Notices by Sean Coates (sean@scoat.es)

Firefox is 20 years old today. I was using it as “Phoenix” before Firefox 1.0.

That was a real time of hope. Despite Microsoft’s coup attempt with Internet Explorer, we—the makers and users of the Web—prevailed. There was an alternative to the corporate control and vendor lock-in, and we embraced it.

The IE-only web was decimated. It was a victory for the platform we loved so much.

I wish we weren’t letting so much of that same pre-Firefox monoculture story play out with Chrome, right now.

You know that thing “I’m not angry; I’m just disappointed”?

Not this time. This time it’s both.

@schuh @pluralistic Thanks! This wasn’t even on my radar because I consume nearly only audiobooks. Any chance you know of an audio version of this somewhere? Even as part of a podcast or similar (like Spill, recently).

@evan Favourited for the camaraderie, not for the content. I did this a while back, too, and it feels awful.

We were there when Microsoft almost succeeded at destroying the Web with their browser monoculture in the late ‘90s. It’s horrible seeing Google gain ground in this same battle.

My remedial studies for today: (re-)watch @anildash ’s talk on The Web We Lost.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KKMnoTTHJk

This is from 11+ years ago. I’m watching in the context of “in hindsight, things didn’t even seem that bad 11 years ago.” So much has changed for the worse (as far as the Open/Good Web goes) since then.

A more optimistic standpoint: it DOES feel like there’s more movement in the right direction than even 5 years ago, with things like the fediverse gaining momentum. (1/3)

@evan bUt WhAt iF I lIsTeNed tO iT?!

Having trouble combining the letters elegantly, but there must be a portmanteau for the sounds in “ennui” and “week”, right?

Just went to share (externally to this platform) a post from @anildash , which was actually a repost from Threads, and copying the URL was mostly transparent (at least in my client, here, Mona).

I didn’t even really notice that it was Threads in this feed.

Pretty interesting that the federation (even if imperfect) is *happening*.

@dbs Thanks for sharing. I hadn’t seen the response. Some real eye-rolling results there. )-:

/cc @sboots @evan

@evan Sounds awesome. Did you get it locally? And think it’s suitable for a smart 12 year old?

@evan That’s a good question. I’m not sure, myself. It’s really more like “non-public”, but that doesn’t have a good ring.

@evan Yeah, I agree. What I meant is that some people hear that and think they’re public.

@evan I think part of that confusion is that DMs are not *private* (as far as access is concerned), they’re just direct.

Meaning: people with database access, or otherwise-privileged access to the instances, can read the DMs. This is true of pretty much every system that does not explicitly state otherwise; it’s just confusing to some folks.

@evan (because I know you do post-poll analysis)

Qualified yes: you should be able to disassociate someone’s replies from your own messages, but deleting another person’s posts entirely has its own abuse concerns (and is an arms race at best).

(White cis man here, so maybe my opinion is naturally flawed/incomplete, but have been considering/reconsidering these ideas for a long time.)

@evan I wouldn’t say that Air Canada is particularly well-known for their application of Poka-yoke.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poka-yoke

Adding mine to the #eclipse traffic

Trying to buy tickets to a music show, and the only way to purchase them (which is a Ticketmaster rebrand) requires me to enter the personal details of each ticket holder (not just the cardholder).

** This madness must stop. **

(Obviously, I lied. They’d better not be checking IDs at the door.)

For the past ~2 years, I’ve been working on a neuroscience startup (called Matter). We have an app that—by its nature—needs to operate on private user data. Some of that data is so private that we never actually want to handle it ourselves. So we don’t.

We can’t leak data we don’t have. We can’t mishandle private info that never leaves the control of the user.

We’re taking a mostly-unique approach to user data at Matter, and I’ve finally written a little bit about it:

https://seancoates.com/blogs/matter-and-privacy

I’ve been saying “exists is the enemy of good” in conversation for quite a while, now, but I’d never really documented it before today.

(TL;DR: sometimes we miss a good-enough solution because a not-quite-good-enough solution is already out there and in use.)

https://seancoates.com/blogs/exists-is-the-enemy-of-good

Rereading Cory Doctorow’s ( @pluralistic’s ) book `The Internet Con: How to seize the means of computation`, and I’m increasingly convinced that this is the most important thing I read in 2023.

The reread is to solidify the book’s ideas and to try to figure out what I—a capable technologist who has been fighting for data portability and interoperability for 15+ years—can actually, practically, do to help.

I urge all of you to read this book, and I almost never do that kind of thing.