This is a good article on digital gardens in the MIT Technology Review.
Here’s a nice quote:
“Gardens … lie between farmland and wilderness,” he wrote. “The garden is farmland that delights the senses, designed for delight rather than commodity.”
As strypey points out though… the article is basically describing personal websites.
My personal site is a repository for my memories, experiences, feelings, recipes, tips, photos, and more. […] it is an ever-growing extension of myself that I have total control over, my mirror and memory aid. I want to be able to look back at this when I’m eighty and thank my past self for surfacing things that I otherwise would have forgotten.
Hmm, reading this and also Amy Hoy’s post recently (How the Blog Broke the Web) is making me think a bit different about how I refer to my site(s). Think I’ll think of it a bit more as having a personal site, rather than framing it as I have a ‘blog’ or a ‘wiki’. Both of which are great technologies, but I want to be a little bit freer about how I think about what my home on the web is and how I structure it.
he chided me by saying that he didn’t really understand why so many leftists seemed to think of themselves as pessimists. “After all, we all do incredibly, insanely optimistic things all the time”.
– The Opposite of a Cynic: David Graeber, 1961-2020 | Novara Media
“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world,” Graeber once wrote, “is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”
– The anarchist: How David Graeber became the left’s most influential thinker
Interesting thought on how having generic tools for publishing lost us some of the fun of hand-crafted homepages.
once you are given a tool that operates effortlessly — but only in a certain way — every choice that deviates from the standard represents a major cost.
I hear that – publishing through WordPress got me lots of IndieWeb goodness, but I feel a bit restricted in other ways sometimes. That said, you definitely should have tooling available for people who can’t/don’t want to hand-roll everything.
Liking the report on the idea of a ‘British Digital Cooperative‘.
The BDC would be tasked with developing a surveillance-free platform architecture to enable citizens to interact with one another, provide support for publicly funded journalism, and develop resources for social and political communication.
– The British Digital Cooperative: A New Model Public Sector Institution
One of the side effects of getting a veg box from the local food co-op is I know now more about squash varieties than I ever really expected I would.
Also that there is a Wikipedia on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gourds_and_squashes
https://thoughtshrapnel.com/2020/01/01/microcast-81/
Doug has a preference for the Fediverse as an approach to an open web, and says the political philosophy of the IndieWeb is a type of right-libertarianism, because it lacks social equality, and without that it is just a focus on individual freedom.
My gut response is that I disagree of course. But it’s a great jumping off point for some thought and reflection…
Diversity is absolutely a problem in tech, but IndieWeb folks are, from my experience, absolutely doing what they can to rectify that; bringing in people from all sorts of backgrounds, trying to boost the minority voices, and being supportive of everyone who is trying to make the world, or at least the Internet, a better place.
This is a really good article by Fluffy on the state of the IndieWeb and making it more accessible for wider adoption. Just because we’re not there yet, doesn’t mean that we’re not trying.
A trailer for the upcoming documentary ‘The Social Dilemma’ from the Center for Humane Technology: https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=uaaC57tcci0
I don’t know much about CHT. I listened to a few episodes from Your Undivided Attention a while back and they were very interesting, though I have a vague memory of thinking they seemed to skirt around to avoid implicating capitalism as a systemic cause of anything.