Haven| havenweb.org
This week, the popular Twitter/X alternative Bluesky shared that they’re working with Epic Games and the UK Government to do Age Assurance“—verifying the age of a user before showing them adult-appropriate content.| havenweb.org
Haven promotes a different paradigm for social media, a model where everything is private. It is that paradigm that is important. Haven is just one option for implementing that paradigm but it is the paradigm I want to promote. One really cool consequence of private social media is that it cannot be censored.| havenweb.org
There is a history to the web. When it started, this computer-to-computer network let people share web pages by running a program on their computer (a webserver) and someone else could run a program on their computer (a web browser) to see what the first person shared. If you wanted to publish something on the first generation of the web, you needed the following: A computer to run the webserver, connected to the internet Knowledge about how to setup the webserver Knowledge about how to write...| Haven Blog
Today’s blog post is something a little bit different. Google released a tool called NotebookLM1 that can summarize articles in the form of a podcast. I tried it out with things I’ve written about Haven, and it generated a really good overview of Haven; exploring what Haven is and the role it plays in the ecosystem of online communication. Take a listen below! Your browser does not support the audio element. https://notebooklm.google.com ↩| Haven Blog
The first time I heard about Secure Scuttlebut, or SSB, I thought it was the coolest idea. Let people moving around from place to place be the transmission mechanism for a network. Facebook over sneakernet! I love protocols and this one triggered some sort of itch with the crossover of novel ideas along with a lack of dependance on (or vulnerability to) the internet. It felt very cyberpunk. So I installed patchwork and poked around to discover that they had implemented this idea of pubs to al...| Haven Blog
I love the IndieAuth community, I love what they stand for, and I love a lot of the technology they’ve built and defined. But I have a hard time getting behind Webmentions, even though they clearly solve a problem that exists and the people who use them love them. What’s going on here? First, some background. The IndieWeb community wants an internet that isn’t dominated by a few giant silos. They want the internet to be free and open with a rich diversity of ways to interact with it. Wh...| Haven Blog
Bluesky is a project/company that came from somewhere inside of Twitter or Jack Dorsey. They’re moving forward with the idea that Twitter (or its replacement) should operate with an open protocol so that users can move between different hosting providers. Under this vision, Twitter would just be one provider but the protocol would be compatible with people who want to run their own servers and still tweet at each other. I’m a big fan of open protocols, that’s a commitment I’ve made in...| Haven Blog
You might have noticed a new “Run on PikaPods” button in the Haven Readme file. PikaPods is a company that offers very economical paid hosting for open source projects like Haven. As of today, if you sign up with PikaPods you get a free $5 credit without needing to add a credit card. PikaPods only charges $1.64 per month to run your Haven, so you get 3 months free to try out Haven before you have to start paying! In this post, we’ll talk about how to setup your own Haven on PikaPods. Be...| Haven Blog
The IndieWeb is an awesome community of people building their own websites. In their words it “is a people-focused alternative to the corporate web.” James is a blogger who I found through that community and this morning he has a post titled Some thoughts on walled gardens. It’s a topic very relevant to Haven since I think Haven offers an excellent path away from the walled gardens that own more and more of the internet, so I’m sharing some of my own thoughts. One of James’ first th...| Haven Blog
There are two sides to most social networks: writing and reading. One thing that the popular platforms do really well is to integrate the two sides. For example, your Facebook feed has a very convenient box at the top to share “what’s on your mind”; while your main feed is full of what other people have written in that box. The broader internet doesn’t really work the same way. Building and publishing a website uses one set of tools while reading a web page uses a browser.| havenweb.org
What is Facebook?| havenweb.org