. “Do you think they’d give us asylum?” they asked with so much hope. It broke my heart to see their desperation, the pleading look in their eyes.

I felt so useless. I wished there was something I could’ve done for them.

I think about them a lot.

He drew a deep breath. ‘Well, I’m back,’ he said.

I know how you feel, Samwise Gamgee.

I have returned from my travels—a week aboard the Queen Mary 2 crossing the Atlantic, followed by a weekend in New York, finishing with a week in Saint Augustine, Florida.

The Atlantic crossing was just as much fun as last time. In fact it was better because this time Jessica and I got to share the experience with our dear friends Dan and Sue.

There was dressing up! There was precarious ballet! There were waves! There were even some dolphins!

The truth is that this kind of Atlantic crossing is a bit like cosplaying a former age of travel. You get out of it what you put it into it. If you’re into LARPing as an Edwardian-era traveller, you’re going to have a good time.

We got very into it. Dressing up for dinner. Putting on a tux for the gala night. Donning masks for the masquerade evening.

It’s actually quite a practical way of travelling if you don’t mind being cut off from all digital communication for a week (this is a feature, not a bug). You adjust your clock by one hour most nights so that by the time you show up in New York, you’re on the right timezone with zero jetlag.

That was just as well because we had a packed weekend of activities in New York. By pure coincidence, two separate groups of friends were also in town from far away. We all met up and had a grand old time. Brunch in Tribeca; a John Cale concert in Prospect Park; the farmer’s market in Union Square; walking the high line …good times with good friends.

New York was hot, but not as hot as what followed in Florida. A week lazing about on Saint Augustine beach. I ate shrimp every single day. I regret nothing.

We timed our exit just right. We flew out of Florida before the tropical storm hit. Then we landed in Gatwick right before the air-traffic control chaos erupted.

I had one day of rest before going back to work.

Well, I say “work”, but the first item in my calendar was speaking at Web Summer Camp in Croatia. Back to the airport.

The talk went well, and I got to attend a performance workshop by Harry. But best of all was the location. Opatija is an idyllic paradise. Imagine crossing a web conference with White Lotus, but in a good way. It felt like a continuation of Florida, but with more placid clear waters.

But now I’m really back. And fortunately the English weather is playing along by being unseasonably warm . It’s as if the warm temperatures are following me around. I like it.

Social networks come and social networks go.

Right now, there’s a whole bunch of social networks coming (Blewski, Freds, Mastication) and one big one going, thanks to Elongate.

Me? I watch all of this unfold like Doctor Manhattan on Mars. I have no great connection to any of these places. They’re all just syndication endpoints to me.

I used to have a checkbox in my posting interface that said “Twitter”. If I wanted to add a copy of one of my notes to Twitter, I’d enable that toggle.

I have, of course, now removed that checkbox. Twitter is dead to me (and it should be dead to you too).

I used to have another checkbox next to that one that said “Flickr”. If I was adding a photo to one of my notes, I could toggle that to send a copy to my Flickr account.

Alas, that no longer works. Flickr only allows you to post 1000 photos before requiring a pro account. Fair enough. I’ve actually posted 20 times that amount since 2005, but I let my pro membership lapse a while back.

So now I’ve removed the “Flickr” checkbox too.

Instead I’ve now got a checkbox labelled “Mastodon” that sends a copy of a note to my Mastodon account.

When I publish a blog post like the one you’re reading now here on my journal, there’s yet another checkbox that says “Medium”. Toggling that checkbox sends a copy of my post to my page on Ev’s blog.

At least it used to. At some point that stopped working too. I was going to start debugging my code, but when I went to the documentation for the Medium API, I saw this:

This repository has been archived by the owner on Mar 2, 2023. It is now read-only.

I guessed I missed the memo. I guess Medium also missed the memo, because developers.medium.com is still live. It proudly proclaims:

Medium’s Publishing API makes it easy for you to plug into the Medium network, create your content on Medium from anywhere you write, and expand your audience and your influence.

Not a word of that is accurate.

That page also has a link to the Medium engineering blog. Surely the announcement of the API deprecation would be published there?

Crickets.

Moving on…

I have an account on Bluesky. I don’t know why.

I was idly wondering about sending copies of my notes there when I came across a straightforward solution: micro.blog.

That’s yet another place where I have an account. They make syndication very straightfoward. You can go to your account and point to a feed from your own website.

That’s it. Syndication enabled.

It gets better. Micro.blog can also cross-post to other services. One of those services is Bluesky. I gave permission to micro.blog to syndicate to Bluesky so now my notes show up there too.

It’s like dominoes falling: I post something on my website which updates my RSS feed which gets picked up by micro.blog which passes it on to Bluesky.

I noticed that one of the other services that micro.blog can post to is Medium. Hmmm …would that still work given the abandonment of the API?

I gave permission to micro.blog to cross-post to Medium when my feed of blog posts is updated. It seems to have worked!

We’ll see how long it lasts. We’ll see how long any of them last. Today’s social media darlings are tomorrow’s Friendster and MySpace.

When the current crop of services wither and die, my own website will still remain in full bloom.

Before The Situation, I used to work in the Clearleft studio quite a bit. Maybe I’d do a bit of work at home for an hour or two before heading in, but I’d spend most of my working day with my colleagues.

That all changed three years ago:

Clearleft is a remote-working company right now. I mean, that’s hardly surprising—just about everyone I know is working from home.

Clearleft has remained remote-first. We’ve still got our studio space, though we’ve cut back to just having one floor. But most of the time people are working from home. I still occasionally pop into the studio—I’m actually writing this in the studio right now—but mostly I work out of my own house.

It’s funny how the old ways of thinking have been flipped. If I want to get work done, I stay home. If I want to socialise, I go into the studio.

For a lot of the work I do—writing, podcasting, some video calls, maybe some coding—my home environment works better than the studio. In the Before Times I’d have to put on headphones to block out the distractions of a humming workplace. Of course I miss the serendipitous chats with my co-workers but that’s why it’s nice to still have the option of popping into the studio.

Jessica has always worked from home. Our flat isn’t very big but we’ve got our own separate spaces so we don’t disturb one another too much.

For a while now we’ve been thinking that we could just as easily work from another country. I was inspired by a (video) chat I had with Luke when he casually mentioned that he was in Cypress. Why not? As long as the internet connection is good, the location doesn’t make any difference to the work.

So Jessica and I spent the last week working in Ortygia, Sicily.

It was pretty much the perfect choice. It’s not a huge bustling city. In fact it was really quiet. But there was still plenty to explore—winding alleyways, beautiful old buildings, and of course plenty of amazing food.

The time difference was just one hour. We used the extra hour in the morning to go to the market to get some of the magnificent local fruits and vegetables to make some excellent lunches.

We made sure that we found an AirBnB place with a good internet connection and separate workspaces. All in all, it worked out great. And because we were there for a week, we didn’t feel the pressure to run around to try to see everything.

We spent the days working and the evenings having a nice sundowner appertivo followed by some pasta or seafood.

It was simultaneously productive and relaxing.

I woke up today to a very annoying new bug in Firefox. The browser shits the bed in an unpredictable fashion when rounding up single pixel line widths in SVG. That’s quite a problem on The Session where all the sheet music is rendered in SVG. Those thin lines in sheet music are kind of important.

Browser bugs like these are very frustrating. There’s nothing you can do from your side other than filing a bug. The locus of control is very much with the developers of the browser.

Still, the occasional regression in a browser is a price I’m willing to pay for a plurality of rendering engines. Call me old-fashioned but I still value the ecological impact of browser diversity.

That said, I understand the argument for converging on a single rendering engine. I don’t agree with it but I understand it. It’s like this…

Back in the bad old days of the original browser wars, the browser companies just made shit up. That made life a misery for web developers. The Web Standards Project knocked some heads together. Netscape and Microsoft would agree to support standards.

So that’s where the bar was set: browsers agreed to work to the same standards, but competed by having different rendering engines.

There’s an argument to be made for raising that bar: browsers agree to work to the same standards, and have the same shared rendering engine, but compete by innovating in all other areas—the browser chrome, personalisation, privacy, and so on.

Like I said, I understand the argument. I just don’t agree with it.

One reason for zeroing in a single rendering engine is that it’s just too damned hard to create or maintain an entirely different rendering engine now that web standards are incredibly powerful and complex. Only a very large company with very deep pockets can hope to be a rendering engine player. Google. Apple. Heck, even Microsoft threw in the towel and abandoned their rendering engine in favour of Blink and V8.

And yet. Andreas Kling recently wrote about the Ladybird browser. How we’re building a browser when it’s supposed to be impossible:

The ECMAScript, HTML, and CSS specifications today are (for the most part) stellar technical documents whose algorithms can be implemented with considerably less effort and guesswork than in the past.

I’ll be watching that project with interest. Not because I plan to use the brower. I’d just like to see some evidence against the complexity argument.

Meanwhile most other browser projects are building on the raised bar of a shared browser engine. Blisk, Brave, and Arc all use Chromium under the hood.

Arc is the most interesting one. Built by the wonderfully named Browser Company of New York, it’s attempting to inject some fresh thinking into everything outside of the rendering engine.

Experiments like Arc feel like they could have more in common with tools-for-thought software like Obsidian and Roam Research. Those tools build knowledge graphs of connected nodes. A kind of hypertext of ideas. But we’ve already got hypertext tools we use every day: web browsers. It’s just that they don’t do much with the accumulated knowledge of our web browsing. Our browsing history is a boring reverse chronological list instead of a cool-looking knowledge graph or timeline.

For inspiration we can go all the way back to Vannevar Bush’s genuinely seminal 1945 article, As We May Think. Bush imagined device, the Memex, was a direct inspiration on Douglas Engelbart, Ted Nelson, and Tim Berners-Lee.

The article describes a kind of hypertext machine that worked with microfilm. Thanks to Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web, we now have a global digital hypertext system that we access every day through our browsers.

But the article also described the idea of “associative trails”:

Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.

Our browsing histories are a kind of associative trail. They’re as unique as fingerprints. Even if everyone in the world started on the same URL, our browsing histories would quickly diverge.

Bush imagined that these associative trails could be shared:

The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities.

Heck, making a useful browsing history could be a real skill:

There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.

Taking something personal and making it public isn’t a new idea. It was what drove the wave of web 2.0 startups. Before Flickr, your photos were private. Before Delicous, your bookmarks were private. Before Last.fm, what music you were listening to was private.

I’m not saying that we should all make our browsing histories public. That would be a security nightmare. But I am saying there’s a lot of untapped potential in our browsing histories.

Let’s say we keep our browsing histories private, but make better use of them.

From what I’ve seen of large language model tools, the people getting most use of out of them are training them on a specific corpus. Like, “take this book and then answer my questions about the characters and plot” or “take this codebase and then answer my questions about the code.” If you treat these chatbots as calculators for words they can be useful for some tasks.

Large language model tools are getting smaller and more portable. It’s not hard to imagine one getting bundled into a web browser. It feeds on your browsing history. The bigger your browsing history, the more useful it can be.

Except, y’know, for the times when it just make shit up.

Vannevar Bush didn’t predict a Memex that would hallucinate bits of microfilm that didn’t exist.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m not a fan of initialisms and acronyms. They can be exclusionary.

It bothers me doubly when everyone is talking about AI.

First of all, the term is so vague as to be meaningless. Sometimes—though rarely—AI refers to general artificial intelligence. Sometimes AI refers to machine learning. Sometimes AI refers to large language models. Sometimes AI refers to a series of if/else statements. That’s quite a spectrum of meaning.

Secondly, there’s the assumption that everyone understands the abbreviation. I guess that’s generally a safe assumption, but sometimes AI could refer to something other than artificial intelligence.

In countries with plenty of pastoral agriculture, if someone works in AI, it usually means they’re going from farm to farm either extracting or injecting animal semen. AI stands for artificial insemination.

I think that abbreviation might work better for the kind of things currently described as using AI.

We were discussing this hot topic at work recently. Is AI coming for our jobs? The consensus was maybe, but only the parts of our jobs that we’re more than happy to have automated. Like summarising some some findings. Or perhaps as a kind of lorem ipsum generator. Or for just getting the ball rolling with a design direction. As Terence puts it:

Midjourney is great for a first draft. If, like me, you struggle to give shape to your ideas then it is nothing short of magic. It gets you through the first 90% of the hard work. It’s then up to you to refine things.

That’s pretty much the conclusion we came to in our discussion at Clearleft. There’s no way that we’d use this technology to generate outputs for clients, but we certainly might use it to generate inputs. It’s like how we’d do a quick round of sketching to get a bunch of different ideas out into the open. Terence is spot on when he says:

Midjourney lets me quickly be wrong in an interesting direction.

To put it another way, using a large language model could be a way of artificially injecting some seeds of ideas. Artificial insemination.

So now when I hear people talk about using AI to create images or articles, I don’t get frustrated. Instead I think, “Using artificial insemination to create images or articles? Yes, that sounds about right.”

I had a video call this morning with someone who was in India. The call went great, except for a few moments when the video stalled.

“Sorry about that”, said the person I was talking to. “It’s the monkeys. They like messing with the cable.”

There’s something charming about an intercontinental internet-enabled meeting being slightly disrupted by some fellow primates being unruly.

It also made me stop and think about how amazing it was that we were having the call in the first place. I remembered Arthur C. Clarke’s predictions from 1964:

I’m thinking of the incredible breakthrough which has been possible by developments in communications, particularly the transistor and, above all, the communications satellite.

These things will make possible a world in which we can be in instant contact with each other wherever we may be, where we can contact our friends anywhere on Earth even if we don’t know their actual physical location.

It will be possible in that age—perhaps only 50 years from now—for a man to conduct his business from Tahiti or Bali just as well as he could from London.

The casual sexism of assuming that it would be a “man” conducting business hasn’t aged well. And it’s not the communications satellite that enabled my video call, but old-fashioned undersea cables, many in the same locations as their telegraphic antecedents. But still; not bad, Arthur.

After my call, I caught up on some email. There was a new newsletter from Ariel who’s currently in Antarctica.

Just thinking about the fact that I know someone who’s in Antarctica—who sent me a postcard from Antarctica—gave me another rush of feeling like I was living in the future. As I started to read the contents of the latest newsletter, that feeling became even more specific. Doesn’t this sound exactly like something straight out of a late ’80s/early ’90s cyberpunk novel?

Four of my teammates head off hiking towards the mountains to dig holes in the soil in hopes of finding microscopic animals contained within them. I hang back near the survival bags with the remaining teammate and begin unfolding my drone to get a closer look at the glaciers. After filming the textures of the land and ice from multiple angles for 90 minutes, my batteries are spent, my hands are cold and my stomach is growling. I land the drone, fold it up into my bright yellow Pelican case, and pull out an expired granola bar to keep my hunger pangs at bay.

I’ve always liked the idea that your website can be your API. Like, you’ve already got URLs to identify resources, so why not make that URL structure predictable and those resources parsable?

That’s why the (read-only) API for The Session doesn’t live at a separate subdomain. It uses the same URL structure as the regular site, but you can request the resources in an alternative format: JSON, XML, RSS.

This works out pretty well, mostly because I put a lot of thought into the URL structure of the site. I’m something of a URL fetishist, but I think that taking a URL-first approach to information architecture can be a good exercise.

Most of the resources on The Session involve nouns like tunes, events, discussions, and so on. There’s a consistent and predictable structure to the URLs for those sections:

• /things
• /things/new
• /things/search

And then an idividual item can be found at:

• things/ID

That’s all nice and predictable and the naming of the URLs matches what you’d expect to find:

• tunes
• tunes/new
• tunes/search?q=Ireland
• tunes/320

Tunes, events, discussions, sessions. Those are all fine. But there’s one section of the site that has this root URL:

/recordings

When I was coming up with the URL structure twenty years ago, it was clear what you’d find there: track listings for albums of music. No one would’ve expected to find actual recordings of music available to listen to on-demand. The bandwidth constraints and technical limitations of the time made that clear.

Two decades on, the situation has changed. Now someone new to the site might well expect to hit a link called “recordings” and expect to hear actual recordings of music.

So I should probably change the label on the link. I don’t think “albums” is quite right—what even is an album any more? The word “discography” is probably the most appropriate label.

Here’s my dilemma: if I update the label, should I also update the URL structure?

Right now, the section of the site with /tunes URLs is labelled “tunes”. The section of the site with /events URLs is labelled “events”. Currently the section of the site with /recordings URLs is labelled “recordings”, but may soon be labelled “discography”.

If you click on “tunes”, you end up at /tunes. But if you click on “discography”, you end up at /recordings.

Is that okay? Am I the only one that would be bothered by that?

I could update the URLs to match the labelling (with redirects for the old URLs, of course), but I’m not so keen on this URL structure:

• /discography
• /discography/new
• /discography/search
• /discography/ID

It doesn’t seem as tidy as:

• /recordings
• /recordings/new
• /recordings/search
• /recordings/ID

But if I don’t update the URLs to match the label, then I’m just going to have to live with the mismatch.

I’m just thinking out loud here. I think I should definitely update the label. I just won’t make any decision on changing URLs for a while yet.

Exactly sixteen years ago on this day, I wrote about Twitter, a service I had been using for a few weeks. I documented how confusing yet compelling it was.

Twitter grew and grew after that. But at some point, it began to feel more like it was shrinking, shrivelling into a husk of its former self.

Just over ten years ago, there was a battle for the soul of Twitter from within. One camp wanted it to become an interoperable protocol, like email. The other camp wanted it to be a content farm, monetised by advertisers. That’s the vision that won. They declared war on the third-party developers who had helped grow Twitter in the first place, and cracked down on anything that didn’t foster e N g A g E m E n T.

The muskofication of Twitter is the nail in the coffin. In the tradition of all scandals since Watergate, I propose we refer to the shocking recent events at Twitter as Elongate.

Post-Elongate Twitter will limp on, I’m sure, but it can never be the fun place it once was. The incentives just aren’t there. As Bastian wrote:

Twitter was once an amplifier for brilliant ideas, for positivity, for change, for a better future. Many didn’t understand the power it had as a communication platform. But that power turned against the exact same people who needed this platform so urgently. It’s now a waste of time and energy at best and a threat to progress and society at worst.

I don’t foresee myself syndicating my notes to Twitter any more. I’ve removed the site from my browser’s bookmarks. I’ve removed it from my phone’s home screen too.

As someone who’s been verified on Twitter for years, with over 140,000 followers, it should probably feel like a bigger deal than it does. I echo Robin’s observation:

The speed with which Twitter recedes in your mind will shock you. Like a demon from a folktale, the kind that only gains power when you invite it into your home, the platform melts like mist when that invitation is rescinded.

Meanwhile, Mastodon is proving to be thoroughly enjoyable. Some parts are still rough around the edges, but compared to Twitter in 2006, it’s positively polished.

Interestingly, the biggest complaint that I and my friends had about Twitter all those years ago wasn’t about Twitter per se, but about lock-in:

Twitter is yet another social network where we have to go and manually add all the same friends from every other social network.

That’s the very thing that sets the fediverse apart: the ability to move from one service to another and bring your social network with you. Now Matt is promising to add ActivityPub to Tumblr. That future we wanted sixteen years ago might finally be arriving.

Right now, Twitter feels like Dunkirk beach in May 1940. And look, here comes a plucky armada of web servers running Mastodon instances!

Others have written some guides to getting started on Mastodon:

• An oversimplified guide to setting up Mastodon by Sarah Higley,
• An Increasingly Less-Brief Guide to Mastodon by Noëlle Anthony,
• 10 Quick Tips for a Great Mastodon Experience by Jens Oliver Meiert, and
• How to Get Started on Mastodon by Justin Pot for Wired.

There are also tools like Twitodon to help you migrate from Twitter to Mastodon.

Getting on board isn’t completely frictionless. Understanding how Mastodon works can be confusing. But then again, so was Twitter fifteen years ago.

Right now, many Mastodon instances are struggling with the influx of new sign-ups. But this is temporary. And actually, it’s also very reminiscent of the early unreliable days of Twitter.

I don’t want to go into the technical details of Mastodon and the fediverse—even though those details are fascinating and impressive. What I’m really struck by is the vibe.

In a nutshell, I’m loving it! It feels …nice.

I was fully expecting Mastodon to be full of meta-discussions about Mastodon, but in the past few weeks I’ve enjoyed people posting about stone circles, astronomy, and—obviously—cats and dogs.

The process of finding people to follow has been slow, but in a good way. I’ve enjoyed seeking people out. It’s been easier to find the techy folks, but I’ve also been finding scientists, journalists, and artists.

On the one hand, the niceness of the experience isn’t down to technical architecture; it’s all about the social norms. On the other hand, those social norms are very much directed by technical decisions. The folks working on the fediverse for the past few years have made very thoughtful design decisions to amplify niceness and discourage nastiness. It’s all very gratifying to experience!

Personally, I’m posting to Mastodon via my own website. As much as I’m really enjoying Mastodon, I still firmly believe that nothing beats having control of your own content on your domain.

But I also totally get that not everyone has the same set of priorities as me. And frankly, it’s unrealistic to expect everyone to have their own domain name.

It’s like there’s a spectrum of ownership. On one end, there’s publishing on your own website. On the other end, there’s publishing on silos like Twitter, Facebook, Medium, Instagram, and MySpace.

Publishing on Mastodon feels much closer to the website end of the spectrum than it does to the silo end of the spectrum. If something bad happens to the Mastodon instance you’re on, you can up and move to a different instance, taking your social graph with you.

In a way, it’s like delegating domain ownership to someone you trust. If you don’t have the time, energy, resources, or interest in having your own domain, but you trust someone who’s running a Mastodon instance, it’s the next best thing to publishing on your own website.

Simon described it well when he said Mastodon is just blogs:

A Mastodon server (often called an instance) is just a shared blog host. Kind of like putting your personal blog in a folder on a domain on shared hosting with some of your friends.

Want to go it alone? You can do that: run your own dedicated Mastodon instance on your own domain.

And rather than compare Mastodon to Twitter, Simon makes a comparison with RSS:

Do you still miss Google Reader, almost a decade after it was shut down? It’s back!

A Mastodon server is a feed reader, shared by everyone who uses that server.

Lots of other folks are feeling the same excitement in the air that I’m getting:

Bastian wrote:

Real conversations. Real people. Interesting content. A feeling of a warm welcoming group. No algorithm to mess around with our timelines. No troll army to destory every tiny bit of peace. Yes, Mastodon is rough around the edges. Many parts are not intuitive. But this roughness somehow added to the positive experience for me.

This could really work!

Brent Simmons wrote:

The web is wide open again, for the first time in what feels like forever.

I concur! Though, like Paul, I love not being beholden to either Twitter or Mastodon:

I love not feeling bound to any particular social network. This website, my website, is the one true home for all the stuff I’ve felt compelled to write down or point a camera at over the years. When a social network disappears, goes out of fashion or becomes inhospitable, I can happily move on with little anguish.

But like I said, I don’t expect everyone to have the time, means, or inclination to do that. Mastodon definitely feels like it shares the same indie web spirit though.

Personally, I recommend experiencing Mastodon through the website rather than a native app. Mastodon instances are progressive web apps so you can add them to your phone’s home screen.

You can find me on Mastodon as @adactio@mastodon.social

I’m not too bothered about what instance I’m on. It really only makes a difference to my local timeline. And if I do end up finding an instance I prefer, then I know that migrating will be quite straightforward, by design. Perhaps I should be on an instance with a focus on front-end development or the indie web. I still haven’t found much of an Irish traditional music community on the fediverse. I’m wondering if maybe I should start a Mastodon instance for that.

While I’m a citizen of mastodon.social, I’m doing my bit by chipping in some money to support it: sponsorship levels on Patreon start at just $1 a month. And while I can’t offer much technical assistance, I opened my first Mastodon pull request with a suggested improvement for the documentation.

I’m really impressed with the quality of the software. It isn’t perfect but considering that it’s an open source project, it’s better than most VC-backed services with more and better-paid staff. As Giles said, comparing it to Twitter:

I’m using Mastodon now and it’s not the same, but it’s not shit either. It’s different. It takes a bit of adjustment. And I’m enjoying it.

Most of all, I love, love, love that Mastodon demonstrates that things can be different. For too long we’ve been told that behavioural advertising was an intrinsic part of being online, that social networks must inevitably be monolithic centralised beasts, that we have to relinquish control to corporations in order to be online. The fediverse is showing us a better way. And this isn’t just a proof of concept either. It’s here now. It’s here to stay, if you want it.

I’ve been contemplating a checkbox. The label for this checkbox reads:

This is a bot account

Let me back up…

In what seems like decades ago, but was in fact just a few weeks, Elon Musk bought Twitter and began burning it to the ground. His admirers insist he’s playing some form of four-dimensional chess, but to the rest of us, his actions are indistinguishable from a spoilt rich kid not understanding what a social network is.

It wasn’t giving me much cause for anguish personally. For the past eight years, I’ve only used Twitter as a syndication endpoint for my own notes. But I understand that’s a very privileged position to be in. Most people on Twitter don’t have the same luxury of independence. It’s genuinely maddening and saddening to see their years of sharing destroyed by one cruel idiot.

Lots of people started moving to Mastodon. I figured I should do the same for my syndicated notes.

At first, I signed up for an account on mastodon.cloud. No particular reason. But that’s where I saw this very insightful post from Anil Dash:

When it came time to reckon with social media’s failings, nobody ran to the “web3” platforms. Nobody asked “can I get paid per message”? Nobody asked about the blockchain. The community of people who’ve been quietly doing this work for years (decades!) ended up being the ones who welcomed everyone over, as always.

I was getting my account all set up and beginning to follow some other folks, when I realised that I actually already had an exisiting account over on mastodon.social. Doh! Turns out that I signed up back in 2017 to kick the tyres, but never did much else because there weren’t many other people around back then. Oh, how times have changed!

Anyway, I thought I had really screwed up by having two accounts but this turned out to be an opportunity to experience some of the thoughtfulness in Mastodon’s design. The process of migrating from one Mastodon account to another—on a completely different instance—was very smooth! It was clear that this wasn’t an afterthought. This is an essential part of the fediverse and the design of the migration flow reflects that.

This gives me enormous peace of mind. If I ever want to switch to a different instance and still keep my network intact, I know it won’t be a problem. Mastodon is like the opposite of the roach-motel mentality that permeates most VC-backed so-called social networks.

As I played around some more—reading, following, exploring—my feelings of fondness only grew stronger. I like this place a lot!

I definitely wanted to syndicate my notes to Mastodon. At first, I implemented a straightforward RSS-to-Mastodon syndication using IFTTT (IF This, Then That), thanks to Matthias’s excellent tutorial.

But that didn’t feel quite right. When I syndicate to Twitter, I make a conscious choice each time. There’s a “Twitter” toggle that I can enable or disable in my posting interface. Mastodon deserved the same level of thoughtfulness.

So I switched off the IFTTT recipe and started exploring the Mastodon API. It’s going to sound like a humblebrag when I tell you that I got cross-posting working in almost no time at all, but that’s not a testament to my coding prowess (I’m really not very good), but rather a testament to the Mastodon API, which was a joy to work with.

1. On your Mastodon instance, go to /settings/applications.
2. Click on New Application.
3. Fill in the details about your website and select write:statuses (and probably write:media) from the Scopes list.
4. Copy Your access token to use in API calls.
5. Write some sloppy code (in my case, PHP that uses CURL).

I did hit a wall when it came to posting images. That took me a while to get working, and I couldn’t figure out why. Was it something at Mastodon’s end while it was struggling under the influx of new users? As it turns out, no. It was entirely down to me being an idiot. (You know that situation where you’re working on a problem for ages and you’ve become convinced it’s an extremely gnarly rocket-science problem, but then turns out to be something stupid like a typo? Yeah. That.)

Then there’s the whole question of how to receive replies, likes, and reboosts from Mastodon here on my own site. Luckily, that was super easy, thanks to Brid.gy. One click and I was done. I love Brid.gy!

Take this note, for example. There’s a version on Twitter and a version on Mastodon. The original version on my own site gets responses from both places.

If I’m replying to a response on Twitter, I do not syndicate that to Mastodon.

Likewise, if I’m replying to a response on Mastodon, I do not syndicate that to Twitter.

Oh, one thing worth mentioning: if you’re sending a reply to something on Mastodon using the API, there’s an in_reply_to_id field for you to provide. But you should also include the full @username@instance of the person you’re replying to at the beginning of the message to ensure that it’s displayed as a reply rather than showing up as a regular post. Note the difference between this note on my site and its syndicated version on Mastodon.

Anyway, now I’m posting to Mastodon, but I’m doing it through the the interface of my own website. Which brings me to that checkbox in Mastodon’s profile settings:

This is a bot account

The help text reads:

Signal to others that the account mainly performs automated actions and might not be monitored

If I were doing the automatic cross-posting from RSS, I’d definitely tick that box. But as I’m making a conscious decision whenever I syndicate to Mastodon, I think I’m going to leave that checkbox unticked.

My cross-posting is not automated and I’m very much monitoring my Mastodon account …because I’m enjoying my Mastodon experience more than I’ve enjoyed anything online for quite some time. Highly recommended!