Category: technology

Read Your Website Is Your Passport by Desmond RivetDesmond Rivet (desmondrivet.com)

Your personal website as a form of identification #indieweb

I found this a very helpful discussion of IndieAuth from Desmond, touching on web sign-in, RelMeAuth, OAuth and OIDC along the way. It’s one of those things that I know exists, and just works for me (e.g. everytime I use a Micropub client), but it’s nice to get a bit of a handle on how it works.

In a nutshell the purpose is this:

your domain should function as a kind of universal online passport, allowing you to sign in to various services and applications simply by entering your personal URL

Desmond does a great job of explaining the nitty-gritty of how it works, too. The two bits I bolded below jumped out at me – a decentralised authentication mechanism leveraging DNS as a user registration system. It’s very elegant.

The process of using your domain to log in to sites and services is called web sign-in and is implemented via a protocol called IndieAuth, an extension of OAuth used for decentralized authentication.

If your goal is to make a social network out of the world wide web, there is a certain elegance to the idea of leveraging DNS as a user registration system.

Online passports

Getting events out of the silos seems like a hot topic this year, with plenty of IndieWeb and Fediverse activity around it. The COVID-19 pandemic might be changing the nature of events for the foreseeable, but there’s still plenty happening online.

A couple of weeks ago at IndieWebCamp London, Jamie led a session about owning your RSVPs: https://indieweb.org/2020/London/OwnYourRSVPs

Inspired by the session, my day 2 hacking revolved around events and RSVPs. The plan was to try indie-fy my event discovery a bit, and also try and decouple myself from Meetup a little for events there. I want to get a feed of upcoming events that I might be interested in in my social reader, and RSVP to them on my own site.

Continue reading “Indiewebifying events and RSVPs”

Indiewebifying events and RSVPs

Read Frantz Fanon Against Facebook: How to Decolonize Your Digital-Mind (Versobooks.com)

From the Algeria to algorithms, Lizzie O’Shea argues that Frantz Fanon’s ideas have much to offer us as we seek to understand, and resist, some of the most profound challenges of living in the digital age.

Lizzie O’Shea discusses digital self-determination as a means to understand and resist some of the problems with big tech, using the rubric of Fanon’s work on self-determination. How can we have agency and create our own identity under the thumb of the big surveilling platforms?

Digital self-determination will involve:

  • making use of the technical tools available to communicate freely
  • designing information infrastructure in ways that favour de-centralisation
  • designing online spaces and devices that are welcoming

I definitely like all the conclusions. At first blush, any comparison between colonialism and racism and the problems of digital platforms feels like it could be a little crass… but O’Shea explains her thinking and says she feels Fanon’s ideas are so strong that they can be applied to different times and situations.

Even in a technologically-saturated world, in which human beings are categorised, surveilled and discriminated against, it is possible for us to carve out space for our own identity and shape our destiny.

– Frantz Fanon Against Facebook: How to Decolonize Your Digital-Mind

Digital self-determinism

RSVPed: Attending ONLINE: Homebrew Website Club Europe/London

Join us… on ✨The Internet!✨
Join the Zoom call: tbc 20 minutes before start
We will provide a Zoom video conference link 20 minutes before the meetup here and in the IndieWeb chat.
Homebrew Website Club is a meetup for anyone interested in personal websites and a distributed web. Whether you?…

I’ll be attending and most likely working on a blog post that I need to write about owning my RSVPs, before I actually forget what I did at IWC London.

Via a link to Jared Pereira’s personal website tours posted on the IndieWeb chat, I stumbled on a bit of a goldmine of thoughts on the blog and wiki combo over at Tom Critchlow’s blog.

Lots of interesting new terms:

Also learned about are.na, which says it provides ‘tools for thinking, together‘. Which I like the sound of, but as are.na is a silo, it’s not something I will be using personally.

Tom Critchlow’s blog

Replied to https://boffosocko.com/2020/03/14/neils-noodlemaps/ by Chris AldrichChris Aldrich (boffosocko.com)

According to Neil, this is using “emacs with Org mode and Org-roam and publishing it as static HTML from org-mode. My holy grail would be something like TiddlyWiki but in emacs.”
I’ll have to take a look at this sort of set up while I’m looking at wikis. I’m sort of partial to TiddlyWiki m…

I think starting as frictionlessly as possible is a really good idea. Something where you can just easily type plain text and link those thoughts together – that’s the best place to start. For me that meant org-mode because I use it regularly anyway.

It’s evolving now with org-roam in the mix, in a direction I’m really happy with, but I think if I’d started trying to get everything in one I might have fizzled out. (That happened when I tried org-brain before – it was just too much friction).

I have some notes on my progression of wiki tooling here: https://commonplace.doubleloop.net/20200317105640-wiki_tooling

Getting started with Ansible. Definitely enjoying it as a reproducible way of documenting all the steps involved in a server’s setup.

But… am I going to forget how to do all the actual underlying commands if everything is just an Ansible task in a yaml file? What if I need them in an emergency??