About

{
    "type": "entry",
    "name": "About",
    "content": {
        "text": "Taking a cross country flight\n\n\nGreetings, I am Marcus Povey, a seasoned senior full-stack software engineer based in Europe. I have served a diverse clientele, including software houses, financial and governmental institutions, news agencies, and companies of various sizes.\n\n\n\nThroughout my career, I have been instrumental in the development of several mission-critical software systems, including life-saving medical software, secure messaging platforms, high-performance video platforms, and Open Source projects that are widely used globally.\n\n\n\nIn my current role, I lead a talented team of software engineers in developing cutting-edge scientific software across Europe, primarily in the field of structural biology. I work closely with some of the world\u2019s most renowned scientific institutions to deliver innovative solutions that facilitate scientific research. I have also been actively involved in several EU Open Data Access projects aimed at improving the accessibility and reuse of scientific data, including contributing to the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic. My expertise has been recognized in the industry, and I have been a speaker at numerous scientific conferences, influencing EU data sharing policy.\n\n\n\nAdditionally, I have served as the technical lead for the Elgg project, a widely adopted Open Source social networking platform used by universities, governments, and companies worldwide to streamline internal and external communication. I am also a contributor to the development of the Known platform, a modern social publishing solution incorporating Indieweb technologies.\n\n\n\nFor a more comprehensive understanding of my professional experience, please take a look at my resume or my LinkedIn.\n\n\n\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\n\t\n\n\nIn my personal life, I am an avid traveler and enjoy a nomadic lifestyle that allows me to explore new destinations for both work and leisure. I am always eager to experience different cultures and live in new environments.\n\n\n\nI also collect hobbies like precious shinies. Currently, I pursue a diverse range of interests, including martial arts (such as Judo, Krav Maga, Capoeira, and Jujitsu), rock music, powerlifting, archery, blacksmithing, climbing, motorcycle riding, and piloting light aircraft.\n\n\n\nLet\u2019s go!",
        "html": "<a href=\"https://www.marcus-povey.co.uk/wp-content/68FFE06B-77C0-4F93-BF28-9D312D196BAB-300x300-1.jpg\"><img width=\"300\" height=\"300\" src=\"https://www.marcus-povey.co.uk/wp-content/68FFE06B-77C0-4F93-BF28-9D312D196BAB-300x300-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" /></a>Taking a cross country flight\n\n\n<p>Greetings, I am <a href=\"https://mapkyca.info\">Marcus Povey</a>, a seasoned senior full-stack software engineer based in Europe. I have served a diverse clientele, including software houses, financial and governmental institutions, news agencies, and companies of various sizes.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Throughout my career, I have been instrumental in the development of several mission-critical software systems, including life-saving medical software, secure messaging platforms, high-performance video platforms, and Open Source projects that are widely used globally.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>In my current role, I lead a talented team of software engineers in developing cutting-edge scientific software across Europe, primarily in the field of structural biology. I work closely with some of the world\u2019s most renowned scientific institutions to deliver innovative solutions that facilitate scientific research. I have also been actively involved in several EU Open Data Access projects aimed at improving the accessibility and reuse of scientific data, including contributing to the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic. My expertise has been recognized in the industry, and I have been a speaker at numerous scientific conferences, influencing EU data sharing policy.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Additionally, I have served as the technical lead for the <a href=\"https://elgg.org\">Elgg</a> project, a widely adopted Open Source social networking platform used by universities, governments, and companies worldwide to streamline internal and external communication. I am also a contributor to the development of the <a href=\"https://withknown.com\">Known</a> platform, a modern social publishing solution incorporating <a href=\"https://indieweb.org\">Indieweb</a> technologies.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>For a more comprehensive understanding of my professional experience, please take a look at my <a href=\"https://mapkyca.info\">resume</a> or my <a href=\"https://www.linkedin.com/in/mapkyca/\">LinkedIn</a>.</p>\n\n\n\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/p/C6MWPioruKOeSAfHCmJRGn0ZxKtjCaYBAlHL-w0/\">\n\t\t\t\t<img alt=\"Toledo\" src=\"https://scontent-dfw5-2.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.29350-15/440666035_1561016897814975_3707046929431597787_n.jpg?_nc_cat=110&amp;ccb=1-7&amp;_nc_sid=18de74&amp;_nc_ohc=ZCtH8IuvJXoQ7kNvgHpAYDv&amp;_nc_ht=scontent-dfw5-2.cdninstagram.com&amp;edm=ANo9K5cEAAAA&amp;oh=00_AYBhp__8QnoOPE5Pwdmn_1KITEracJ6ozUiCGejWGCcTqA&amp;oe=66565BA3\" /></a>\n\t\t\t\t\t<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/p/C6JfgJfoZgNMKHkzz8gEoGS5aIHXAKWCJvzaCE0/\">\n\t\t\t\t<img alt=\"Today there will be fragment screening with the chance of managed metadata ontologies.\" src=\"https://scontent-dfw5-2.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.29350-15/437986563_961196769047776_2094029730536203072_n.jpg?_nc_cat=102&amp;ccb=1-7&amp;_nc_sid=18de74&amp;_nc_ohc=N3oQFrydVbsQ7kNvgEtUaR5&amp;_nc_ht=scontent-dfw5-2.cdninstagram.com&amp;edm=ANo9K5cEAAAA&amp;oh=00_AYCwA5rK7o6I4Y3THD3QavoVqCwFdGowi367ZiPK1f6nmg&amp;oe=66565A6F\" /></a>\n\t\t\t\t\t<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/p/C6F7ohboTQFCZ3mIDesYzlOa2jP--pjWSf7wKw0/\">\n\t\t\t\t<img alt=\"Looking at all the small things\" src=\"https://scontent-dfw5-2.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.29350-15/438906960_2556242801211818_3308641251585573522_n.jpg?_nc_cat=109&amp;ccb=1-7&amp;_nc_sid=18de74&amp;_nc_ohc=s-AZo_Uy0_sQ7kNvgEJ8_bO&amp;_nc_ht=scontent-dfw5-2.cdninstagram.com&amp;edm=ANo9K5cEAAAA&amp;oh=00_AYCTsEYgIEuyRKLHpC_Z9MrBffCc8sn2JgCcjVHHThk_4Q&amp;oe=6656752F\" /></a>\n\t\t\t\t\t<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/p/C6COcxdr3nlFi8vnllju-Hni-CsnzrNfEB1YLg0/\">\n\t\t\t\t<img alt=\"Here we go again\u2026!\" src=\"https://scontent-dfw5-2.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.29350-15/439856595_1109107733731624_3867067288350074696_n.jpg?_nc_cat=102&amp;ccb=1-7&amp;_nc_sid=18de74&amp;_nc_ohc=r92Kumot6moQ7kNvgHSp8PY&amp;_nc_ht=scontent-dfw5-2.cdninstagram.com&amp;edm=ANo9K5cEAAAA&amp;oh=00_AYDv6tr71Wbv4XL4oLM7TPD8LlyQ5OPhFnxugnHruOxvQg&amp;oe=66565D28\" /></a>\n\t\t\t\t\t<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/p/C58lD9EoE09VXknuaHfCXl-iD_dxwoMJTRWgtU0/\">\n\t\t\t\t<img alt=\"Presenting Science!\" src=\"https://scontent-dfw5-2.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.29350-15/439221288_1225138021785158_7408701404671914656_n.jpg?_nc_cat=110&amp;ccb=1-7&amp;_nc_sid=18de74&amp;_nc_ohc=FHMJ6VOUFCEQ7kNvgHdRIBg&amp;_nc_ht=scontent-dfw5-2.cdninstagram.com&amp;edm=ANo9K5cEAAAA&amp;oh=00_AYA9aBMKPg4q6igGUR1sCehtLxmrSO0vTanyONKC8cSquw&amp;oe=665665DA\" /></a>\n\t\t\t\t\t<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/p/C56v5y9rSLcbITdPD9pcSRwdxQQ86jFfIN1yZM0/\">\n\t\t\t\t<img alt=\"https://www.instagram.com/p/C56v5y9rSLcbITdPD9pcSRwdxQQ86jFfIN1yZM0/\" src=\"https://scontent-dfw5-2.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.29350-15/439168906_946784933570742_6139629378356387180_n.jpg?_nc_cat=102&amp;ccb=1-7&amp;_nc_sid=18de74&amp;_nc_ohc=fUeUA4JxhuwQ7kNvgFxx9Fd&amp;_nc_ht=scontent-dfw5-2.cdninstagram.com&amp;edm=ANo9K5cEAAAA&amp;oh=00_AYD8t6yipvLAD_u3PxYwgWkM3drMRUsxtSDPnwT7yY7Yfg&amp;oe=66568198\" /></a>\n\t\t\t\t\t<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/p/C4WCi-aLk6AJuvUQ-8nRZ_wuH_VjO114RlPCGo0/\">\n\t\t\t\t<img alt=\"Shhhh....\" src=\"https://scontent-dfw5-2.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.29350-15/432412453_725715763017002_8885616923558416899_n.jpg?_nc_cat=111&amp;ccb=1-7&amp;_nc_sid=18de74&amp;_nc_ohc=4Bgl8VnUIGgQ7kNvgEqlgR7&amp;_nc_ht=scontent-dfw5-2.cdninstagram.com&amp;edm=ANo9K5cEAAAA&amp;oh=00_AYCvnXerWhjXv0T2HwNNQmHEuZnXBIjYO38E-zLlQdmNvQ&amp;oe=66567C64\" /></a>\n\t\t\t\t\t<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/p/C30KyqZL_kZsZTK6Eac-AO6OfqmIGjVQt43iDU0/\">\n\t\t\t\t<img alt=\"Contemplation\" src=\"https://scontent-dfw5-2.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.29350-15/429940804_950272099784278_976520167992623312_n.jpg?_nc_cat=100&amp;ccb=1-7&amp;_nc_sid=18de74&amp;_nc_ohc=H8CyNMNw8dMQ7kNvgHC5se0&amp;_nc_ht=scontent-dfw5-2.cdninstagram.com&amp;edm=ANo9K5cEAAAA&amp;oh=00_AYASznPoOm-lsIH-ppF5Rx9IbHYktaObENYeczTQd30IeQ&amp;oe=66568104\" /></a>\n\t\t\t\t\t<a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/p/C3uv9VdrDRZCYGE37x-_Msp5KxO2TsEbIOdhk00/\">\n\t\t\t\t<img alt=\"https://www.instagram.com/p/C3uv9VdrDRZCYGE37x-_Msp5KxO2TsEbIOdhk00/\" src=\"https://scontent-dfw5-2.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.29350-15/429782545_704718925153046_1284927616223841466_n.jpg?_nc_cat=106&amp;ccb=1-7&amp;_nc_sid=18de74&amp;_nc_ohc=VU87DYaK-f8Q7kNvgEKQJO_&amp;_nc_ht=scontent-dfw5-2.cdninstagram.com&amp;edm=ANo9K5cEAAAA&amp;oh=00_AYDzzHzzQDvkVWGs_su-x04j9thLhLheHpQnQiUeQvlN2w&amp;oe=6656704C\" /></a>\n\t\t\t\n\n\t\n\n\n<p>In my personal life, I am an avid traveler and enjoy a nomadic lifestyle that allows me to explore new destinations for both work and leisure. I am always eager to experience different cultures and live in new environments.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>I also collect hobbies like precious shinies. Currently, I pursue a diverse range of interests, including martial arts (such as Judo, Krav Maga, Capoeira, and Jujitsu), rock music, powerlifting, archery, blacksmithing, climbing, motorcycle riding, and piloting light aircraft.</p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Let\u2019s go!</strong></p>"
    },
    "post-type": "article",
    "_id": "41198894",
    "_source": "244",
    "_is_read": true
}

{
    "type": "entry",
    "author": {
        "name": "#indieweb",
        "url": "https://mastodon.social/tags/indieweb",
        "photo": null
    },
    "url": "https://ohai.social/@3AM/112495678938678935",
    "content": {
        "html": "<p>TWs i really think people often forget to mention, but really needed:</p><p>flashing &amp; flickering light (perfectly also quick-motion gifs), <br />alert sounds (personally, air raid alerts are the worst),<br />animal death (even if it's natural, not because of abuse); <br />USSR (\"aesthetic\" too). educational articles and activism are different story of course.</p><p>i understand it's not possible to tag every trigger, but those are pretty general and important for MANY.</p><p><a href=\"https://ohai.social/tags/indiegames\">#<span>indiegames</span></a> <a href=\"https://ohai.social/tags/indieweb\">#<span>indieweb</span></a> <a href=\"https://ohai.social/tags/indiedev\">#<span>indiedev</span></a> <a href=\"https://ohai.social/tags/indiegamedev\">#<span>indiegamedev</span></a></p>",
        "text": "TWs i really think people often forget to mention, but really needed:\n\nflashing & flickering light (perfectly also quick-motion gifs), \nalert sounds (personally, air raid alerts are the worst),\nanimal death (even if it's natural, not because of abuse); \nUSSR (\"aesthetic\" too). educational articles and activism are different story of course.\n\ni understand it's not possible to tag every trigger, but those are pretty general and important for MANY.\n\n#indiegames #indieweb #indiedev #indiegamedev"
    },
    "published": "2024-05-24T10:50:35+00:00",
    "post-type": "note",
    "_id": "41197162",
    "_source": "8007",
    "_is_read": true
}

{
    "type": "entry",
    "author": {
        "name": "#indieweb",
        "url": "https://mastodon.social/tags/indieweb",
        "photo": null
    },
    "url": "https://mastodon.art/@sundeck/112495510860501585",
    "content": {
        "html": "<p>This week on Fern River Club, Lena &amp; Nora meet up on a quiet weekday morning for a sauna at the Wellness Center.</p><p>Lovers of playful exhibitionism, nudity shared between close friends, and secret glimpses are in for an early summer treat.</p><p><a href=\"https://fernriver.club/scenes/lena-quinn-wellness-center/\"><span>https://</span><span>fernriver.club/scenes/lena-qui</span><span>nn-wellness-center/</span></a></p><p><a href=\"https://mastodon.art/tags/FernRiverClub\">#<span>FernRiverClub</span></a> <a href=\"https://mastodon.art/tags/erotica\">#<span>erotica</span></a> <a href=\"https://mastodon.art/tags/EroticFiction\">#<span>EroticFiction</span></a> <a href=\"https://mastodon.art/tags/EroticStory\">#<span>EroticStory</span></a> <a href=\"https://mastodon.art/tags/homoerotic\">#<span>homoerotic</span></a> <a href=\"https://mastodon.art/tags/DigitalGarden\">#<span>DigitalGarden</span></a> <a href=\"https://mastodon.art/tags/indieweb\">#<span>indieweb</span></a> <a href=\"https://mastodon.art/tags/shower\">#<span>shower</span></a> <a href=\"https://mastodon.art/tags/sauna\">#<span>sauna</span></a> <a href=\"https://mastodon.art/tags/nudity\">#<span>nudity</span></a> <a href=\"https://mastodon.art/tags/braless\">#<span>braless</span></a> <a href=\"https://mastodon.art/tags/nipples\">#<span>nipples</span></a> <a href=\"https://mastodon.art/tags/breasts\">#<span>breasts</span></a> <a href=\"https://mastodon.art/tags/voyeur\">#<span>voyeur</span></a> <a href=\"https://mastodon.art/tags/PublicNudity\">#<span>PublicNudity</span></a> <a href=\"https://mastodon.art/tags/sensuality\">#<span>sensuality</span></a> <a href=\"https://mastodon.art/tags/exhibition\">#<span>exhibition</span></a> <a href=\"https://mastodon.art/tags/CityLife\">#<span>CityLife</span></a> <a href=\"https://mastodon.art/tags/bicycle\">#<span>bicycle</span></a> <a href=\"https://mastodon.art/tags/walkability\">#<span>walkability</span></a> <a href=\"https://mastodon.art/tags/NewUrbanism\">#<span>NewUrbanism</span></a></p>",
        "text": "This week on Fern River Club, Lena & Nora meet up on a quiet weekday morning for a sauna at the Wellness Center.\n\nLovers of playful exhibitionism, nudity shared between close friends, and secret glimpses are in for an early summer treat.\n\nhttps://fernriver.club/scenes/lena-quinn-wellness-center/\n\n#FernRiverClub #erotica #EroticFiction #EroticStory #homoerotic #DigitalGarden #indieweb #shower #sauna #nudity #braless #nipples #breasts #voyeur #PublicNudity #sensuality #exhibition #CityLife #bicycle #walkability #NewUrbanism"
    },
    "published": "2024-05-24T10:07:50+00:00",
    "post-type": "note",
    "_id": "41196709",
    "_source": "8007",
    "_is_read": true
}

{
    "type": "entry",
    "author": {
        "name": "#indieweb",
        "url": "https://mastodon.social/tags/indieweb",
        "photo": null
    },
    "url": "https://fosstodon.org/@ttntm/112495289197147070",
    "content": {
        "html": "<p>Wanted: websites with curated collections of bookmarks/links to other websites that are titled anything starting with the letters \"W\", \"X\" or \"Z\".</p><p>Why? To complete the alphabet, of course!<br />(in terms of the bukmark.club's directory index)</p><p>Boosts are much appreciated!</p><p><a href=\"https://fosstodon.org/tags/SmallWeb\">#<span>SmallWeb</span></a> <a href=\"https://fosstodon.org/tags/indieweb\">#<span>indieweb</span></a> <a href=\"https://fosstodon.org/tags/directory\">#<span>directory</span></a></p>",
        "text": "Wanted: websites with curated collections of bookmarks/links to other websites that are titled anything starting with the letters \"W\", \"X\" or \"Z\".\n\nWhy? To complete the alphabet, of course!\n(in terms of the bukmark.club's directory index)\n\nBoosts are much appreciated!\n\n#SmallWeb #indieweb #directory"
    },
    "published": "2024-05-24T09:11:28+00:00",
    "photo": [
        "https://files.mastodon.social/cache/media_attachments/files/112/495/289/226/046/518/original/651430f068491f60.png"
    ],
    "post-type": "photo",
    "_id": "41196710",
    "_source": "8007",
    "_is_read": true
}

{
    "type": "entry",
    "author": {
        "name": "#indieweb",
        "url": "https://mastodon.social/tags/indieweb",
        "photo": null
    },
    "url": "https://xoxo.zone/@artlung/112492947391749898",
    "content": {
        "html": "<p>I had an excuse to show off my <span class=\"h-card\"><a class=\"u-url\" href=\"https://tilde.zone/@tildeclub\">@<span>tildeclub</span></a></span> web page at <a href=\"https://tilde.club/~artlung/\"><span>https://</span><span>tilde.club/~artlung/</span><span></span></a> during FrESH today. It validates as antique DOCTYPE HTML 2.0. My excuse? body {max-width:73ch } ... we were discussing the unit. <a href=\"https://xoxo.zone/tags/indieweb\">#<span>indieweb</span></a> <a href=\"https://xoxo.zone/tags/css\">#<span>css</span></a> <a href=\"https://xoxo.zone/tags/html\">#<span>html</span></a></p>\n<a class=\"u-mention\" href=\"https://tilde.zone/@tildeclub\"></a>",
        "text": "I had an excuse to show off my @tildeclub web page at https://tilde.club/~artlung/ during FrESH today. It validates as antique DOCTYPE HTML 2.0. My excuse? body {max-width:73ch } ... we were discussing the unit. #indieweb #css #html"
    },
    "published": "2024-05-23T23:15:55+00:00",
    "post-type": "note",
    "_id": "41193405",
    "_source": "8007",
    "_is_read": true
}

{
    "type": "entry",
    "author": {
        "name": "#indieweb",
        "url": "https://mastodon.social/tags/indieweb",
        "photo": null
    },
    "url": "https://xoxo.zone/@artlung/112492403837088543",
    "content": {
        "html": "<p>Another terrifically fun event with great participation for the <a href=\"https://xoxo.zone/tags/IndieWeb\">#<span>IndieWeb</span></a>. Number Four will be scheduled soon.</p>",
        "text": "Another terrifically fun event with great participation for the #IndieWeb. Number Four will be scheduled soon."
    },
    "published": "2024-05-23T20:57:41+00:00",
    "post-type": "note",
    "_id": "41192492",
    "_source": "8007",
    "_is_read": true
}

{
    "type": "entry",
    "author": {
        "name": "#indieweb",
        "url": "https://mastodon.social/tags/indieweb",
        "photo": null
    },
    "url": "https://shellsharks.social/@shellsharks/112492188832324502",
    "content": {
        "html": "<p><span class=\"h-card\"><a class=\"u-url\" href=\"https://ioc.exchange/@ApisNecros\">@<span>ApisNecros</span></a></span> Omfg \ud83d\ude02</p><p>\u201cHey I'm putting together a chipotle order, want anything?\u201d</p><p>\u201cYeah, just check out my /chipotle\u201d</p><p>\u2728\ud83c\udf36\ufe0f Magic. \ud83c\udf36\ufe0f\u2728</p><p>Brought to you by the <a href=\"https://shellsharks.social/tags/IndieWeb\">#<span>IndieWeb</span></a></p>\n<a class=\"u-mention\" href=\"https://ioc.exchange/@ApisNecros\"></a>",
        "text": "@ApisNecros Omfg \ud83d\ude02\n\n\u201cHey I'm putting together a chipotle order, want anything?\u201d\n\n\u201cYeah, just check out my /chipotle\u201d\n\n\u2728\ud83c\udf36\ufe0f Magic. \ud83c\udf36\ufe0f\u2728\n\nBrought to you by the #IndieWeb"
    },
    "published": "2024-05-23T20:03:00+00:00",
    "post-type": "note",
    "_id": "41192290",
    "_source": "8007",
    "_is_read": true
}

{
    "type": "entry",
    "author": {
        "name": "#indieweb",
        "url": "https://mastodon.social/tags/indieweb",
        "photo": null
    },
    "url": "https://ioc.exchange/@ApisNecros/112492169771036486",
    "content": {
        "html": "<p>Inspired by <span class=\"h-card\"><a class=\"u-url\" href=\"https://shellsharks.social/@shellsharks\">@<span>shellsharks</span></a></span> 's creative genius, You can now find my Chipotle order on the new /Chiptole page on my site! Better keep this one in your bookmarks for trivia night \ud83d\ude06 </p><p><a href=\"https://ioc.exchange/tags/IndieWeb\">#<span>IndieWeb</span></a> <br /><a href=\"https://www.vzqk50.com/chipotle\"><span>https://www.</span><span>vzqk50.com/chipotle</span><span></span></a></p>\n<a class=\"u-mention\" href=\"https://shellsharks.social/@shellsharks\"></a>",
        "text": "Inspired by @shellsharks 's creative genius, You can now find my Chipotle order on the new /Chiptole page on my site! Better keep this one in your bookmarks for trivia night \ud83d\ude06 \n\n#IndieWeb \nhttps://www.vzqk50.com/chipotle"
    },
    "published": "2024-05-23T19:58:09+00:00",
    "post-type": "note",
    "_id": "41192051",
    "_source": "8007",
    "_is_read": true
}

{
    "type": "entry",
    "author": {
        "name": "#indieweb",
        "url": "https://mastodon.social/tags/indieweb",
        "photo": null
    },
    "url": "https://hachyderm.io/@reillypascal/112491301999702616",
    "content": {
        "html": "<p>Update: I added a form to my blog to send me a webmention!</p><p><a href=\"https://hachyderm.io/tags/IndieWeb\">#<span>IndieWeb</span></a> <a href=\"https://hachyderm.io/tags/Blog\">#<span>Blog</span></a> <a href=\"https://hachyderm.io/tags/Webmentions\">#<span>Webmentions</span></a> <a href=\"https://hachyderm.io/tags/WebDev\">#<span>WebDev</span></a> <a href=\"https://hachyderm.io/tags/WebDevelopment\">#<span>WebDevelopment</span></a></p>",
        "text": "Update: I added a form to my blog to send me a webmention!\n\n#IndieWeb #Blog #Webmentions #WebDev #WebDevelopment"
    },
    "published": "2024-05-23T16:17:28+00:00",
    "photo": [
        "https://files.mastodon.social/cache/media_attachments/files/112/491/302/118/550/824/original/d23dfd0f8b3a671a.png"
    ],
    "post-type": "photo",
    "_id": "41189906",
    "_source": "8007",
    "_is_read": true
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{
    "type": "entry",
    "author": {
        "name": "#indieweb",
        "url": "https://mastodon.social/tags/indieweb",
        "photo": null
    },
    "url": "https://xoxo.zone/@artlung/112491274878692129",
    "content": {
        "html": "<p>Today: Front End Study Hall 3! <a href=\"https://xoxo.zone/tags/IndieWeb\">#<span>IndieWeb</span></a> has a number of regular events on topics related to agency over the web. The Study Hall is just what it sounds like: we ask and answer questions about <a href=\"https://xoxo.zone/tags/HTML\">#<span>HTML</span></a> and <a href=\"https://xoxo.zone/tags/CSS\">#<span>CSS</span></a> in particular, with live code sketching. Audience: wide experience range (newbie to published expert); wide age range (we had a kid come to one!); wide goal range (\"show me how to code it DIY\" to \"what off-the-shelf can I use\"). <a href=\"https://events.indieweb.org/2024/05/front-end-study-hall-003-CHeoDn1hkrMq\"><span>https://</span><span>events.indieweb.org/2024/05/fr</span><span>ont-end-study-hall-003-CHeoDn1hkrMq</span></a> <a href=\"https://events.indieweb.org/\"><span>https://</span><span>events.indieweb.org/</span><span></span></a></p>",
        "text": "Today: Front End Study Hall 3! #IndieWeb has a number of regular events on topics related to agency over the web. The Study Hall is just what it sounds like: we ask and answer questions about #HTML and #CSS in particular, with live code sketching. Audience: wide experience range (newbie to published expert); wide age range (we had a kid come to one!); wide goal range (\"show me how to code it DIY\" to \"what off-the-shelf can I use\"). https://events.indieweb.org/2024/05/front-end-study-hall-003-CHeoDn1hkrMq https://events.indieweb.org/"
    },
    "published": "2024-05-23T16:10:34+00:00",
    "post-type": "note",
    "_id": "41189907",
    "_source": "8007",
    "_is_read": true
}

Dispatches from the media apocalypse

{
    "type": "entry",
    "published": "2024-05-23T14:02:03+00:00",
    "url": "https://werd.io/2024/dispatches-from-the-media-apocalypse",
    "name": "Dispatches from the media apocalypse",
    "content": {
        "text": "Without serious intervention, newsrooms are going to disappear. Changes to social media and the advent of generative AI threaten their businesses and the impact of their work. They need to own their online presences outright and build direct relationships with their communities\u2014and they need to do it now.\n\nSocial media audiences are plummeting. Less than 35% of internet searches lead users to click on a website. The views and engagement that newsrooms depend upon to survive are disappearing.\n\nIt\u2019s happening quickly. Semafor\u2019s Max Tani reported recently:Washington Post CEO Will Lewis is introing the paper\u2019s new \u201cBuild It\u201d plan today. In a meeting with staff, he noted that the paper lost $77 million over the past year, and saw a 50% drop off in audience since 2020: \u201cTo be direct, we are in a hole, and we have been for some time.\"Addressing this challenge will require radical changes to how newsrooms invest in and build technology.\n\nIn this post, I\u2019ll attempt to describe the challenges in more detail and then discuss how they can be more adequately addressed.Some context: my move into newsI\u2019ve recently gained a new perspective on these challenges. For over a decade, I\u2019ve worked adjacent to news and journalism. I\u2019ve seen the industry as an engineer, startup founder, product lead, investor, and advisor. More recently, I decided I could be more useful in directly leading technology efforts inside newsrooms. It\u2019s been eye-opening, rewarding work.\n\nMy experience alongside news was diverse. I built product for newsrooms, founded a startup used by public media, invested in early stage media startups, and have taught human-centered product design to teams at organizations like the New York Times and the Associated Press, as well as at institutions like the Newmark School of Journalism and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. I\u2019ve built software, founded, grown, and supported startups, and taught product design to some of the biggest names in journalism.\n\nMy immersion inside newsrooms has been much more recent. ProPublica investigates abuses of the public trust by government, businesses, and other institutions. I\u2019ve worked on technology strategy for the last year, first as a contractor, and now as its Senior Director of Technology. Before that, I was the first CTO at The 19th, which reports on the intersection of gender, politics, and power.\n\nI made this career shift at a pivotal moment for journalism\u2014though it seems every moment for journalism over the last fifteen years has felt pivotal. The industry has struggled to weather the seismic shifts brought about by the internet, which have impacted its business, the state of our politics, and public discourse. It\u2019s been a struggle for decades.The audience threatIt\u2019s getting harder and harder for newsrooms to reach their audiences \u2014 and for them to sustain themselves.\n\nI\u2019ve often remarked that journalism treats the internet as something that happened to it rather than something it can actively shape and build, but it at least had some time to adjust to its new normal. The internet landscape has been largely static for well over a decade \u2014 roughly from the introduction of the iPhone 3G to Twitter\u2019s acquisition by Elon Musk. People used more or less the same services; they accessed the internet more or less the same way. Publications and online services came and went, but the laws of physics of the web were essentially constants.\n\nOver the last year in particular, that\u2019s all changed. Shifts in the social media landscape and the growing popularity and prevalence of generative AI have meant that the rules that newsrooms began to rely on no longer hold.\n\nAt their heart, online newsrooms have a reasonably simple funnel. They publish journalism, which finds an audience, some of which either decide to pay for it or view ads that theoretically cover the cost of the work. Hopefully, they will make enough money to publish more journalism.\n\nThis description is a little reductive: there are lots of different revenue models in play, for one thing. I\u2019m particularly enamored with patronage models that allow those with the means to support open-access journalism for anyone to read freely. Still, some are entirely ad-supported, some are sponsored, and others are protected behind a paywall (or some combination of the above). For another, journalism isn\u2019t always the sole driver of subscriptions. The New York Times receives tens of millions of subscribers from its games like Wordle and Connections, as well as its Cooking app.\n\nStill, there are two pivotal facts for every newsroom: their work must reach an audience, and someone must pay for it. The first is a prerequisite of the second: if nobody discovers the journalism, nobody will pay for it. So, reaching and growing an audience is crucial.\n\nFor the last decade and a half, newsrooms have used social media and search engines as the primary way to reach people. People share stories across social media\u2014particularly Facebook and Twitter\u2014and search for topics they\u2019re interested in. It\u2019s generally worked.\n\nOver the last year, social media has radically fragmented. Twitter transformed into X under its new management; users began to flee the platform in the face of more toxic discourse, and active use plummeted. Facebook is slowly declining and referrals to news sites have fallen by 50% over the last year. Instagram is not in decline. Still, it\u2019s harder to post links to external sites there, which means that while newsrooms can reach users, they have more difficulty converting them to subscribers.\n\nOn top of these changes, we\u2019ve also seen the rise of Threads, Mastodon, and Bluesky, as well as a long tail of other social apps, platforms, and forums on which to reach people. Audiences on social media used to be found in a very small number of places and are now spread out across very different platforms. The fediverse and AT Protocol also yield different problems: which instance should a newsroom choose to make its home? How can it measure engagement in what it posts in a decentralized system so that it knows what\u2019s working and where it should continue to invest its meager resources?\n\nMuch has been written about newsrooms\u2019 inability to move away from X even as it has become a hotbed of white supremacy and far-right rhetoric. The honest truth is that it still drives significant traffic to their websites, and in an environment where traffic referrals are dropping overall, intentionally further deepening the traffic shortfall is understandably not a career risk newsroom leaders are willing to make.\n\nSocial media isn\u2019t the only way newsrooms are finding it harder to find an audience. Even search engines, long the stalwarts of the web, are moving away from referring traffic.\n\nAs search engines move to make AI-driven answers more prominent than links to external websites, they threaten to reduce newsroom audiences, too. More than 65% of Google searches already ended without a click to an external site. Now, it\u2019s planning to roll out AI-driven answers to over a billion people. It\u2019s not that other links are going away entirely. Still, because AI answers are the most prominent information on the page, clickthroughs to the external websites where the answers were found initially will be significantly reduced.\n\nA similar dynamic is at play with the rise of AI services like ChatGPT, emerging as stiff competition for search engines like Google. These services answer questions definitively (although not always correctly), usually with no external links on the page. ChatGPT could learn from a newsroom\u2019s articles and display information gleaned from an expensive investigative story while never revealing its source or allowing readers to support the journalism.\n\nGenerative AI models seem like magic: they answer questions succinctly, in natural language, based on prompts that look a lot like talking to a real human being. They work by training a neural network on a vast corpus of information, often obtained by crawling the web. Based on these enormous piles of data, AI engines answer questions by predicting which word should come next: a magic trick of statistics empowered by something close to the sum total of human knowledge.\n\nThat\u2019s not hyperbole. It\u2019s not a stretch to say that OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT and Google\u2019s Gemini were trained on most of the internet, including websites, published books, videos, articles, art, science, and research. They couldn\u2019t function without this data \u2014 but, ironically, they rarely credit their sources for any of it. Users see the benefit of fast answers; the sources of that information are starved of oxygen.\n\nWe\u2019re at the foothills of both changes: social media is likely to fragment further, and generative AI will become even more prevalent as it becomes more powerful. Newsrooms can no longer rely on their old tactics to reach their audiences, and they will need to build new tactics that take these trends into account if they hope to survive.Some models are more resilient than othersThe 19th\u2019s Alexandra Smith recently wrote about the state of play in Columbia Journalism Review:In our current reality, journalism exists in various formats splintered across platforms and products. People are just as likely to get their news on Instagram as from a news website. It no longer makes sense to rely primarily on measuring readership by traditional website metrics.This is a depressing fact if you rely on paywalled subscriptions or ad impressions. Nobody\u2019s looking at your ads if they\u2019re consuming your journalism off-platform, and how can you possibly get someone to subscribe if they never touch your app or website? Instagram and TikTok don\u2019t have built-in subscriptions.\n\nOver the years, many people have suggested micropayments \u2014 tiny payments you make every time you read a news article anywhere \u2014 but this depends on everyone on the web having some kind of micropayment account that is on and funded by default and the platforms all participating. It\u2019s a reasonable idea if the conditions are right, but the conditions will never be right \u2014 and, like subscription models, it shuts out people who can\u2019t pay, who are often the people most in need of public service journalism to begin with.\n\nFor newsrooms like The 19th, the picture is much rosier: like most non-profit newsrooms, it depends on donors who support it based on its journalistic impact. (The same is true of ProPublica, my employer.) That impact could occur anywhere, on any platform; the trick is to measure it so donors can be informed. Alexandra developed a new metric, Total Journalism Reach, that captures precisely this:Right now, it includes website views; views of our stories that are republished on other news sites and aggregation apps, like Apple News; views of our newsletters based on how many emails we send and their average open rates, reduced for inflation since Apple implemented a new privacy feature; event attendees; video views; podcast listens; and Instagram post views.This is clearly valuable work that will help newsrooms like The 19th prove their impact to current and potential donors. The quote above doubles as a useful example of the places The 19th is reaching its audience.\n\nIt\u2019s worth considering how these might change over time. Some of the media Alexandra describes are inside The 19th\u2019s control, and some are less so.Supplier powerIn his classic piece \u200cHow Competitive Forces Shape Strategy, Michael Porter described five forces that shape competitive strategy. One of them is supplier power: the ability of providers of essential inputs to a business to exert influence over the organization. If suppliers to the industry have too much power \u2014 because there are few alternatives, for example \u2014 they can effectively force the company\u2019s strategy by raising costs or enforcing adverse policies.\n\nNewsrooms\u2019 platforms for reaching their audiences, such as social media and Apple News, currently have outsized supplier power over the journalism industry. As a result, the industry is disproportionately vulnerable to the effects of business decisions made by the owners of those platforms.\n\nIn April, Instagram introduced a new automatic filter, switched on by default, to remove political content, which affected many newsrooms, and illustrates the kind of changes service providers can make on a whim.\n\nNewsrooms on Apple News tend to see a multiple of the number of reads they see on their websites, but Apple could pull the product tomorrow. Even today, the number of views you get highly depends on which stories the Apple News team chooses to highlight. Ads in publications on Apple News need to use Apple\u2019s ad network. It\u2019s a closed shop. Apple News is only successful because it comes installed by default on Apple devices; hundreds of similar news aggregators have all failed to survive in their own right. It\u2019s a precarious place to hang your hat.\n\nWe\u2019ve already discussed the impact of search engine design decisions like prioritizing AI over click-through rates. Only one search engine is prominent enough to have disproportionate supplier power: a position Google has bought by spending over $21 billion a year to be the default search engine in every web browser.\n\nHowever, not all conduits to readers have this outsized supplier power as a feature. Social media platforms, search engines, and news aggregators are all run by wealthy individual companies like X, Meta, Google, and Apple, who have the potential to exert their power. If you choose to leave them for any reason, you\u2019re also leaving behind the relationships you\u2019ve built up with your audience there: there\u2019s no audience portability.\n\nIn contrast, email, podcasts (real podcasts, not the single-platform kind where you ink an exclusive deal with Spotify or Audible), and the web are well-used methods to reach audiences that aren\u2019t owned by any platform. There are certainly market leaders for each communication type. Still, each is based on an open protocol that no single company controls \u2014 which means, for those methods, no supplier can exert adverse supplier power. If one service provider misbehaves, you can simply switch to another without losing functionality. You can bring your audience with you. They\u2019re safer methods, as long as enough readers want to be reached in those ways.\n\nThat\u2019s why so many publications have focused their strategies on their email newsletters. Everyone already has an email address, and (barring technical difficulties) if a publisher sends a subscriber a message, they\u2019re guaranteed to receive it. Moreover, people engaged enough to hit the \u201csubscribe\u201d button are far more likely to convert to donors or upgrade to a paid subscription.\n\nNewsletters, unfortunately, are also in decline. Open rates have fallen over the last decade; Gmail\u2019s dominant position and aggressive filtering have made it harder for newsletters to be noticed; there\u2019s more competition for attention. There aren\u2019t any great ways for new readers to discover newsletters \u2014 those subscription pages are subject to the same internet traffic dynamics as articles. It\u2019s getting harder and harder to direct new visitors to subscribe, which is why we see more overt \u201cplease subscribe\u201d popup overlays on news sites. The focus has needfully shifted to converting more existing subscribers into donors or customers rather than widening the funnel and finding more newcomers.\n\nNewsrooms need alternative media that allow them to make direct connections with their audiences. These media must be free from undue supplier power and have a large base of existing users that can be tapped into.\n\nSo what else is out there?\n\nThe answer is not much. Yet.The innovation squeezeMost non-profit newsrooms have tiny technology teams. The 19th, when I was CTO, had two engineers in addition to me; ProPublica has four. (Other interactive developers work on standalone stories but don\u2019t address platform needs.) In contrast, I led a team of twenty-two engineers at the last startup I worked at, and we had over a hundred at Medium.\n\nTo bridge that gap, there is a small community of digital agencies that make supporting newsroom platform needs a core part of their business. Probably the most famous are Alley and Upstatement, but there are around a dozen more that are actively used by newsrooms.\n\nThey do beautiful work and are an excellent way for a newsroom to start strong with a modern brand and a well-functioning web platform. I strongly recommend that a new newsroom consults with them.\n\nThere is an emerging dynamic, though, where the technology vision for a newsroom is outsourced to the agencies. As we\u2019ve discussed, a newsroom\u2019s success and impact depend highly on core internet technologies like the web and email. Newsrooms quite reasonably spec and build a platform based on what will work well today. However, because the vision and expertise for harnessing the internet lie with the agencies, they don\u2019t have any meaningful technology capability for innovating around what will work well tomorrow.\n\nNewsrooms absolutely need to focus on today. That\u2019s an obvious prerequisite: they must meet their audiences, subscribers, and donors where they\u2019re at right now. However, they also need to be aware of what is coming down the road and prepared to experiment with, engage with, and potentially help shape new technologies that could impact their businesses in the future. If the internet changes, they need to be ready for it. To reference an overused Wayne Gretzky quote: you need to skate to where the puck will be, not where it is right now.\n\nNobody knows for certain where the puck will be. That means newsrooms need to make bets about the future of technology \u2014 which, in turn, means they must have the capacity to make bets about the future of technology.\n\nMost newsrooms already have technical staff who maintain their websites, fix broken platform stacks, and build tools for the newsroom. These staff must also highlight future business risks and allow them to experiment with new platform opportunities. In a world where newsrooms rely on the internet as a publishing mechanism, technology expertise must be integral to their strategy discussions. And because technology changes so quickly and unpredictably, maintaining the time, space, and intellectual curiosity for experimentation is critical.Nothing will work, but anything might\nExperimentation doesn\u2019t need to be resource-intensive or time-consuming. Alongside in-house expertise, the most important prerequisite is the willingness of a newsroom to test: to say \u201cyes\u201d to trying something out, but being clear about the parameters for success, and always rooting success or failure in a concrete understanding of their communities.\n\nI\u2019ve written before about how, if the fediverse is successful, it will be a powerful asset to media organizations that combines the direct relationship properties of email with the conversational and viral properties of social media. At the same time, there\u2019s no doubt that the network is relatively small today, that the experience of using Mastodon falls short of corporate social networks like the Twitter everyone remembers, and that features like blocking referrer data makes life much harder for audience teams. There are lots of good reasons for a resource-strapped management team to say \u201cno\u201d to joining it.\n\nAt the same time, because it has the potential to be interesting, some newsrooms (including my employer) are experimenting with a presence. The ones who make the leap are often pleasantly surprised: engagement per capita is dramatically higher, particularly around social justice topics. Anecdotally, I discovered that posting a fundraising call to action to the network yielded more donations than from every other social network \u2014 combined.\n\nIt\u2019s worth looking at Rest of World\u2019s \u201cMore Ways to Read\u201d page \u2014 a massive spread of platforms that runs the gamut from every social network to news apps, messaging platforms, audio, newsletters, and RSS feeds. The clear intention, taken seriously, is to meet audiences where they\u2019re at, even if some of those networks have not yet emerged as a clear winner. All this from a tiny team.\n\nHowever, experimenting isn\u2019t just about social media. It\u2019s worth experimenting with anything and everything, from push notifications to website redesigns that humanize journalists to new ways for communities to support the newsroom itself.\n\nOn the last point, I\u2019m particularly enamored with how The 19th allows members to donate their time instead of money. Understanding that not everyone who cares about their mission has discretionary spending ability, they\u2019re harnessing their community to create street teams of people who can help promote, develop, and share the work in other ways. It\u2019s brilliant \u2014 and very clearly something that was arrived at through an experimental process.\n\nI learned a formal process for human-centered experimentation as a founder at Matter, the accelerator for early-stage media startups, which changed the way I think about building products forever. A similarly powerful program is now taught as Columbia Journalism School\u2019s Sulzberger Fellowship. If you can join a program like this, it\u2019s well worth it, but consultants like Tiny Collaborative\u2019s Tran Ha and Matter\u2019s Corey Ford are also available to engage in other ways. And again, the most important prerequisites are in-house expertise and the willingness to say \u201cyes\u201d.\n\nTo achieve this, they must shift their cultures. The principles of experimentation, curiosity, and empathy that are the hallmarks of great journalism must also be applied to the platforms that power their publishing and fundraising activities. They must foster great ideas, wherever they come from, and be willing to try stuff. That inherently also implies building a culture of transparency and open communication in organizations that have, on average, underinvested in these areas. As Bo Hee Kim, then a Director of Newsroom Strategy at the New York Times, wrote back in 2020:Companies will need to address broader issues with communication, access, and equity within the workplace. Leaders will need to believe that newsroom culture has a bigger impact on the journalism than they understood in previous years \u2014 that a strong team dynamic is as important as their sharp and shiny stars. Managers are key to this transition and will need to reset with a new definition of success, followed by support and training to change.Gary P. Pisano in Harvard Business Review:Too many leaders think that by breaking the organization into smaller units or creating autonomous \u201cskunk works\u201d they can emulate an innovative start-up culture. This approach rarely works. It confuses scale with culture. Simply breaking a big bureaucratic organization into smaller units does not magically endow them with entrepreneurial spirit. Without strong management efforts to shape values, norms, and behaviors, these offspring units tend to inherit the culture of the parent organization that spawned them.Creating an innovative culture is complex, intentional work. But it is work that must be done if news organizations are to innovate and, therefore, survive.ConclusionThe internet is changing more rapidly than it has in years, creating headwinds for newsrooms and jeopardizing independent journalism\u2019s viability. We need those organizations to exist: they reduce corruption, inform the voting public, and allow us to connect with and understand our communities in vital ways.\n\nThese organizations must own their digital presence outright to shield themselves from risks created by third parties that wield outsized supplier power over their business models. They must build direct relationships with their communities, prioritizing open protocols over proprietary systems. They need to invest in technology expertise that can help them weather these changes and make that expertise a first-class part of their senior leadership teams.\n\nTo get there, they must build an open culture of experimentation, where transparency and openness are core values cemented through excellent, intentional communication. They must be empathetic, un-hierarchical workplaces where a great idea can be fostered from anywhere. They must build a mutual culture of respect and collaboration between editorial and non-editorial staff and ensure that the expertise to advise on and predict technology challenges is present and well-supported in-house.\n\nExperimentation and innovation are key. Newsrooms can discover practical ways to navigate these challenges by testing new strategies, technologies and mindsets. The road ahead is challenging, but with strategic investments and a forward-looking approach, newsrooms can continue to fulfill their vital role in a well-functioning democratic society. The best time for action was ten years ago; the second best time is now.",
        "html": "<p><img src=\"https://werd.io/file/664f4ae345efd31a4a05dd22/thumb.jpg\" alt=\"A man holding a burning newspaper\" width=\"1024\" height=\"768\" /></p><p>Without serious intervention, newsrooms are going to disappear. Changes to social media and the advent of generative AI threaten their businesses and the impact of their work. They need to own their online presences outright and build direct relationships with their communities\u2014and they need to do it now.</p><p>Social media audiences are plummeting. <a href=\"https://searchengineland.com/zero-click-google-searches-rose-to-nearly-65-in-2020-347115\">Less than 35% of internet searches lead users to click on a website.</a> The views and engagement that newsrooms depend upon to survive are disappearing.</p><p>It\u2019s happening quickly. <a href=\"https://x.com/maxwelltani/status/1793291963292082564\">Semafor\u2019s Max Tani reported recently</a>:</p><blockquote><p>Washington Post CEO Will Lewis is introing the paper\u2019s new \u201cBuild It\u201d plan today. In a meeting with staff, he noted that the paper lost $77 million over the past year, and saw a 50% drop off in audience since 2020: \u201cTo be direct, we are in a hole, and we have been for some time.\"</p></blockquote><p>Addressing this challenge will require radical changes to how newsrooms invest in and build technology.</p><p>In this post, I\u2019ll attempt to describe the challenges in more detail and then discuss how they can be more adequately addressed.</p><h3>Some context: my move into news</h3><p>I\u2019ve recently gained a new perspective on these challenges. For over a decade, I\u2019ve worked adjacent to news and journalism. I\u2019ve seen the industry as an engineer, startup founder, product lead, investor, and advisor. More recently, I decided I could be more useful in directly leading technology efforts inside newsrooms. It\u2019s been eye-opening, rewarding work.</p><p>My experience <em>alongside</em> news was diverse. I built product for newsrooms, founded a startup used by public media, invested in early stage media startups, and have taught human-centered product design to teams at organizations like the New York Times and the Associated Press, as well as at institutions like <a href=\"https://werd.io/2020/designing-for-equity\">the Newmark School of Journalism</a> and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. I\u2019ve built software, founded, grown, and supported startups, and taught product design to some of the biggest names in journalism.</p><p>My immersion <em>inside</em> newsrooms has been much more recent. <a href=\"https://propublica.org\">ProPublica</a> investigates abuses of the public trust by government, businesses, and other institutions. I\u2019ve worked on technology strategy for the last year, first as a contractor, and now as its <a href=\"https://www.propublica.org/people/ben-werdmuller\">Senior Director of Technology</a>. Before that, I was <a href=\"https://19thnews.org/2022/03/19th-ben-werdmuller-chief-technology-officer/\">the first CTO</a> at <a href=\"https://19thnews.org\">The 19th</a>, which reports on the intersection of gender, politics, and power.</p><p>I made this career shift at a pivotal moment for journalism\u2014though it seems <em>every</em> moment for journalism over the last fifteen years has felt pivotal. The industry has struggled to weather the seismic shifts brought about by the internet, which have impacted its business, the state of our politics, and public discourse. It\u2019s been a struggle for decades.</p><h3>The audience threat</h3><p>It\u2019s getting harder and harder for newsrooms to reach their audiences \u2014 and for them to sustain themselves.</p><p>I\u2019ve often remarked that journalism treats the internet as something that happened to it rather than something it can actively shape and build, but it at least had some time to adjust to its new normal. The internet landscape has been largely static for well over a decade \u2014 roughly from the introduction of the iPhone 3G to Twitter\u2019s acquisition by Elon Musk. People used more or less the same services; they accessed the internet more or less the same way. Publications and online services came and went, but the laws of physics of the web were essentially constants.</p><p>Over the last year in particular, that\u2019s all changed. Shifts in the social media landscape and the growing popularity and prevalence of generative AI have meant that the rules that newsrooms began to rely on no longer hold.</p><p>At their heart, online newsrooms have a reasonably simple funnel. They publish journalism, which finds an audience, some of which either decide to pay for it or view ads that theoretically cover the cost of the work. Hopefully, they will make enough money to publish more journalism.</p><p>This description is a little reductive: there are lots of different revenue models in play, for one thing. I\u2019m particularly enamored with patronage models that allow those with the means to support open-access journalism for anyone to read freely. Still, some are entirely ad-supported, some are sponsored, and others are protected behind a paywall (or some combination of the above). For another, journalism isn\u2019t always the sole driver of subscriptions. The New York Times receives tens of millions of subscribers <a href=\"https://www.axios.com/2024/01/29/wordle-nyt-games-news-media-layoffs\">from its games</a> like Wordle and Connections, as well as <a href=\"https://digiday.com/media/the-new-york-times-cooking-is-letting-readers-taste-test-recipes-over-text-to-drive-subscriptions/\">its Cooking app</a>.</p><p>Still, there are two pivotal facts for every newsroom: their work must reach an audience, and someone must pay for it. The first is a prerequisite of the second: if nobody discovers the journalism, nobody will pay for it. So, reaching and growing an audience is crucial.</p><p>For the last decade and a half, newsrooms have used social media and search engines as the primary way to reach people. People share stories across social media\u2014particularly Facebook and Twitter\u2014and search for topics they\u2019re interested in. It\u2019s generally worked.</p><p>Over the last year, social media has radically fragmented. Twitter transformed into X under its new management; users began to flee the platform in the face of more toxic discourse, and <a href=\"https://www.axios.com/2023/10/26/x-twitter-usage-statistics-elon-musk-owner\">active use plummeted</a>. Facebook <a href=\"https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/5/9/facebook-has-3-billion-users-but-younger-users-quitting-platform\">is slowly declining</a> and <a href=\"https://pressgazette.co.uk/media-audience-and-business-data/media_metrics/facebooks-referral-traffic-for-publishers-down-50-in-12-months/\">referrals to news sites have fallen by 50% over the last year</a>. Instagram is not in decline. Still, it\u2019s harder to post links to external sites there, which means that while newsrooms can reach users, they have more difficulty converting them to subscribers.</p><p>On top of these changes, we\u2019ve also seen the rise of Threads, Mastodon, and Bluesky, as well as a long tail of other social apps, platforms, and forums on which to reach people. Audiences on social media used to be found in a very small number of places and are now spread out across very different platforms. The fediverse and AT Protocol also yield different problems: which instance should a newsroom choose to make its home? How can it measure engagement in what it posts in a decentralized system so that it knows what\u2019s working and where it should continue to invest its meager resources?</p><p>Much has been written about newsrooms\u2019 inability to move away from X even as it has become a hotbed of white supremacy and far-right rhetoric. The honest truth is that it still drives significant traffic to their websites, and in an environment where traffic referrals are dropping overall, intentionally further deepening the traffic shortfall is understandably not a career risk newsroom leaders are willing to make.</p><p>Social media isn\u2019t the only way newsrooms are finding it harder to find an audience. Even search engines, long the stalwarts of the web, are moving away from referring traffic.</p><p>As search engines move to make AI-driven answers more prominent than links to external websites, they threaten to reduce newsroom audiences, too. <a href=\"https://searchengineland.com/zero-click-google-searches-rose-to-nearly-65-in-2020-347115\">More than 65% of Google searches already ended without a click to an external site</a>. Now, it\u2019s planning to <a href=\"https://www.engadget.com/google-search-will-now-show-ai-generated-answers-to-millions-by-default-174512845.html\">roll out AI-driven answers to over a billion people</a>. It\u2019s not that other links are going away entirely. Still, because AI answers are the most prominent information on the page, clickthroughs to the external websites where the answers were found initially will be significantly reduced.</p><p>A similar dynamic is at play with the rise of AI services like ChatGPT, emerging as stiff competition for search engines like Google. These services answer questions definitively (although not always correctly), usually with no external links on the page. ChatGPT could learn from a newsroom\u2019s articles and display information gleaned from an expensive investigative story while never revealing its source or allowing readers to support the journalism.</p><p>Generative AI models seem like magic: they answer questions succinctly, in natural language, based on prompts that look a lot like talking to a real human being. They work by training a neural network on a vast corpus of information, often obtained by crawling the web. Based on these enormous piles of data, AI engines answer questions by predicting which word should come next: a magic trick of statistics empowered by something close to the sum total of human knowledge.</p><p>That\u2019s not hyperbole. It\u2019s not a stretch to say that OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT and Google\u2019s Gemini were trained on most of the internet, including websites, published books, videos, articles, art, science, and research. They couldn\u2019t function without this data \u2014 but, ironically, they rarely credit their sources for any of it. Users see the benefit of fast answers; the sources of that information are starved of oxygen.</p><p>We\u2019re at the foothills of both changes: social media is likely to fragment further, and generative AI will become even more prevalent as it becomes more powerful. Newsrooms can no longer rely on their old tactics to reach their audiences, and they will need to build new tactics that take these trends into account if they hope to survive.</p><h3>Some models are more resilient than others</h3><p><a href=\"https://www.cjr.org/analysis/alexandra-smith-metrics-readership-19th-impact.php\">The 19th\u2019s Alexandra Smith recently wrote about the state of play in Columbia Journalism Review</a>:</p><blockquote><p>In our current reality, journalism exists in various formats splintered across platforms and products. People are just as likely to get their news on Instagram as from a news website. It no longer makes sense to rely primarily on measuring readership by traditional website metrics.</p></blockquote><p>This is a depressing fact if you rely on paywalled subscriptions or ad impressions. Nobody\u2019s looking at your ads if they\u2019re consuming your journalism off-platform, and how can you possibly get someone to subscribe if they never touch your app or website? Instagram and TikTok don\u2019t have built-in subscriptions.</p><p>Over the years, many people have suggested micropayments \u2014 tiny payments you make every time you read a news article anywhere \u2014 but this depends on everyone on the web having some kind of micropayment account that is on and funded by default and the platforms all participating. It\u2019s a reasonable idea if the conditions are right, <a href=\"https://molodtsov.me/2023/05/why-micropayments-dont-work/\">but the conditions will never be right</a> \u2014 and, like subscription models, it shuts out people who can\u2019t pay, who are often the people most in need of public service journalism to begin with.</p><p>For newsrooms like The 19th, the picture is much rosier: like most non-profit newsrooms, it depends on donors who support it based on its journalistic <em>impact</em>. (The same is true of ProPublica, my employer.) That impact could occur anywhere, on any platform; the trick is to measure it so donors can be informed. <a href=\"https://www.cjr.org/analysis/alexandra-smith-metrics-readership-19th-impact.php\">Alexandra developed a new metric, Total Journalism Reach, that captures precisely this</a>:</p><blockquote><p>Right now, it includes website views; views of our stories that are republished on other news sites and aggregation apps, like Apple News; views of our newsletters based on how many emails we send and their average open rates, reduced for inflation since Apple implemented a new privacy feature; event attendees; video views; podcast listens; and Instagram post views.</p></blockquote><p>This is clearly valuable work that will help newsrooms like The 19th prove their impact to current and potential donors. The quote above doubles as a useful example of the places The 19th is reaching its audience.</p><p>It\u2019s worth considering how these might change over time. Some of the media Alexandra describes are inside The 19th\u2019s control, and some are less so.</p><h3>Supplier power</h3><p>In his classic piece <em>\u200c<a href=\"https://hbr.org/1979/03/how-competitive-forces-shape-strategy\">How Competitive Forces Shape Strategy</a></em>, Michael Porter described <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porter%27s_five_forces_analysis\">five forces that shape competitive strategy</a>. One of them is supplier power: the ability of providers of essential inputs to a business to exert influence over the organization. If suppliers to the industry have too much power \u2014 because there are few alternatives, for example \u2014 they can effectively force the company\u2019s strategy by raising costs or enforcing adverse policies.</p><p>Newsrooms\u2019 platforms for reaching their audiences, such as social media and Apple News, currently have outsized supplier power over the journalism industry. As a result, the industry is disproportionately vulnerable to the effects of business decisions made by the owners of those platforms.</p><p>In April, Instagram <a href=\"https://www.yahoo.com/news/instagrams-new-automatic-filter-for-political-content-prompts-pushback-from-some-users-172033054.html?guccounter=1\">introduced a new automatic filter, switched on by default, to remove political content</a>, which affected many newsrooms, and illustrates the kind of changes service providers can make on a whim.</p><p>Newsrooms on Apple News tend to see a multiple of the number of reads they see on their websites, but Apple could pull the product tomorrow. Even today, the number of views you get highly depends on which stories the Apple News team chooses to highlight. Ads in publications on Apple News need to use Apple\u2019s ad network. It\u2019s a closed shop. Apple News is only successful because it comes installed by default on Apple devices; hundreds of similar news aggregators have all failed to survive in their own right. It\u2019s a precarious place to hang your hat.</p><p>We\u2019ve already discussed the impact of search engine design decisions like prioritizing AI over click-through rates. Only one search engine is prominent enough to have disproportionate supplier power: a position Google has bought <a href=\"https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/27/23934961/google-antitrust-trial-defaults-search-deal-26-3-billion\">by spending over $21 billion a year to be the default search engine in every web browser</a>.</p><p>However, not all conduits to readers have this outsized supplier power as a feature. Social media platforms, search engines, and news aggregators are all run by wealthy individual companies like X, Meta, Google, and Apple, who have the potential to exert their power. If you choose to leave them for any reason, you\u2019re also leaving behind the relationships you\u2019ve built up with your audience there: there\u2019s no audience portability.</p><p>In contrast, email, podcasts (<em>real</em> podcasts, not the single-platform kind where you ink an exclusive deal with Spotify or Audible), and the web are well-used methods to reach audiences that <em>aren\u2019t</em> owned by any platform. There are certainly market leaders for each communication type. Still, each is based on an open protocol that no single company controls \u2014 which means, for those methods, no supplier can exert adverse supplier power. If one service provider misbehaves, you can simply switch to another without losing functionality. You can bring your audience with you. They\u2019re safer methods, as long as enough readers want to be reached in those ways.</p><p>That\u2019s why so many publications have focused their strategies on their email newsletters. Everyone already has an email address, and (barring technical difficulties) if a publisher sends a subscriber a message, they\u2019re guaranteed to receive it. Moreover, people engaged enough to hit the \u201csubscribe\u201d button are far more likely to convert to donors or upgrade to a paid subscription.</p><p>Newsletters, unfortunately, <a href=\"https://mkarolian.substack.com/p/newsletter-winter-is-coming\">are also in decline</a>. Open rates have fallen over the last decade; Gmail\u2019s dominant position and aggressive filtering have made it harder for newsletters to be noticed; there\u2019s more competition for attention. There aren\u2019t any great ways for new readers to discover newsletters \u2014 those subscription pages are subject to the same internet traffic dynamics as articles. It\u2019s getting harder and harder to direct new visitors to subscribe, which is why we see more overt \u201cplease subscribe\u201d popup overlays on news sites. The focus has needfully shifted to converting more <em>existing</em> subscribers into donors or customers rather than widening the funnel and finding more newcomers.</p><p>Newsrooms need alternative media that allow them to make direct connections with their audiences. These media must be free from undue supplier power and have a large base of existing users that can be tapped into.</p><p>So what else is out there?</p><p>The answer is not much. Yet.</p><h3>The innovation squeeze</h3><p>Most non-profit newsrooms have tiny technology teams. The 19th, when I was CTO, had two engineers in addition to me; ProPublica has four. (Other interactive developers work on standalone stories but don\u2019t address platform needs.) In contrast, I led a team of twenty-two engineers at the last startup I worked at, and we had over a hundred at Medium.</p><p>To bridge that gap, there is a small community of digital agencies that make supporting newsroom platform needs a core part of their business. Probably the most famous are <a href=\"https://alley.com/\">Alley</a> and <a href=\"https://upstatement.com/\">Upstatement</a>, but there are around a dozen more that are actively used by newsrooms.</p><p>They do beautiful work and are an excellent way for a newsroom to start strong with a modern brand and a well-functioning web platform. I strongly recommend that a new newsroom consults with them.</p><p>There is an emerging dynamic, though, where the technology vision for a newsroom is outsourced to the agencies. As we\u2019ve discussed, a newsroom\u2019s success and impact depend highly on core internet technologies like the web and email. Newsrooms quite reasonably spec and build a platform based on what will work well <em>today</em>. However, because the vision and expertise for harnessing the internet lie with the agencies, they don\u2019t have any meaningful technology capability for innovating around what will work well <em>tomorrow</em>.</p><p>Newsrooms absolutely need to focus on today. That\u2019s an obvious prerequisite: they must meet their audiences, subscribers, and donors where they\u2019re at right now. However, they also need to be aware of what is coming down the road and prepared to experiment with, engage with, and potentially help shape new technologies that could impact their businesses in the future. If the internet changes, they need to be ready for it. To reference an overused Wayne Gretzky quote: you need to skate to where the puck <em>will</em> be, not where it is right now.</p><p>Nobody knows for certain where the puck will be. That means newsrooms need to make bets about the future of technology \u2014 which, in turn, means they must have the <em>capacity</em> to make bets about the future of technology.</p><p>Most newsrooms already have technical staff who maintain their websites, fix broken platform stacks, and build tools for the newsroom. These staff must also highlight future business risks and allow them to experiment with new platform opportunities. In a world where newsrooms rely on the internet as a publishing mechanism, technology expertise must be integral to their strategy discussions. And because technology changes so quickly and unpredictably, maintaining the time, space, and intellectual curiosity for experimentation is critical.</p><h3>Nothing <em>will</em> work, but anything <em>might</em>\n</h3><p>Experimentation doesn\u2019t need to be resource-intensive or time-consuming. Alongside in-house expertise, the most important prerequisite is the willingness of a newsroom to test: to say \u201cyes\u201d to trying something out, but being clear about the parameters for success, and always rooting success or failure in a concrete understanding of their communities.</p><p>I\u2019ve written before about how, if the fediverse is successful, <a href=\"https://werd.io/2024/the-fediverse-for-media-organizations\">it will be a powerful asset to media organizations</a> that combines the direct relationship properties of email with the conversational and viral properties of social media. At the same time, there\u2019s no doubt that the network is relatively small today, that the experience of using Mastodon falls short of corporate social networks like the Twitter everyone remembers, and that <a href=\"https://anderegg.ca/2024/05/19/whats-up-with-mastodon-and-referer-headers\">features like blocking referrer data</a> makes life much harder for audience teams. There are lots of good reasons for a resource-strapped management team to say \u201cno\u201d to joining it.</p><p>At the same time, because it has the <em>potential</em> to be interesting, some newsrooms (<a href=\"https://newsie.social/@ProPublica\">including my employer</a>) are experimenting with a presence. The ones who make the leap are often pleasantly surprised: engagement per capita is dramatically higher, particularly around social justice topics. Anecdotally, I discovered that posting a fundraising call to action to the network yielded more donations than from every other social network \u2014 <em>combined</em>.</p><p>It\u2019s worth looking at <a href=\"https://restofworld.org/platforms/\">Rest of World\u2019s \u201cMore Ways to Read\u201d page</a> \u2014 a massive spread of platforms that runs the gamut from <em>every social network</em> to news apps, messaging platforms, audio, newsletters, and RSS feeds. The clear intention, taken seriously, is to meet audiences where they\u2019re at, even if some of those networks have not yet emerged as a clear winner. All this from <a href=\"https://restofworld.org/about/team/\">a tiny team</a>.</p><p>However, experimenting isn\u2019t just about social media. It\u2019s worth experimenting with anything and everything, from push notifications to website redesigns that humanize journalists to new ways for communities to support the newsroom itself.</p><p>On the last point, I\u2019m particularly enamored with how The 19th allows members <a href=\"https://19thnews.org/membership/\">to donate their time instead of money</a>. Understanding that not everyone who cares about their mission has discretionary spending ability, they\u2019re harnessing their community to create street teams of people who can help promote, develop, and share the work in other ways. It\u2019s brilliant \u2014 and very clearly something that was arrived at through an experimental process.</p><p>I learned a formal process for human-centered experimentation as a founder at <a href=\"https://open.nytimes.com/thinking-like-entrepreneurs-our-experience-with-matter-a-design-thinking-vc-program-b836f4271c6a?gi=697a6a08d381\">Matter</a>, the accelerator for early-stage media startups, which changed the way I think about building products forever. A similarly powerful program is now taught <a href=\"https://journalism.columbia.edu/news/matter-ventures-co-founder-corey-ford-lead-columbias-sulzberger-leadership-program\">as Columbia Journalism School\u2019s Sulzberger Fellowship</a>. If you can join a program like this, it\u2019s well worth it, but consultants like <a href=\"https://www.linkedin.com/in/trannha/\">Tiny Collaborative\u2019s Tran Ha</a> and <a href=\"https://www.linkedin.com/in/coreyjford/\">Matter\u2019s Corey Ford</a> are also available to engage in other ways. And again, the most important prerequisites are in-house expertise and the willingness to say \u201cyes\u201d.</p><p>To achieve this, they must shift their cultures. The principles of experimentation, curiosity, and empathy that are the hallmarks of great journalism must also be applied to the platforms that power their publishing and fundraising activities. They must foster great ideas, wherever they come from, and <em>be willing to try stuff</em>. That inherently also implies building a culture of transparency and open communication in organizations that have, on average, underinvested in these areas. As Bo Hee Kim, then a Director of Newsroom Strategy at the New York Times, <a href=\"https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/12/newsrooms-create-an-intentional-and-collaborative-culture/\">wrote back in 2020</a>:</p><blockquote><p>Companies will need to address broader issues with communication, access, and equity within the workplace. Leaders will need to believe that newsroom culture has a bigger impact on the journalism than they understood in previous years \u2014 that a strong team dynamic is as important as their sharp and shiny stars. Managers are key to this transition and will need to reset with a new definition of success, followed by support and training to change.</p></blockquote><p><a href=\"https://hbr.org/2019/01/the-hard-truth-about-innovative-cultures\">Gary P. Pisano in Harvard Business Review</a>:</p><blockquote><p>Too many leaders think that by breaking the organization into smaller units or creating autonomous \u201cskunk works\u201d they can emulate an innovative start-up culture. This approach rarely works. It confuses scale with culture. Simply breaking a big bureaucratic organization into smaller units does not magically endow them with entrepreneurial spirit. Without strong management efforts to shape values, norms, and behaviors, these offspring units tend to inherit the culture of the parent organization that spawned them.</p></blockquote><p>Creating an innovative culture is complex, intentional work. But it is work that must be done if news organizations are to innovate and, therefore, survive.</p><h3>Conclusion</h3><p>The internet is changing more rapidly than it has in years, creating headwinds for newsrooms and jeopardizing independent journalism\u2019s viability. We <em>need</em> those organizations to exist: they <a href=\"https://drnews.substack.com/p/how-loud-does-the-watchdog-bark\">reduce corruption</a>, <a href=\"https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/07395329211014968\">inform the voting public</a>, and <a href=\"https://www.theajp.org/news-insights/the-state-of-local-news-and-why-it-matters/#sectionfour\">allow us to connect with and understand our communities</a> in vital ways.</p><p>These organizations must own their digital presence outright to shield themselves from risks created by third parties that wield outsized supplier power over their business models. They must build direct relationships with their communities, prioritizing open protocols over proprietary systems. They need to invest in technology expertise that can help them weather these changes and make that expertise a first-class part of their senior leadership teams.</p><p>To get there, they must build an open culture of experimentation, where transparency and openness are core values cemented through excellent, intentional communication. They must be empathetic, un-hierarchical workplaces where a great idea can be fostered from anywhere. They must build a mutual culture of respect and collaboration between editorial and non-editorial staff and ensure that the expertise to advise on and predict technology challenges is present and well-supported in-house.</p><p>Experimentation and innovation are key. Newsrooms can discover practical ways to navigate these challenges by testing new strategies, technologies and mindsets. The road ahead is challenging, but with strategic investments and a forward-looking approach, newsrooms can continue to fulfill their vital role in a well-functioning democratic society. The best time for action was ten years ago; the second best time is now.</p>"
    },
    "author": {
        "type": "card",
        "name": "Ben Werdmuller",
        "url": "https://werd.io/profile/benwerd",
        "photo": "https://werd.io/file/5d388c5fb16ea14aac640912/thumb.jpg"
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        "url": "https://mastodon.social/tags/indieweb",
        "photo": null
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    "url": "https://mastodon.social/@indieaisle/112490416652618725",
    "content": {
        "html": "<p>A simple service to get form submissions sent directly to your email. With spam bot blocking included.</p><p><a href=\"https://mastodon.social/tags/SmallWeb\">#<span>SmallWeb</span></a> <a href=\"https://mastodon.social/tags/indieweb\">#<span>indieweb</span></a> <a href=\"https://mastodon.social/tags/webdev\">#<span>webdev</span></a> <a href=\"https://mastodon.social/tags/website\">#<span>website</span></a> <a href=\"https://mastodon.social/tags/webdesign\">#<span>webdesign</span></a></p><p><a href=\"https://indieaisle.com/form-to-email/\"><span>https://</span><span>indieaisle.com/form-to-email/</span><span></span></a></p>",
        "text": "A simple service to get form submissions sent directly to your email. With spam bot blocking included.\n\n#SmallWeb #indieweb #webdev #website #webdesign\n\nhttps://indieaisle.com/form-to-email/"
    },
    "published": "2024-05-23T12:32:19+00:00",
    "post-type": "note",
    "_id": "41187715",
    "_source": "8007",
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{
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        "url": "https://mastodon.social/tags/indieweb",
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    "url": "https://mastodon.social/@benjaminparry/112490292941357732",
    "content": {
        "html": "<p>**Building on the idea of an IndieWeb zine** \u2013 Riffing on <span class=\"h-card\"><a class=\"u-url\" href=\"https://indieweb.social/@capjamesg\">@<span>capjamesg</span></a></span> \u2019s idea of a printed <a href=\"https://mastodon.social/tags/IndieWeb\">#<span>IndieWeb</span></a> zine.</p><p><a href=\"https://benjamin.parry.is/writing/2024/05/building-on-the-idea-of-an-indieweb-zine/\"><span>https://</span><span>benjamin.parry.is/writing/2024</span><span>/05/building-on-the-idea-of-an-indieweb-zine/</span></a></p>\n<a class=\"u-mention\" href=\"https://indieweb.social/@capjamesg\"></a>",
        "text": "**Building on the idea of an IndieWeb zine** \u2013 Riffing on @capjamesg \u2019s idea of a printed #IndieWeb zine.\n\nhttps://benjamin.parry.is/writing/2024/05/building-on-the-idea-of-an-indieweb-zine/"
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    "published": "2024-05-23T12:00:51+00:00",
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{
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        "photo": null
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    "url": "https://gnu.gl/@godteeth/112490191789994536",
    "content": {
        "html": "<p>seeing a lot of anti-google discourse lately</p><p>reminder that searx/searxng exists and searches many engines at once while displaying the results in a sensible algorithm</p><p><a href=\"https://gnu.gl/tags/defederation\">#<span>defederation</span></a> <a href=\"https://gnu.gl/tags/smallweb\">#<span>smallweb</span></a> <a href=\"https://gnu.gl/tags/selfhosting\">#<span>selfhosting</span></a> <a href=\"https://gnu.gl/tags/indieweb\">#<span>indieweb</span></a> <a href=\"https://gnu.gl/tags/degoogle\">#<span>degoogle</span></a> <a href=\"https://gnu.gl/tags/google\">#<span>google</span></a> <a href=\"https://gnu.gl/tags/search\">#<span>search</span></a> <a href=\"https://gnu.gl/tags/searx\">#<span>searx</span></a> <a href=\"https://gnu.gl/tags/searxng\">#<span>searxng</span></a></p>",
        "text": "seeing a lot of anti-google discourse lately\n\nreminder that searx/searxng exists and searches many engines at once while displaying the results in a sensible algorithm\n\n#defederation #smallweb #selfhosting #indieweb #degoogle #google #search #searx #searxng"
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    "published": "2024-05-23T11:35:08+00:00",
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Feditesting!

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    "url": "https://herestomwiththeweather.com/2024/05/22/feditesting/",
    "published": "2024-05-22T17:29:29+00:00",
    "content": {
        "html": "<p>It\u2019s cool to see the progress of the <a href=\"https://feditest.org/\">FediTest</a> project.  On March 7, there was a <a href=\"https://fedidevs.org/notes/2024-03-07/\">show-and-tell online meeting</a> and at the end of April, a <a href=\"https://feditest.org/blog/2024-04-30-update/\">FediTest implementation update</a> included a <a href=\"https://feditest.org/docs/quickstart/\">Quickstart</a> to try out some examples.</p>\n\n<p>I was pleasantly surprised by the experience (including the specification annotations referencing each test) and the organization of the testing framework even at an early stage.  I was able to get all the tests for the <a href=\"https://github.com/fediverse-devnet/feditest-tests-fediverse/blob/develop/example-testplans/saas-imp-webfinger-server.json\">sass-imp-webfinger-server testplan</a> passing last night for <a href=\"https://github.com/herestomwiththeweather/irwin\">Irwin</a>.  For each failing test, I created an issue and referenced the test (e.g. <a href=\"https://github.com/herestomwiththeweather/irwin/issues/15\"> Well-known webfinger should respond with access-control-allow-origin header #15 </a> ).</p>\n\n<p>Here\u2019s the output of this example testplan:</p>\n\n<pre><code>TAP version 14\n# test plan: Unnamed\n# started: 2024-05-22 06:33:53.423983+00:00\n# ended: 2024-05-22 06:34:42.924770+00:00\n# platform: Linux-6.5.0-28-generic-x86_64-with-glibc2.35\n# username: tbbrown\n# hostname: agency\n# session: Unnamed\n# constellation: Unnamed\n#   roles:\n#     - name: client\n#       driver: imp.ImpInProcessNodeDriver\n#     - name: server\n#       driver: saas.SaasFediverseNodeDriver\nok 1 - webfinger.server.4_1__2_parameter_ordering_not_significant::parameter_ordering\nok 2 - webfinger.server.4_2__14_must_only_redirect_to_https::must_only_redirect_to_https\nok 3 - webfinger.server.4_2__3_requires_resource_uri::requires_resource_uri\nok 4 - webfinger.server.4_2__4_do_not_accept_malformed_resource_parameters::double_equals\nok 5 - webfinger.server.4_2__4_do_not_accept_malformed_resource_parameters::not_percent_encoded\nok 6 - webfinger.server.4_2__5_status_404_for_nonexisting_resources::status_404_for_nonexisting_resources\nok 7 - webfinger.server.4_5__1_any_uri_scheme_for_resource_identifiers::any_uri_scheme_for_resource_identifiers\nok 8 - webfinger.server.4__1_accepts_all_link_rels_in_query::accepts_combined_link_rels_in_query\nok 9 - webfinger.server.4__1_accepts_all_link_rels_in_query::accepts_known_link_rels_in_query\nok 10 - webfinger.server.4__1_accepts_all_link_rels_in_query::accepts_unknown_link_rels_in_query\nok 11 - webfinger.server.4__3_only_returns_jrd_in_response_to_https_requests::only_returns_jrd_in_response_to_https\nok 12 - webfinger.server.5_1_cors_header_required::cors_header_required\n1..12\n# test run summary:\n#   total: 12\n#   passed: 12\n#   failed: 0\n#   skipped: 0\n#   errors: 0\n</code></pre>\n\n\n<p>Getting these tests passing certainly improved the code and my understanding of the webfinger spec. Thanks to Johannes Ernst and the <a href=\"https://fedidevs.org/\">Fediverse Developer Network</a> community for this.</p>",
        "text": "It\u2019s cool to see the progress of the FediTest project.  On March 7, there was a show-and-tell online meeting and at the end of April, a FediTest implementation update included a Quickstart to try out some examples.\n\nI was pleasantly surprised by the experience (including the specification annotations referencing each test) and the organization of the testing framework even at an early stage.  I was able to get all the tests for the sass-imp-webfinger-server testplan passing last night for Irwin.  For each failing test, I created an issue and referenced the test (e.g.  Well-known webfinger should respond with access-control-allow-origin header #15  ).\n\nHere\u2019s the output of this example testplan:\n\nTAP version 14\n# test plan: Unnamed\n# started: 2024-05-22 06:33:53.423983+00:00\n# ended: 2024-05-22 06:34:42.924770+00:00\n# platform: Linux-6.5.0-28-generic-x86_64-with-glibc2.35\n# username: tbbrown\n# hostname: agency\n# session: Unnamed\n# constellation: Unnamed\n#   roles:\n#     - name: client\n#       driver: imp.ImpInProcessNodeDriver\n#     - name: server\n#       driver: saas.SaasFediverseNodeDriver\nok 1 - webfinger.server.4_1__2_parameter_ordering_not_significant::parameter_ordering\nok 2 - webfinger.server.4_2__14_must_only_redirect_to_https::must_only_redirect_to_https\nok 3 - webfinger.server.4_2__3_requires_resource_uri::requires_resource_uri\nok 4 - webfinger.server.4_2__4_do_not_accept_malformed_resource_parameters::double_equals\nok 5 - webfinger.server.4_2__4_do_not_accept_malformed_resource_parameters::not_percent_encoded\nok 6 - webfinger.server.4_2__5_status_404_for_nonexisting_resources::status_404_for_nonexisting_resources\nok 7 - webfinger.server.4_5__1_any_uri_scheme_for_resource_identifiers::any_uri_scheme_for_resource_identifiers\nok 8 - webfinger.server.4__1_accepts_all_link_rels_in_query::accepts_combined_link_rels_in_query\nok 9 - webfinger.server.4__1_accepts_all_link_rels_in_query::accepts_known_link_rels_in_query\nok 10 - webfinger.server.4__1_accepts_all_link_rels_in_query::accepts_unknown_link_rels_in_query\nok 11 - webfinger.server.4__3_only_returns_jrd_in_response_to_https_requests::only_returns_jrd_in_response_to_https\nok 12 - webfinger.server.5_1_cors_header_required::cors_header_required\n1..12\n# test run summary:\n#   total: 12\n#   passed: 12\n#   failed: 0\n#   skipped: 0\n#   errors: 0\n\n\n\nGetting these tests passing certainly improved the code and my understanding of the webfinger spec. Thanks to Johannes Ernst and the Fediverse Developer Network community for this."
    },
    "name": "Feditesting!",
    "post-type": "article",
    "_id": "41184244",
    "_source": "246",
    "_is_read": true
}

{
    "type": "entry",
    "author": {
        "name": "#indieweb",
        "url": "https://mastodon.social/tags/indieweb",
        "photo": null
    },
    "url": "https://scicomm.xyz/@ratika/112487949721495238",
    "content": {
        "html": "<p><a href=\"https://scicomm.xyz/tags/Blogging\">#<span>Blogging</span></a> is on my mind a lot lately; I keep returning to the topic in my <a href=\"https://scicomm.xyz/tags/writing\">#<span>writing</span></a></p><p><a href=\"https://chavanniclass.wordpress.com/2024/05/23/bends-in-the-universe/\"><span>https://</span><span>chavanniclass.wordpress.com/20</span><span>24/05/23/bends-in-the-universe/</span></a></p><p><a href=\"https://scicomm.xyz/tags/blog\">#<span>blog</span></a> <a href=\"https://scicomm.xyz/tags/IndieWeb\">#<span>IndieWeb</span></a> <a href=\"https://scicomm.xyz/tags/books\">#<span>books</span></a> <a href=\"https://scicomm.xyz/tags/reading\">#<span>reading</span></a> <a href=\"https://scicomm.xyz/tags/AmWriting\">#<span>AmWriting</span></a> <a href=\"https://scicomm.xyz/tags/WritingCommunity\">#<span>WritingCommunity</span></a></p>",
        "text": "#Blogging is on my mind a lot lately; I keep returning to the topic in my #writing\n\nhttps://chavanniclass.wordpress.com/2024/05/23/bends-in-the-universe/\n\n#blog #IndieWeb #books #reading #AmWriting #WritingCommunity"
    },
    "published": "2024-05-23T02:04:56+00:00",
    "post-type": "note",
    "_id": "41184146",
    "_source": "8007",
    "_is_read": true
}

Protocols, platforms and priorities

{
    "type": "entry",
    "author": {
        "name": "Paul Robert Lloyd",
        "url": "https://paulrobertlloyd.com",
        "photo": null
    },
    "url": "https://paulrobertlloyd.com/2024/143/a1/protocols/",
    "published": "2024-05-22T23:40:00+00:00",
    "content": {
        "html": "<p>Over the last few days, <a href=\"https://www.manton.org/2024/05/22/yesterdays-ai-thoughts.html\">Manton Reece shared some thoughts on OpenAI</a> and the fall out after <a href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/may/20/chatgpt-scarlett-johansson-voice\">Scarlett Johansson revealed the company wanted to use her voice</a>.</p><p>Manton runs <a href=\"https://micro.blog/\">Micro.blog</a>. Over the last year or so, he\u2019s been introducing features that use <abbr title=\"artificial intelligence\">AI</abbr> and features that take advantage of what large language models do best; summarising information. You can now easily add <a href=\"https://www.manton.org/2023/03/30/introducing-microblog-podcast.html\">transcripts to your podcasts</a>, generate <a href=\"https://www.manton.org/2024/02/05/bookmark-improvements-for.html\">summaries for bookmarked websites</a> and prepare <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xapxxwuEjno\">text descriptions for photos</a>.</p><p>For all the companies hitching their wares to the <abbr title=\"artificial intelligence\">AI</abbr>-bandwagon (typically motivated by a need to keep investors happy rather than any user needs) these modest <abbr title=\"artificial intelligence\">AI</abbr> additions appear to be useful and not in conflict with the platform\u2019s core offering.</p><p>Recognising that <abbr title=\"artificial intelligence\">AI</abbr> is controversial \u2013 rightly so given the unethical means its models have been developed and the untold amounts of energy required to run them \u2013 Manton added <a href=\"https://www.manton.org/2024/04/16/new-ai-global.html\">an option for users to disable all <abbr title=\"artificial intelligence\">AI</abbr> features across the platform</a>. Given these concerns and more, I\u2019m keeping this option firmly turned off.</p><p>It\u2019s these sort of thoughtful product decisions that I really admire, not least because they often go against the grain. Micro.blog doesn\u2019t show any follower counts but instead shows the users a person is following that you\u2019re not. It doesn\u2019t have hashtags, instead relying on emoji and a human-curated discover feed. There are no reply counts, or public likes. Micro.blog\u2019s first employee was not a designer or developer, but a community manager, Jean (<a href=\"https://micro.welltempered.net/2024/05/08/changes.html\">hanging up her boots after 7 years</a> growing and supporting the community).</p><p>Yet, off the back of Manton\u2019s recent posts, I read a number of responses from people on Mastodon that were needlessly antagonistic and emotionally detached, with some cancelling their subscriptions. Pile on! These were posted to Mastodon but could be seen in an otherwise tranquil Micro.blog app thanks to the platform\u2019s support for ActivityPub.</p><p>This tonal shift highlights what remains an issue with Mastodon. Unlike Micro.blog, it largely replicates the interface paradigms of Twitter, software fine-tuned for polarisation and outrage. This example of federated outrage is the latest in an increasing number I\u2019ve seen this year. Regardless of Mastodon\u2019s technical underpinnings, while it incentivises the same interactions, familiar social dynamics will play out.</p><p>When seen like that, I\u2019m left wondering if the one product decision Manton might regret is integrating Micro.blog with platforms that don\u2019t share his same level of thoughtfulness.</p><p>Apologies if this comes across a bit \u2018leave Britney alone\u2019. I\u2019ve got plenty of complaints about Micro.blog, and I\u2019m just as surprised as you that it\u2019s this post I\u2019ve written instead of one covering those!</p><p>Reply via email</p>",
        "text": "Over the last few days, Manton Reece shared some thoughts on OpenAI and the fall out after Scarlett Johansson revealed the company wanted to use her voice.\n\nManton runs Micro.blog. Over the last year or so, he\u2019s been introducing features that use AI and features that take advantage of what large language models do best; summarising information. You can now easily add transcripts to your podcasts, generate summaries for bookmarked websites and prepare text descriptions for photos.\n\nFor all the companies hitching their wares to the AI-bandwagon (typically motivated by a need to keep investors happy rather than any user needs) these modest AI additions appear to be useful and not in conflict with the platform\u2019s core offering.\n\nRecognising that AI is controversial \u2013 rightly so given the unethical means its models have been developed and the untold amounts of energy required to run them \u2013 Manton added an option for users to disable all AI features across the platform. Given these concerns and more, I\u2019m keeping this option firmly turned off.\n\nIt\u2019s these sort of thoughtful product decisions that I really admire, not least because they often go against the grain. Micro.blog doesn\u2019t show any follower counts but instead shows the users a person is following that you\u2019re not. It doesn\u2019t have hashtags, instead relying on emoji and a human-curated discover feed. There are no reply counts, or public likes. Micro.blog\u2019s first employee was not a designer or developer, but a community manager, Jean (hanging up her boots after 7 years growing and supporting the community).\n\nYet, off the back of Manton\u2019s recent posts, I read a number of responses from people on Mastodon that were needlessly antagonistic and emotionally detached, with some cancelling their subscriptions. Pile on! These were posted to Mastodon but could be seen in an otherwise tranquil Micro.blog app thanks to the platform\u2019s support for ActivityPub.\n\nThis tonal shift highlights what remains an issue with Mastodon. Unlike Micro.blog, it largely replicates the interface paradigms of Twitter, software fine-tuned for polarisation and outrage. This example of federated outrage is the latest in an increasing number I\u2019ve seen this year. Regardless of Mastodon\u2019s technical underpinnings, while it incentivises the same interactions, familiar social dynamics will play out.\n\nWhen seen like that, I\u2019m left wondering if the one product decision Manton might regret is integrating Micro.blog with platforms that don\u2019t share his same level of thoughtfulness.\n\nApologies if this comes across a bit \u2018leave Britney alone\u2019. I\u2019ve got plenty of complaints about Micro.blog, and I\u2019m just as surprised as you that it\u2019s this post I\u2019ve written instead of one covering those!\n\nReply via email"
    },
    "name": "Protocols, platforms and priorities",
    "post-type": "article",
    "_id": "41183216",
    "_source": "3686",
    "_is_read": true
}

{
    "type": "entry",
    "author": {
        "name": "#indieweb",
        "url": "https://mastodon.social/tags/indieweb",
        "photo": null
    },
    "url": "https://d20.social/@shane/112486978812629323",
    "content": {
        "html": "<p>Really accessible tutorial to getting your own website set up, outside the social media walled gardens, from <span class=\"h-card\"><a class=\"u-url\" href=\"https://front-end.social/@chriscoyier\">@<span>chriscoyier</span></a></span>.</p><p>More static, quirky, non-uniform websites please!</p><p><a href=\"https://frontendmasters.com/blog/exactly-how-to-deploy-local-files-to-make-a-live-website/\"><span>https://</span><span>frontendmasters.com/blog/exact</span><span>ly-how-to-deploy-local-files-to-make-a-live-website/</span></a></p><p><a href=\"https://d20.social/tags/indieweb\">#<span>indieweb</span></a></p>\n<a class=\"u-mention\" href=\"https://front-end.social/@chriscoyier\"></a>",
        "text": "Really accessible tutorial to getting your own website set up, outside the social media walled gardens, from @chriscoyier.\n\nMore static, quirky, non-uniform websites please!\n\nhttps://frontendmasters.com/blog/exactly-how-to-deploy-local-files-to-make-a-live-website/\n\n#indieweb"
    },
    "published": "2024-05-22T21:58:01+00:00",
    "post-type": "note",
    "_id": "41182789",
    "_source": "8007",
    "_is_read": true
}

{
    "type": "entry",
    "author": {
        "name": "#indieweb",
        "url": "https://mastodon.social/tags/indieweb",
        "photo": null
    },
    "url": "https://dewp.space/@carstingaxion/112486745873097018",
    "content": {
        "html": "<p><span class=\"h-card\"><a class=\"u-url\" href=\"https://social.lol/@robb\">@<span>robb</span></a></span> <span class=\"h-card\"><a class=\"u-url\" href=\"https://shellsharks.social/@shellsharks\">@<span>shellsharks</span></a></span> Way more appealing than going through the <a href=\"https://dewp.space/tags/indieweb\">#<span>indieweb</span></a> wiki. Really like it!</p>\n<a class=\"u-mention\" href=\"https://shellsharks.social/@shellsharks\"></a>\n<a class=\"u-mention\" href=\"https://social.lol/@robb\"></a>",
        "text": "@robb @shellsharks Way more appealing than going through the #indieweb wiki. Really like it!"
    },
    "published": "2024-05-22T20:58:47+00:00",
    "post-type": "note",
    "_id": "41182270",
    "_source": "8007",
    "_is_read": true
}

{
    "type": "entry",
    "author": {
        "name": "@reillypascal",
        "url": "https://hachyderm.io/@reillypascal",
        "photo": null
    },
    "url": "https://hachyderm.io/@reillypascal/112486645715143295",
    "content": {
        "html": "<p>I added a /now page to my website! My plan for now is to update it fairly regularly \u2014 my site deploys from GitHub, and I've found it's pretty easy to add new content in the GitHub app on my phone, so hopefully that ease smooths the path to keep it updated.</p><p><a href=\"https://reillyspitzfaden.com/now\"><span>https://</span><span>reillyspitzfaden.com/now</span><span></span></a></p><p><a href=\"https://hachyderm.io/tags/IndieWeb\">#<span>IndieWeb</span></a> <a href=\"https://hachyderm.io/tags/PersonalSites\">#<span>PersonalSites</span></a> <a href=\"https://hachyderm.io/tags/PersonalWebsite\">#<span>PersonalWebsite</span></a> <a href=\"https://hachyderm.io/tags/NowNowNow\">#<span>NowNowNow</span></a></p>",
        "text": "I added a /now page to my website! My plan for now is to update it fairly regularly \u2014 my site deploys from GitHub, and I've found it's pretty easy to add new content in the GitHub app on my phone, so hopefully that ease smooths the path to keep it updated.\n\nhttps://reillyspitzfaden.com/now\n\n#IndieWeb #PersonalSites #PersonalWebsite #NowNowNow"
    },
    "published": "2024-05-22T20:33:19+00:00",
    "post-type": "note",
    "_id": "41181885",
    "_source": "8007",
    "_is_read": true
}