The border:none conference was in Germany last week followed by an IndieWebCamp event, so several indieweb people were there. In the chat, the amount of current Covid cases was brought up and a mention of how few were masked in a crowd of about 200.

My heart sank — a feeling I’m unfortunately getting more and more used to. I commented “in-person conferences may just be a thing of the past for me at this rate 🫠.” I followed that with an explanation that it’s the psychological and emotional weight of being in spaces like that. I have to psych myself up. It feels really isolating; the “alone in a crowded room” feeling.

Tantek helpfully tried to put a positive frame on it as “an interesting exercise in independence and not bowing to implied / perceived social pressure” and the idea that it can help train us to be independent thinkers. I’ve been thinking on that for a bit now. I think there is some truth to that, but I also feel pretty well-trained in that regard after almost 4 years of this.

For me, it’s important to remember that the context of this training is the nearly unmitigated spread of a virus with long-term health impacts. That’s a big part of the psychological weight. I can’t emphasize enough how important community care has become to me. It’s not just my health that I’m concerned about when I’m in a crowd. Looking around and seeing that the majority are not taking basic precautions (for whatever reason) really weighs on me. We know these precautions make everyone safer, but so many people have bought into the hyper-individualism of the moment.

I love the work that Clean Air Club is doing in Chicago, crowdfunding and trying to make concerts safer by providing free air purifiers. They posted a reel recently that I think explains the importance of being proactive in prioritizing Covid safety and accessibility. Here is a transcript of the audio (emphasis mine):

Going to shows the past few years, it seems like nobody is masking anymore. But the reality is that Covid cautious people are being pushed out of these spaces. There’s a selection bias at crowded events. If you do attend and choose to mask, you feel like the only one. But you’re not.

This is a classic paradox of inaccessibility. Because a space is inaccessible to Covid cautious people, they aren’t able to join. But because they aren’t able to join, it appears that there is no demand for Covid cautious spaces. It’s feedback loop that entrenches ableism in our music scene. Artists, event hosts, and venues most of all have an obligation to interrupt this loop.

Prioritize Covid safety.

Clean Air Club,

This has me mulling over what policies I will promote if/when I’m in a position to organize in-person events again, as well as what I will request/encourage other event organizers to implement. I hope to write more on that soon.

Irwin: Dabbling with ActivityPub

Welp, the Instagram gods decided that this comment was spam/abusive and immediately removed it. My first guess is the fist emoji, but the common meaning of that is “solidarity,” especially in the context of an activism post like that. I tried to comment again without that emoji but got a generic “try again later” message. Maybe the automated system thinks it’s a misleading comment about IG features, but it’s not.

Today I tried commenting on someone else’s Halloween costume and got a more extensive message:

“Try again later. We restrict certain activity to protect our community. Based on your use, this action will be unavailable for you until 2023-10-31. Tell us if you think we made a mistake.

Learn more in account status (link)”

Of course that learn more link doesn’t work and only takes me back to the homepage. Seems pretty excessive for leaving a friendly comment on a mutual’s post — not even a stranger.

Blorgin'

Not in Our Name

🎃 Nightmare Before Christmas Live at the Bowl 🎃

I realized this month has been 6 years of me living in San Diego. That’s wild. That’s the longest I’ve lived in one place since I left Indianapolis in 2011. Of course it hasn’t felt that long because I still feel stuck in time in 2020.

coding at #IndieWebCamp Nuremberg, completed the following projects:

0.0: fixed the https://chat.indieweb.org/ footer to drop #Matrix as an access option since their bridge is disabled (#IndieWeb IRC, Discord, and Slack still work great), and provide an explicit link/encouragement for filing issues

0.5: investigated IndieWeb wiki issues (mobile presentation), possible fixes, and documented them: https://indieweb.org/MediaWiki_customizations#Issues

0.7: add HTML <search> element support to my home page and permalinks as nerdsniped by @adactio.com (@adactio@mastodon.social @adactio); expanded to <search role=search> to also support folks using older browsers / screenreaders that only support #ARIA 1.1.

0.8: replaced my incorrect use of HTML attribute aria-hidden="true" (on my links to #BridgyFed) as pointed out by @jkphl.is (@jkphl@mastodon.social @jkphl) and https://sonja-weckenmann.de (@sweckenmann@mas.to), with hidden="from-humans". Since other values are allowed on the hidden attribute and treated as hidden="hidden", the "from-humans" value communicates a subtle semantic that the element is intended for consumption by robots & crawlers, like #Bridgy.
0.8.1 Update: created a pull-request (https://github.com/snarfed/bridgy-fed/pull/701) to update the BridgyFed documentation markup examples to use the 'hidden' attribute accordingly as well.

Time is up for today’s IndieWebCamp Create Day so my remaining projects will have to wait.
#IndieWebCamp #Matrix #ARIA #BridgyFed #Bridgy
The Uncanny

at The Uncanny

Joe's Pub

Let’s John Cameron Mitchell (and Amber Martin)

The Redd
Vegan Night Market — with anomalily
Oregon Humane Society

at Oregon Humane Society

Inspiring mix of perspective expanding and personal talks at border:none (https://border-none.net/ @border_none) the past two days. Thanks speakers, volunteers, and especially organizers @marcthiele.com (@marcthiele@mastodon.social @marcthiele) and @jkphl.is (@jkphl@mastodon.social @jkphl).

Looking forward to the next two days at #IndieWebCamp Nürnberg @tollwerk.de (@tollwerk@mastodon.social @tollwerk) of personal site demos, brainstorming sessions, and making, creating, & hacking things from UX to protocols to improve & interconnect our websites, with each other ( #Webmention ), #fediverse ( #BridgyFed & #ActivityPub ), and others ( #POSSE #backfeed ).

Still a few spots if you’re in town or can hop on a train and join us Saturday & Sunday!

🎟 Tickets: https://ti.to/beyondtellerrand/bordernone-2023/with/kqyaidtq92k
🗓 Event: https://events.indieweb.org/2023/10/indiewebcamp-nuremberg-2023-DmXe4dYdfagc
ℹ️ More info: https://indieweb.org/2023/Nuremberg

#bordernone #bono23 #IndieWeb
#IndieWebCamp #Webmention #fediverse #BridgyFed #ActivityPub #POSSE #backfeed #bordernone #bono23 #IndieWeb
City Winery New York City

Let’s Jonathan Coulton

Pier 45 - Hudson River Park

A break between events

Orwellian Language

Hello ...ladies.

I don’t remember how to do introduction posts, so there ya go, Bluesky.

This is a good writeup on some sneaky vulnerabilities in OAuth implementations, but ultimately is just a simple access token injection attack: https://salt.security/blog/oh-auth-abusing-oauth-to-take-over-millions-of-accounts

Random blogging

I’m attendingIf You Knew Me Would You Love Me 2023-10-26 7:00pm–9:30pm.