Reading through the sites of longtimers of the web, like Ton‘s site, and more recently Phil Jones‘ and Bill Seitz‘ wikis, and what they link to, makes you realise that there’s such a ton of written history out there. It’s a real treasure trove. And that it’s important that it has been recorded out on the open web, not in some silo that might have vanished and the history been lost.
Also makes me realise that much of what I’m thinking about has been thought about before! There’s some great resources out there. Phil calls some of the recent activity around this a renewal or a reboot. It’s good to have history to read through.
Phil Jones has a page on his wiki about a web renewal: http://thoughtstorms.info/view/WebRenewal
The rediscovery of the same types of community and values that excited us at TheDawnOfWiki.
Hopefully a rediscovery that is long-lived?
That word ‘rediscovery’ chimes with the article that was in the MIT Technology Review recently: Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet. It’s a nice article, but is pretty much describing home pages from way back when, like they’re a new thing.
It’s not the hyped-up search for WebThreePointZero or TheNextBigThing. Instead it’s a return to seeking something of the openness and freedom that has been lost with the rise of giants like Twitter, Facebook and Google.
I hope the openness and freedom comes back and remains. I have a bit of a worry that for example Roam Research is going to become something like the Facebook of the personal wiki.
Check out our interview with Gaël Duval (@gael@mastodon.social) of e foundation! On the e alternative OS, de-googling your phone, data privacy, and software obsolescence.
“Declaration of Digital Autonomy”. From the Software Freedom Conservancy. I like the focus on consent, ownership, right to change/repair, privacy. Too end-user focused though, I’d want some mention of the producers of technology… there shouldn’t be any exploitation anywhere in the supply chain.
Roam is now talking about ‘multiplayer’. I’m presuming this means linking between individuals’ wikis. I like the idea of interlinking wikis, but imagining it’s going to be pretty closed in Roam.
Bill Seitz has lots of ideas about a more open WikiWeb.
aka Wiki Sphere; parallel to BlogWeb, the universe of (clusters of) WikiSpaces
I finished A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers recently. I loved it. There’s something very lovely about Becky Chambers’ sci-fi – it’s much more touching and emotional than a lot that I’ve read. I felt quite emotional at the ending of this one – it’s so full of heart and compassion.
I’ve been finding Bill Seitz’ wiki a trove of interesting thoughts on wikis lately – his page on TeamWiki’s might be of interest re: the company digital garden you mentioned: http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/TeamWiki
Moved my WordPress site over to my new VPS at GreenHost now. That’s everything then – can turn off the old Digital Ocean droplet now.
The new VPS is Ubuntu 20.04, which is MySQL 8, so had a little bit of a faff with some errors as the old server was MySQL 5.7.
Here’s my rough notes on the steps for setting up the new server.