Posts tagged "internet":

Standards

Diary

In the morning picked up one of my grandchildren from the railway station in Modi'in (one of two such drives today, because in the evening I had to pick up son). I had a meeting with the accounts department people at the office, then spent the morning doing some cleaning and laundry (but then, forgot to hang the machine till about midnight, discovering it only on my room and lights out check.)

When D came home, she arrived with the negatives scanner I had ordered from China a couple of months ago. I was sure it was lost in the mail, and couldn't do much about it because I had accidentally indicated that I'd received it. So that was a big surprise. With these orders from China, you never know whether it will arrive in a matter of weeks, or of months, or who will deliver it, or to where. The scanner is mainly for the archival work on old film at the office, but it can be useful for scanning personal film as well. I already tried it, and am quite happy with the results: the challenge is to keep dust away from the negatives, because the slightest speck of dust creates a white spot on the negative.

In the afternoon we visited our neighbours, where we said bye to R who is going back to the UK, where she and her husband are spending a year. In our neighbours' yard, I found a good specimen of Lantana, a flower I've been wanting to photograph (above).

I was telling our neighbour about the interesting novel, "A Life of Holes", which was narrated to Paul Bowles by Driss ben Hamed Charhadi, a poor and illiterate Moroccan, if Bowles can be believed. I think B would like it.

Diary

I cut the grass and the weeds around the house this morning with the brush cutter. It took about 90 minutes. There's more to do.

Afterwards we went out to a plant nursery to buy mainly flowering plants for pots + fertilizer for the lawn and the citrus trees. We noticed this year that the skin seems to be growing thicker and thicker on the oranges and gratefruits, and this apparently indicates a need for potassium, in particular. We got some organic fertilizer and resisted the advice to get a chemical to treat the crinkling of the leaves. Similarly for the bit of lawn, I didn't get the fertilizer that has insecticide built in. I don't want to be responsible for killing the critters or harming birds.

Journal

Happy with the photos I took yesterday around the village, and that more of them came out well than did not; a sign that I'm getting a hang of the X10. Just one or two of them were out of focus or poorly exposed.

Problems lingered this morning after uninstalling Protonvpn, which proved too buggy on my Linux box. After the uninstall I couldn't enter some sites (including this one). This was resolved by restarting the modem. I may have to return to the earlier vpn (which worked fine).

Our resident climatologist Avner Gross has a good article about climate change in the Hebrew version of Haaretz that didn't make it into English, so I read it today. Together with Greta's book, through which I'm still plodding, I feel a bit under the weather.

It's almost impossible to depart this country, at least to Europe, without airplanes, so I think I have hit on a unique plan: Go to the airport and book the first plane with an empty seat. Planes are rarely full, especially out of season. Once in Europe, it is possible to go by trains or buses, which are less harmful to the biosphere.

That won't help with India. The days of overland travel through Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan have passed. With an Israeli resident stamp, Iran could arrest me as a spy, while India is wary of travelers who have been to Pakistan. I'm not even sure that foreigners can travel through the Wagah border these days.

Trends I'm seeing

Journal

I have picked up a slight cold, as often I do when cooler weather sets in. "Cool" may be a bit misleading for folks north of here. We haven't need to turn on the heating so far, but also haven't turned on the A/C for a month at least. Since we don't need either for several months of the year, perhaps our carbon foot print is a bit lower than the results given by those websites that try to estimate one's carbon emissions. On the other hand, most Europeans don't use A/C in the summer as we do.

Having a cold has given me the excuse for spending even more time than usual at my desk. I've followed all those ActivityPub conversations from the last few days and gotten to thinking that I don't so much feel at home there, even without actually participating in the chatter. It's a real "kishkushiada" as they might say in Hebrew (a place of relentless chit-chat). In that sense, my former timeline on Hubzilla was a bit more relaxed. It's all the threads that drive me crazy: the statuses that begin with "Replying to…" - each of which needs to be expanded in order to find the context. Perhaps I need to do some weeding and follow people who are less chatty. And also spend less time there.

It brings me to the question of whether it's actually worthwhile to install a personal Fediverse instance again. My current thinking is that it isn't. My personal website is a better place to invest my efforts. I still have the hope for it to become a "digital garden", though I'm not confident that I've chosen the best medium for it. I dither back and forth on these things.

Instance blocking; the open web

After so many years in the Fediverse, I thought that I understood it well by now. But looking lately at the landscape, through the portal of Mastodon, I'm not so sure. What I see there is a culture where blocking becomes the solution for whatever you don't like, particularly instance blocking.

On the conventional social networks, you can block a person. On Mastodon, if you don't like somebody, you can block the whole instance. While I initially felt some sympathy for blocking instances like Gab, now I'm beginning to see how far this can go. Last week, someone set up an instance to "onboard journalists", without vetting so well who could join up there. A couple of days later, other instances began blocking that one due to the presence of a few unsavoury members. Today I read that another Mastodon instance decided, in the name of free speech, to allow persons with controversial opinions, so people on other instances are urging to block that instance.

I can imagine that eventually someone will decide that it's advisable to block all instances that aren't on some kind of a master-list whose member instances endorse a particular constitution - perhaps one that is similar to that of mastodon.social* (I have only heard about these, but haven't read them). And why not block instances on the basis of their geographical location while we are at it? Russia? Ukraine? Israel? Palestine? Africa?

Update: What there currently is, is the list maintained at joinmastodon.org that is governed by the criteria of the Mastodon server covenant:

Thus, we are proud to announce the creation of the Mastodon Server Covenant. By highlighting those communities that are high quality and best align with our values, we hope to foster a friendly and better moderated online space. Any server that we link to from joinmastodon.org commits to actively moderating against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia.

In practice, it's very demanding for volunteer moderators to perform such moderation, but super easy to block an entire instance.

In an environment of hair trigger instance-blocking, we're arguably better off in one of the mainstream social networks, where we're chucked out mainly for egregiously bad behaviour - but our own behaviour, not that of our neighbours or due to our affiliation with some group - say, the US Republican Party.

Although it's very tempting to filter out all the voices that we don't want to hear, the consequence is that we live in an ever more intolerant society.

I'm not going to change the world, but I'm in favour of a return to the open web, in combination with RSS news feeds and email newsletters. The need to set up a personal site, or to be published to an existing journal sets a high bar, but maybe that's a good thing. There are many problems yet to solve, such as discovery, comment spam, payment issues, government censorship, etc. but there are also advantages: returning control and responsibility to the individual; independence from any kind of control or banishment by corporations, billionaires, groups, cliques, etc.

What the Indieweb people propose is, as always, a pragmatic and favourable compromise: publish first to our own site, and then to everywhere else: we don't have to be in love with the networks we use in order to benefit from their reach. So we publish where we can and if we get blocked we get blocked.

Because I happen to be not-so-interested in spreading my germs far and wide, I try to keep my site out of the search engines and don't publish to Facebook and Twitter, hardly even to the Fediverse. So I probably won't take that advice.

Diary

How aesthetics influences my use of software and the web

It's hard to admit it, but if I look at my consumption habits on the internet, and of my use of software in general, I am definitely influenced by the way a site or an application looks. I will tend to prefer those that look attractive to me. I can point to various examples.

SeaMonkey browser has a very good solution to RSS news feeds. It's easy to subscribe, and it arranges them like email messages under separate folders. It's easy, quick and responsive to skim through news feeds. Yet although SeaMonkey's presentation is not what you would call ugly - and there are worse examples of feed aggregators - I have to force myself to go there and start reading. Back when I was using Google Reader and Feedly, it was easier.

Similarly, Thunderbird, which derives from SeaMonkey, is an excellent email client, but, try as I might, I find myself steering towards webmail clients such as Fastmail's (and Gmail's for the office). I often read mail in the webmail client, then compose the replies in Thunderbird, which gives me more control.

Wikis are sometimes a better solution for building websites than blogs. Material is arranged by subject rather than chronology for one thing. Yet when I try to read articles produced in Dokuwiki and Mediawiki, for example, I am often put off by the way they look. They are just too boringly plain for me, I suppose.

LibreOffice is a fine wordprocessor, and for me just as good as, and easier to use, than its commercial competitors. But, when I write text, I will usually prefer a simple text editor. I think I'm put off by all those tool bars, rows of icons and the menu system.

My taste is not necessarily dictated by what's considered slick. I dislike many modern websites, with their oversized graphics, animation and glitzy formatting. Similarly many shopping sites are attrocious (could that be the real reason why I cancelled my Amazon account?). But I often like simple blogs that use attractive fonts, good proportions between the sizes of titles and texts, and nice use of graphics. And news media sites are usually fine for me (though I'm usually seeing them ad-free).

I like to think of myself as uninfluenced by style (Lao Tzu: "The sage is for the belly, not for the eye") and free software is often more drab than its commercial equivalents. But the truth is that my tendency to use software or visit websites is quite affected by appearance, even if the selection is not always conscious.

I once read that all of us weigh up and unconsciously evaluate a website within a few seconds of landing on its home page. And just as surely, our sense of aesthetics is influenced by trends and the conditioning derived from what we have seen before. It's a bit like cars. What makes the latest models look attractive to us, while those of a few years ago seem dated and old-fashioned? There's nothing intrinsically better about the new designs. A visitor from another planet would not necessarily choose the new design over the model of a decade ago.

Journal

I have been working at a snail's pace at the Hubzilla installation, with flagging enthusiasm as I'm not really convinced of the need for it. Zap would have been a better fit, but Hubzilla has better instructions. I just had a look at Friendica; which I once used, though never installed. I suppose that's another a candidate. There's no platform that really wows me. I have always thought that the best way to use social networks would be a desktop client like pidgin. Android clients exist, but I see nothing similar in Linux. Anyhow, I still need a server.

Lately I've been thinking that WordPress still offers me the best ability to create websites, among the platforms that I understand. But my indecisiveness is prodigal.

2022-07-05 - SPIP CMS

Am having problems with another of the web sites for which I am responsible. It works on the SPIP CMS. I like SPIP, but there is always a problem with updates. I was a bit behind, so I did one update that broke the menus. That's something that I was reasonably sure I could fix, so I did the next update, and that one nuked the entire site.There's a PHP extension called sodium, that my web host, Hostgator, doesn't permit on their shared plan.It would be necessary to upgrade to one of their VPS plans, but their prices aren't really competitive for that.

There are 2 lessons here.

1. Developers always need to check that the features they want to incorporate won't break their users' experience, and at least give fair warning.
2. The days for Shared Hosting are really past.There are too many things we need to do that don't fit into their rigid set of options.Shared hosts are good if you want to limit oneself to applications that are really mainstream, like WordPress. I should have known better than to host something like SPIP there, but, at the time, around 20 years ago, VPS wasn't as affordable, and the knowledge about how to run one wasn't as available.

I will try to restore the site to an earlier version, but I need to decide how to go forward.

Maybe again Kamatera, at least for that site.

2022-07-02-new-server

After my recent problems with the phone company's new fiber network and its restrictive modem, I decided to look for a VPS for my hosting needs.

I began by considering solutions like Neocities. But actually I have had my fill of shared hosting providers, and economically it absolutely makes sense to prefer a VPS. I have done it a couple of times before over the years. The one I have now picked is Kamatera - mainly because I saw they are cheap and have servers in Israel. Their lowest cost is currently $4, which gives a server with 1 MB of RAM + 20 GB of file space. That should be more than enough for my modest needs, and the cost is about the same as what the phone company charges for a permanent IP.

At Kamatera it was possible to use a server image that already included a LAMP installation and Phpmyadmin, so that was convenient. For now I need only PHP.

I learned a new word today, "KISS" - someone coined it to refer to simplicity as a software principle, and that well describes what I'm trying to do: to always choose the simplest solution and as close as possible to what I, with my lack of tech knowhow, can have a hope of getting my head around. It certainly won't always mean using the best tool for the job, but will be the closest to what I understand. Modern languages and advanced frameworks will often get the job done in a better way. But on various occasions I have had difficulty with some of these. Sometimes there will be dependency problems, or inconsistencies between versions that are difficult to sort out. So, whereas the software application itself may be elegant and simple, the framework that supports it may be complex.

In general, whenever a software developer boasts about his product's beautiful simplicity and ease of use, I have learned to take that with a lot of salt. The 2-minute installation will take hours to get working because he didn't factor in my stupidity, evidently.

We are living in an age - fortunately - where we can create amazing, beautiful websites with almost no technical skills. And we can opt into networks like Tumblr or Blogger or WordPress where everything is done for us. My attempts to avoid these platforms look stuborn, almost ludicrous by comparison, and the results are unimpressive, old-fashioned and primitive. I spend hours to obtain something that can be done in a few seconds otherwise.

But on the other hand, without being a trained programmer or developer, I am doing things my own way and am closer to being in control of the tools that I use. That's the extent of my aspiration. And hopefully to do some nice things with these tools.

I don't want to be too much of a Luddite (I know, that's a term that is wrongly used) Wired has an interesting article about OpenAI and the growing use of artificial intelligence in writing code. It's a pity that Microsoft got their clutches on it, but I can really see how this could change everything. It has potential like the Internet, like Guttenberg, to empower ordinary people. On the other hand, in trying to explain its value to my wife, I was unable to come up with many good examples to prove my point.

2022-06-23 Home Server Woes

Well, unfortunately I did not succeed to use our phone company's infrastructure for properly hosting my website from home. Their fiber modem comes with various cyber protections and although it claims not to be operating under a firewall, it still seems to be. I was able to almost get NGINX to serve my pages without https, but the service seemed wonky, hit-or-miss and did not stabilize for the first 24 hours, at least. I don't want to give too much time to this, having already spent many hours getting things up and running with the old modem. Fiber is still a little new around here. Bezeq, the phone company, is trying its best to seal people in to its own service and does not allow one to use a non-Bezeq modem without using an adapter. Eventually I will probably find a freer ISP because there are competitors.

For now I'm able to use my Fastmail file storage to host this static site, but, for a couple of reasons that is not ideal. I will hunt around for a good and hopefully cheap virtual server as I also don't like being nannied by the hosting companies.

2022-06-22 Fiber | Israel-Palestine

Yesterday we were connected to the fiber infrastructure and, hopefully will receive more robust internet connection, though that flimsy wire hanging flapping about among the bushes, leaves me feeling rather doubtful. In the newer section of the village, the cables are buried; in the older section where we live, we depend on wires and poles, which occasionally get hit and pulled down by passing trucks. The phone company technicians are known for their resourcefulness. For years, our connection was dependent on cables twisted together inside an old coke bottle on our roof. I suppose the technician didn't have a proper connection box handy on his several visits.

Now we have a formal connection speed of 1 Mb, though stability, rather than speed will be the incentive of most of the village residents to adopt the new service.

I still haven't got around to asking the phone company to give me a permanent ip and open port 80, so this post will be offline till I so so.

For the Thich Nhat Hanh sangha I suggested to share the Nextcloud folder I use, so that we'll have a joint folder for sangha-related activities. It's hosted at Disroot.org. They are a bit slow in responding to requests for new user registrations, so we'll see if this actually works. Most people are used to instant responses for new registration from the big tech companies, so the idea of a sign-up taking several days is foreign to them. I'm also not sure exactly how the Nextcloud federation plays out in real life, so we'll see. The service actually wasn't working at all for me for the past several months, till I figured out that I need to update my client. Then it worked again. This is one of the problems with AppImage and the other newer Linux software installations. The Debian package management system is much more dependable by comparison. And the more that software developers come to rely on the newer installation methods, the less motivated they are to keep the repository versions updated. (The other main problem is the variety of competing installation types, so that one has to remember whether an application was informed from the repository or snap or appimage, or Git or compiled from a tar ball, or whatever. The result is chaos, whereas formerly it was a lot easier to manage to update a Linux system than in Windows.

Link

‘The land beyond the road is forbidden’: Israeli settler shepherds displace Palestinians This is typical of the painful story that happens beneath the radar of international attention. Shepherding weaponized and used simply to take over Palestinian lands. The occupation is violent in every one of its aspects, but when Palestinians resort to desperate means like blowing themselves up in order to protest the occupation, they are the ones who are castigated for being violent.

The phone company sub-contractor who came to install our new fiber line were Palestinians from East Jerusalem. He was impressed to hear that our village is shared by Arabs and Jews living together. "It's the only one, unfortunately, I said." - "Inshallah, one day there will be peace" . - "Sure, after we are dead," I joked. His young worker, who hadn't understand this exchange in Hebrew, asked him afterwards why he was hearing the teachers from the adjacent primary school speaking in Arabic. So his boss explained to him that the school has Arab and Jewish kids learning together. The two of them had nothing more to say about it. In the reality of East Jerusalem, such a reality is even more difficult to contemplate.

2022-06-01 NGINX

Continuing my server odyssey, I managed to set up NGINX, eventually, after looking at several options for alternatives to Apache. Although I was drawn to Hiawatha (mentioned in yesterday's post), there were no current binaries available for Debian (the directory and repository came up blank). It would have been possible to compile it from source, but the instructions were long and complicated and its own documentation "strongly advises" using a binary.

So I moved the DNS back to my own server after the site's latest short sojourn at Fastmail. Direct access to the photo albums still don't work because I haven't figured out how to make that apache .htaccess transformation from a standard directory to a fancy formatted gallery served through php so far. It requires moving the contents of the .htaccess file into the NGINX site configuration file since NGINX handles rewrites differently. While there's an apache .htaccess to NGINX configuration file tool available online, the result doesn't work for me, so I've reached out to the Novagallery developer. If Novagallery doesn't work for me, I'll find another simple system. There are even instructions available on a DIY solution [1] for doing almost exactly what Novagallery does, but although that is a solution to part of the puzzle, I think that Novagallery goes a little further.

20-05-31 Server again

I began the installation of Dokuwiki but had some difficulties along the way. The instructions seem to assume that one has set up a site for it under Apache, so I went about enabling that. But then, before I was able to proceed further, Apache began to give errors, which affected the server as a whole. I wasn't able to solve that problem so quickly, so I transfered the server content over to my Fastmail file storage, and changed the domain DNS to point there.

The advantage with Fastmail is that this is a trivial task. The disadvantage is that the Fastmail server is very limited in what it can handle. For example, the Novagallery software depends upon .htaccess redirects. They don't function under Fastmail. However, with a few more clicks I enabled Fastmail to display those photo albums instead. It doesn't seem to be possible to add a "home" button in the Fastmail photo galleries, so I will set the html target to open them in a separate browser tab.

The limitedness of Fastmail's server reminded me why I want to keep the system really simple. Perhaps, instead of installing Dokuwiki, I will create a homespun system of my own, that is even more simple, specifically geared to my modest needs, and which works on Fastmail and any other simple server.

In the meantime, while the files are being served from Fastmail, I will try to find a simpler and lighter solution for the web server than what Apache offers.

A couple of months ago, Fastmail dropped support for FTP upload. Now we must rely upon either webdav or the in-browser file manager. Neither of these are as convenient as being able to use something like rsync. So eventually I may want to find another solution for a backup web server.

2022-05-30 Wikis and web servers

I've been looking again at several aspects of the site. On the weekend I spent several hours trying to set up Epicyon, which is intended to be a simple social networking application based on the activity pub protocol, created by Bob Mottram. I previously had partial success setting up Epicyon, under Mottram's Freedombone (now called Libraserver, I think). It didn't work very well, then, but there is reason to hope that it is more mature now. Be that as it may, I failed in my attempts. Not because of Epicyon but because the instructions for setting it up are geared for the NGINX web server, and what I have installed is Apache. There's a method of installing NGINX as a reverse proxy for Apache, and that's what I was trying. By the end of several hours what I had was a server that served neither through NGINX nor Apache. So I shrugged my shoulders and disabled NGINX. Now the blog works again, happily.

After looking at Epicyon, I went back to review GnuSocial. I have installed this successfully a couple of times, on VPSs and even on Hostgator shared hosting. So I know that it's not too difficult. It works well enough with Apache. GnuSocial is the veteran social media instance of the Fediverse. It was created by Evan Prodromou originally as a commercially offered product called StatusNet. StatusNet powered early forms of the Fediverse, with a main instance that was first called Laconi.ca then Identi.ca. When Prodromou abandoned the project, he turned it over to the people behind GNU while he himself went on to create what was the first instance of an activitypub server, Pump.io, for which he reused the Identi.ca name for his instance. That project was bit of a failure, though the Activitypub protocol itself went on to become a great success; it is the basis of Mastodon and Pleroma, and many other instances of the Fediverse. Meanwhile a new team, with some European funding has gone back to GnuSocial to modernize the code and adapt it for use with the Activitypub protocol, since this is now the backbone of the Fediverse.

Well, I can go through the process of installing GnuSocial again, but I'm having doubts again whether I really want to try again with social networking. The truth is, I have never had great success with it, on the level of active participation, and I don't so much like its influence upon me. What I do feel a need for, however, is to keep up to date with many ideas that are spread through social networking. For example, without access to social networking, I would not have been aware of that Solarpunk conference that I listened to yesterday.

Now, some of the discourse around such ideas takes place on the Fediverse; while much of it takes place on Twitter. I have access to the Fediverse currently through Disroot's new Pleroma instance. It's possible to either follow people there, or simply subscribe to them through RSS. That, in a way is simpler, because it does not involve sending a follow request. Regarding Twitter, it is possible to do the same, through the intermediary of Nitter.net, which, unlike Twitter, offers RSS newsfeeds. So I might just decide to solve the problem of subscribing to social network people via RSS. Newsfeeds really provide a complete solution for the reading of both blogs and microblogs. One only has to be disciplined enough to actually read the feeds.

The server: After looking at the way NGINX and Apache work, I am actually considering changing to something simpler, such as Hiawatha server. I remember it from PuppyLinux, which came with a Hiawatha Server already configured. I am just doubtful whether i will manage with the Hiawatha equivalent of Apache's .htaccess file rewrites, which I need for my Novagallery program, in particular. I'll see.

Wiki: A website should not be based only on the chronological format of blogging. There is room also for a more lateral dimension, so I am thinking to incorporate a wiki. There is a nice example of a personal wiki at https://njoseph.me/mediawiki/Main_Page

In keeping with the rest of the site, I am trying to find a wiki system that is based on simplicity and without a database. So far, Dokuwiki seems to be the best candidate. It is written in PHP and is based on plain text files. I will look into this.

2022-04-22 - Hubzilla | state of the web

2022-03-08 - Photos | Big Tech | Registration Walls | Telegram

I posted a new photo album from our walk last Saturday.

Channel 11 ran an article on the Big Tech companies that focused on several aspects: that they don't pay taxes in this country; that they are virtually unreachable if they happen to close your account; that they invade privacy; that they are anticompetitive; that they manipulate the government and the legal system to insure their monopolies are not threatened, etc. It managed to get through all this material pretty well.

I'm beginning to think website "registration walls" are almost as bad as paywalls. They are just as effective at locking me out anyhow, because I usually refuse to register. I just tried to read an article on The Intercept and hit one of these. I'm more and more convinced that piracy is the way for those of us who value our privacy and are too poor to subscribe to umpteen journals. It feels scrappy, and it deprives journals of their incomes, but if they can't honour our privacy and set up a sensible system for donations or occasional payments, I think it isn't our problem.

The EFF has posted information (in English) intended to help Ukrainians and Russians use Telegram more safely: Telegram Harm Reduction for Users in Russia and Ukraine . It is kind of a shame that Telegram itself doesn't do more to make this information available to its users. Telegram is not private by default and does not do enough to make its privacy features easily available. Durov, on his own Telegram channel, just wrote a long post describing his tribulations with the Russian government and his family connections with Ukraine:

Some people wondered if Telegram is somehow less secure for Ukrainians, because I once lived in Russia. Let me tell these people how my career in Russia ended.

It could have been an opportunity to address users in Ukraine and Russia in a similar way that the EFF has just done.

US accused of hypocrisy for supporting sanctions against Russia but not Israel https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/07/us-sanctions-against-russia-but-not-israel The war invites many such comparisons and exposes double-standards like this.

The web itself

We had a discussion with Christopher Titmuss the other day, in which he talked about community. Someone raised the issue of “virtual community”, implying that his focus on real community might be a little backward-looking in the light of the advent of virtual communities. They gave the example of people in need being helped by crowd-funding. Titmus in his response focused on the surveillance capitalism aspects of Facebook and popular platforms. He said this was a poor substitute for real community, and that we should not delude ourselves into believing that there is any real community to be found in platforms intended only for the gain of their owners. He said that if he uses these platforms it is only to send announcements.

I found myself asking whether this applied to alternative internet social networks that lack profit motivation. I think he probably is not aware of such possibilities but that it is just as likely that he would still think them a poor substitute for real community.

I personally haven’t found in the alternative social networks a solution but would not discount the possibility that they might provide a fair solution to develop a planet wide community. But actually I’m beginning to think that the internet itself, or the web that lives on it, is our best and widest social network, rather than limit oneself to little islands. We should develop tools that harness the power of the whole web, rather than encampments. The Indie Web movement probably has the best ideas about how to do that. Because the problem is, on the vastness of the web, how do we find each other? Right now only spambots seem to manage to find my web page. And probably there are also bots and spiders operated by government security services that search for keywords. And other bad actors.

The internet is the closest we have come to networking human consciousness. It contains our worst and finest human traits, ideas, potential, everything. There is a wonderful opportunity there to contribute to raising our collective consciousness, just as there are opportunities to degrading it.