Read How solid is Tim’s plan to redecentralize the web? by Irina Bolychevsky (Medium)

The internet and near-costless scaling of digital has allowed the concentration of too much power in too few hands. Our systems for…

I really like the Personal Data Store concept. You own your data, and you choose to let apps interact with it for your benefit. It’s pretty much what the #indieweb is doing (though perhaps for the more limited subset of things that don’t need verified claims).

I don’t like the commercial nature of most PDS offerings (including Solid now).

Either way, some good general food for thought in this article.

How you choose to break a monopoly depends on your politics I guess.

Direct action against it; grassroots alternatives; state support for alternatives; legislation/anti-trust; state alternatives. Maybe some combination thereof.

I’d probably plump for the first two/three.

I think it’s a bit of a misused and overused trope to say that people use centralised services because they have a better user experience.

The only definition of user experience that puts Facebook or Twitter ahead of alternatives is a broad definition that includes the network effect (people I know are on it) and familiarity (it’s what I’m used to).

But in such a broad definition, I would then include things such as ‘you manipulate me with ads’, ‘you steal my attention’. This is bad UX.

In a narrow definition of user experience – how easy is it for me to sign up; how easy it is for me to share an image; how easy is it for me to share a note; there is nothing special to Facebook or Twitter in these regards.

You rarely hear someone complain about the user experience of signing up for an email provider. But that’s (nominally, at least, gmail black hole aside)
a decentralised service. It’s just because people are familiar with it and it’s where people already are. If a company came along and said – hey – for email – everyone on the planet must sign up to this one megaservice to exchange emails from now on. People would say – what a terrible idea. Because people are familiar with it not working that way.

I don’t think centralised services have better UX. All they have is a monopoly.

Read Fully Automated Green Communism | Novara Media (Novara Media)

How can we secure luxury for all without careering even faster towards climate catastrophe? Aaron Bastani discusses.

“It means saying ‘here is a path to limitless abundance’, rather than calling for civilisation to be placed in a straight jacket.”

Following on the previous ‘degrowth vs accelerationism’ article, a view from what the other article would call the left accelerationist approach.

I wouldn’t call it accelerationism though. Just a harnessing of technology for the aims of equality and abundance. But not blind techno-optimism.

Good article.

Hand-curation should be cherished too. Knowing another human being has listened, thought about and combined these tracks is a beautiful thing. The only recommender algorithm I ever liked was last.fm, which really got the social aspect of music.
Coool.. just came across RadioDroid on f-droid, it’s an app for discovering and playing internet radio streams.

Now I’m listening to hibernate on Resonance Extra and it’s awesome. https://extra.resonance.fm/

I was thinking about how to approach music discovery since ditching Deezer (which was pretty terrible for it anyway). I think back to radio is the way to go (I mean duh, pretty obviously really).