Notices by Richard MacManus (ricmac@mastodon.social), page 9

@wolf_witte @pfefferle @pfefferle@notiz.blog Mastodon feature request: translation button :) (I have been using Google Translate to follow along) cc @Gargron

@evan @mmasnick yes, he made some good points about Bluesky protocol. I still like ActivityPub better, and it’s been open web from the start. But ideally they will federate in the end. We shall see.

@mike @evan Another excellent interview Mike, loving this podcast. Also, glad to hear you're working on a fedi book, Evan!

Three #openweb trends for developers to consider as we head into the new year — including a social web renaissance (#fediverse) and HTML web components. https://thenewstack.io/the-state-of-the-open-web-3-takeaways-heading-into-2024/

P.s. F**k X

Web-First in 24

Some initial notes about my personal goals for the new year. Work in progress, and curious if others are thinking similar thoughts about their social media / online life goals etc.

Principles:
• Always bet on the web
• Web protocols > platforms (slogan: “Down with walled gardens!”)
• Web openness > Whatever Mark Zuckerberg defines as “interoperability” (slogan: “Down with robber barons!”)
• Bring back Sidebar Culture (all the fun stuff a blog sidebar had in 2004)

TBC

My strategy:
• My website is my base
• Mastodon is my social media channel ; qst: worth checking out micro.blog again?
• Threads = fediverse (if it doesn’t join, then quit it)
• Bluesky tbd, but again it will need to join the fediverse for me to use it
• What about Substack? Email list is open, but I need to archive all posts to a website I control; maybe WP but private posts? Or maybe I accept that the book version will be my open version.
• TBC…

Sidebar Culture: remember thinks like blogrolls, “Influential articles”, Flickr photos, MyBlogLog (a proto-social network for bloggers). All this stuff and more helped make early 2000s blogging fun and more communal. Would love to find a way to bring that back in 2024…

My wife was trying to do some work on a #WordPress site (she’s not a techie) and was complaining loudly about the terrible new interface. It was of course Gutenberg and its hideous blocks UI. I immediately recommended a plugin called “WordPress Classic”, which I have used for a while now. It fixes WP and brings back a UI that people can actually use. Sometimes I dispair about so-called progress in my profession (web tech). Gutenberg, React and its JavaScript bulk, what happened to Twitter, etc.

@jaredwsmith it’s somewhat remarkable that Gutenberg fails both pro tech users (like yourself) and people in other professions (like my wife).

@pfefferle ok after a bit of futzing around I think I have it how I want it now :) https://mastodon.social/@ricmac@ricmac.org Thanks so much for your help!

@pfefferle ok thanks. Just one more question :) If I change "admin" in my webfinger file to "blog" then will that change my Mastodon name to blog AT ricmac.org?

@pfefferle so the blog a/c would be @admin ? I couldn't find that one on Mastodon.

@pfefferle ok, that does actually work! https://mastodon.social/@admin@ricmac.org

@pfefferle the problem is I can't find a folder named "/.well-known/". I seem to recall having the same issue last time and that Hostinger just doesn't allowed people on shared servers to access it. Anyway, thanks for looking into it!

@pfefferle yes that's the one

Ok I have tried to get the new 1.0 version of the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress working, but unfortunately it still has the same bug as 10 months ago when I last tried this (ref https://wordpress.org/support/topic/webfinger-endpoint-unavailable/). @pfefferle not sure if you have any further suggestions, but it seems like WP sites hosted on Hostinger still cannot use this plugin on Mastodon :(

"Automattic and WordPress design engineer, Matt Wiebe, recently announced [...] that the ActivityPub plugin has released its version 1.0."

Hmmm, time for me to give that plugin another go. I had tried several times to get it to work, but there was a persistant bug related to my web host.

https://alternativeto.net/news/2023/9/wordpress-blogs-can-now-be-followed-in-the-fediverse-with-the-activitypub-plugin/

In this post I explain why #Threads chose #ActivityPub as its open standard to support (instead of, say, Bluesky's protocol or Tim Berners-Lee's Solid). Also I look at some of the challenges Meta will face as it tries to join the fediverse. https://thenewstack.io/threads-adopting-activitypub-makes-sense-but-wont-be-easy/

Tools that help developers collaborate with designers is a growing trend. Figma and Canva have been touting their new dev tools, and now Penpot is too. I spoke to its creator Pablo Ruiz-Múzquiz (@diacritica) about Penpot’s rapid growth after the Figma acquisition by Adobe. https://thenewstack.io/penpot-woos-developers-takes-on-figma-with-open-source-tool/

I take a look at where Bluesky and Nostr are at with their open protocols, from a dev perspective (with thanks to @rabble, whose insights I leaned on for this post) https://thenewstack.io/bluesky-vs-nostr-which-should-developers-care-about-more/