Profiting from convincing (or, perhaps more accurately, “manipulating”) people to pay attention. Big Social Media sites like Facebook are part of the attention economy: you pay nothing to use the site. In fact, you are the product; they sell your attention to advertisers, and therefore design their product to maximize their profits by manipulating you to spend more time on the site. The attention economy is sometimes associated with: loss of free will loss of Privacy psychological harm al...| www.complete.org
Email is one of the most common examples of Asynchronous Communication people are familiar with today. It is a store-and-forward approach which is tolerant of temporary disruptions to services and supports multiple hops. Email is also a distributed system, supporting many different servers and providers. However, market forces have caused Google and Microsoft to have an outsized influence on email, and their algorithms and policies make it increasingly difficult for independent mail servers t...| www.complete.org
“Free (as in freedom) Software” is all about giving you back control of your digital life. Both Debian and the Free Software Foundation have definitions of what it means to be free; in general, it means that you must be able to: Inspect how the software works and modify it (source code access) Give away copies of the software, whether modified or not Base other software upon it, or integrate it into other projects (sometimes with the requirement that these other projects also be Free).| www.complete.org
This was originally published as a post on my blog. This version is intended to be kept up-to-date with developments, and is edited from the original. There is a whole science to manipulating our attention. And because there is a lot of money to be made by doing this well, it means we all encounter attempts to manipulate what we pay attention to each day. What is this, and how is it harmful?| www.complete.org
The loose, decentralized confederation of non-profit Social Media sites such as Mastodon, Pixelfed, and PeerTube. They all use ActivityPub for federation. Links to this note Recovering Our Lost Free Will Online: Tools and Techniques That Are Available Now This started out at a post on my blog. This edited version is intended to be kept more up-to-date. How to Join the Fediverse and Cast off the Attention Economy This started as a post on my blog.| www.complete.org
Here are some (potentially) interesting topics you can find here: Old and Small Technology and benefits to us today NNCP, which is an Asynchronous, Encrypted, onion-routed, offline-capable way to send data and execute remote commands. Yggdrasil, a network using IPv6 space where IPs are linked to public keys How this site is built (hint: it’s exported from Emacs!) Amateur Radio ZFS on Linux Long-Distance Train Travel in the USA The Grumpy Cricket - an interactive fiction game for children So...| www.complete.org
Mastodon is a Free Software, decentralized, global Social Media network. Unlike the other major ones, it is not a part of the Attention Economy, and generally has no ads. In How to Join the Fediverse and Cast Off the Attention Economy, I write about how to get started with Mastodon and why it makes sense. Mastodon and other projects that use ActivityPub for federation are said to form the Fediverse.| www.complete.org