Too late — Open Indie
A decade ago I embarked on a journey to Rashidieh, a mixed but primarily Palestinian refugee camp in southern Lebanon. I spent three mont...| Open Indie
Today I participated as a speaker in the Company Models for Impact session at Oslo Innovation Week. My time was limited to \~3 minutes, which turned into a fun (and slightly grueling) exercise in brevity. My speech was based on an earlier draft of this text, which I’ve sinced revised after today’s live performance. --- I hate to admit it, but Elon Musk was a pretty cool guy 10 years ago. He was making cool things anyway. Maybe he was never a particularly swell guy to begin with, but I gen...| Open Indie
Ten walking-minutes from where I live in Oslo, Norway, there's a large pool that opened at the start of this year. I love this pool; I waited many years for it to re-open after it was demolished for subsequent reconstruction. Yet if I could wave a magic money-back wand and make this pool disappear right now - robbing thousands of people, families and smiling kids of their joyful exercise and community - I would. My fellow locals would surely accuse me of abusing my wizarding powers, but a few...| Open Indie
In my youth I was under the all too common delusion that Great Men were to thank for most of society's innovations. Eventually I noticed that the supposedly greatest men of our modern times got to their position of influence and power largely by taking things. It's harder to outright take material goods like land and money, since we live in a society founded on property deeds and private capital, backed by the right to protect those valuables with deadly force. But with the slightest bit of p...| Open Indie
I'm writing this mostly for the sake of my own mental accounting, so I can look back at this years from now and gauge whether my assumptions or position has since changed. Until recently I had no idea who Jesse Singal was. I still don't know much, but my Bluesky feed has told me all I really need to know: Jesse Singal's presence on the mainline Bluesky network makes many tens of thousands of people feel unsafe. Several people whom I defer to for their expertise in community health have propos...| Open Indie
The multi-polar Social Web of my dreams has been beautifully exemplified in two recent articles. First, there’s How decentralized is Bluesky really? by Christine Lemmer-Webber, co-author of the ActivityPub protocol. Christine’s article opens with: recently I have received some direct encouragement from a core Bluesky developer that they have found my writings insightful and useful and would be happy to see me write on the subject. So here are my thoughts. She also goes on to praise Jay Gr...| Open Indie
A decade ago I embarked on a journey to Rashidieh, a mixed but primarily Palestinian refugee camp in southern Lebanon. I spent three mont...| Open Indie
Back in June I wrote about an exciting confluence of digital auth tech: ### Social sign-in for indies The focal point of Weird Netizens was the convergence of OIDC, Rauthy and FedCM as open identity technologies. I've dabbled in online activism for a long time and never before have I experienced these kinds of ripple effects. 1. February: A contributor to the development of FedCM raises awareness about a potential fork in the road for the FedCM spec, which would make it yet another Big Tech e...| Open Indie
It's been a year since I wrote about Weird web pages as a prospective catalyst for the reclamation of my digital identity. There's been significant progress towards that end – more spread out among individual efforts than I initially envisioned, but ultimately for the better. In this time a lot of necessary groundwork has been completed, some of which I didn't even realize was needed until I learned about it. Continuing from where I left off a year ago, let's go a few levels deeper into the...| Open Indie
Mark Zuckerberg has proclaimed that Open Source AI Is the Path Forward. He's not wrong. At the same time, he's absolutely not in it for primarily selfless reasons. When you're late to the tech trend, the best way to catch up in both R&D and mindshare is open source your stuff, so that's what Meta is doing. Even though Mark doesn't yet have an innate understanding and appreciation for The Commons, I'm cheering for Meta's big bet on open AI. Since what 'open source AI' actually entails is woefu...| Open Indie
A year ago in Feed Overload I wrote: 99% of all microblog (and chat) content is ephemeral by design, meant for a specific moment in time. But the 1% that should endure past the 24hr cycle doesn't have good ways to do so in the current paradigm. Reddit/Lemmy has a simple Top sorting mechanism for viewing highly rated content in the past Day / Week / Month / Year / All Time. This is a great way to surface evergreen knowledge artifacts in places like r/AMA and r/todayilearned. It's also a very h...| Open Indie
Online community platforms are assembly-kits for large, communal bonfires, designed to draw people towards the light and into the warm to...| Open Indie
There’s an increasing obsession with “humanness” these days: Humanness in the age of AI Worldcoin: a solution in search of its problem (...| Open Indie
