trainingmontage @trainingmontage@indieweb.social
- He
- Him
I'm a computer science student, web developer, and small-city journalist who really doesn't have enough time.
I am absolutely a follow-back boy.
Joined Apr 2022
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Posting this guide for anyone who happens to follow me from the bird app:
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Hey everyone!
I'm a computer science student, a small-city digital journalist, and a web developer (ostensibly).
I'm approaching the dark side of my 40s and I'm working to make a transition out of journalism into tech. Wish me luck!
I love making websites and I'm very interested in learning more about #IndieWeb.
Also, I hope you're having a fulfilling, if not relaxing, day.
Welp, finals are done.
* Stares into the distance with haunted eyes.
I've been pretty quiet for the last week due to finals removing my soul.
You should feel a little terrified of the people feeding you news, especially through broadcasts.
For example: I knew a morning anchor who was complaining about an infection she had in her eye after she tried treating her initial discomfort with essential oil.
trainingmontage
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WOW. Yeah I've been on mastadon for like only five days now but I'm already flabbergasted at the world that should have been... https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/#Overview
Like literally how did we all agree to just NOT have interoperable social networks??? Looking at the activity pub docs makes it clear how ridiculously easy that would have been. You want my content? Just GET my outbox. Want to send me something? Just POST to my inbox. The server can be anything you want, just format your messages in this (VERY INTUITIVE!) way. It's so simple it's STUPID.
I'm very new to all of this, so I'll admit that there's a lot I don't know, but what is painfully obvious right now is how, yet again, the tendrils of Capitalism have fundamentally altered the STRUCTURE of the Internet to make it less open, less empowering and generally WORSE for most users. However, what's also becoming clear is that it does not have to be that way, and being here is in some small way, bringing about that better possible future.
While I'm in the process of finding a way out of the newsroom and into tech, I have to admit that working in local journalism has equipped me well to procrastinate on college writing projects.
Sometimes I feel like local journalism is really just fast, concise writing under duress.
trainingmontage
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Something important to know about me: I like decentralized technologies, distributed systems and the like, and have a research/dev agenda around them.
I do not like cryptocurrencies. At all.
trainingmontage
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OK who can help take Matt Mullenweg up on his offer to bring #Tumblr up to full #indieweb standards? cc: @humanetech
Not a joke: this is a very real opportunity... #openweb
trainingmontage
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i need to know how to make sure my posts here never make it to google search
trainingmontage
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Before reading more about #IndieWeb, I read a bit about blockchains.
Things like distributed ledgers and IPFS seemed to have a lot of potential for serving lots of people information via low-power devices.
The most exciting thing about learning #IndieWeb for me right now is seeing that we pretty much have everything we need to do that without having to listen to insane libertarians.
To the moon indeed.
The semester's almost over and I _cannot wait_ to rebuild my site again.
Hahaha.
Before taking this assembly language class I was like "Oooh, maybe I'll write a MASM REPL with JavaScript! Sad students like me who have to run MASM on Linux will find it super useful."
No. I will not do that.
I just want to goof around with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Instead, I'm about to finish up a number of assembly language labs.
Sad!
trainingmontage
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For new people wondering why Mastodon is on thousands of servers instead of one:
-It helps protect us all against Elon Musk scenarios. It's very difficult for anyone to buy a network made of thousands of independently owned servers. (It's the same reason why no one owns the world's email network, because there are so many independent providers out there.)
-If your server misbehaves (or sells out to a malevolent billionaire), you can move your account to a different server, or even to a brand new server. Decentralisation means you're never trapped on a site you hate.
-Mastodon is an open platform where anyone can start their own server, and they don't need tech knowledge if they use a service like https://masto.host or https://federation.spacebear.ee
...and there are lots more good reasons too, to do with servers using alternative Fediverse software etc, but I'll save that for a future post 😁
trainingmontage
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A few years ago I made this flow chart of which Mastodon posts end up in which timelines!
So, you can see how each instance will have a different local timeline, and even a slightly different federated timeline - and you can see why the federated timeline moves so much faster than the local one, too.
This is why it's important to boost good posts and use hashtags - the fediverse is fragmented and harder to search by nature.
【Ξｎｉｇｍａｔｉｃｏ】 🐱
Posting this guide for anyone who happens to follow me from the bird app:
This moves me along to whether I should use a static site generator vs server-rendered.
Seems like SSG is the way to go so I'll have an easier time of keeping track of things like web mentions in (more or less) real-time. I don't know if I want to trigger a site rebuild when I get a new mention.
This is going to be a lot of fun!
The first thing I'm going to do when the current semester ends will be to rebuild my personal site with some fun #indieweb bells and whistles.
What should I do first?
If you were to approach this from the beginning, what steps would you take?
Microformats and syndication seem like good first steps.
Honestly, implementing much of what makes up the decentralized social web seems like a lot of fun.
- He
- Him
I'm a computer science student, web developer, and small-city journalist who really doesn't have enough time.
I am absolutely a follow-back boy.
Joined Apr 2022
