Over at Scripting News, Dave Winer says:

Every blog should have a Subscribe button. In an open ecosystem this is a problem, a problem that silos don't have. Which is the advantage Twitter (a silo) has over the open web.

I guess I'm not smart enough to see what that problem might be.

Some of the people rediscovering independent publishing on their own domains are agonising over self-censorship, guilt and the like. I'm slowly continuing to bring old posts over into my main site. That goes for the ones that hurt a bit to read.

The only ones I'm not bringing are link posts that include dead links. A few are just too topical to bother with. The others are coming over, albeit not very quickly, even if I have to go searching for archived pages to link to.

Along the way, Salmon has this to say:

the world’s billionaires – the richest 2,000 people on the planet – saw their wealth increase by a staggering $762 billion in just one year. That’s an average of $381 million apiece. If those billionaires had simply been content with staying at their 2016 wealth, and had given their one-year gains to the world’s poorest people instead, then extreme poverty would have been eradicated. Hell, they could have eradicated extreme poverty, at least in theory, by giving up just one seventh of their annual gains.

Hang on a minute. Wouldn't the billionnaires need to make that awesome sacrifice every year? Or does the fact the people would slide back into extreme poverty next year not matter?

Catching up on reviewing my Christmas reading: Unbelievably dystopian

Latest episode of Eat This Podcast is up now. Bread as it ought to be.

It is always interesting to read of someone else deciding to give the IndieWeb a try. I like what Michael Singletary has to say, especially this

Most of my online friends and acquaintances will never understand or participate in the IndieWeb, and so I require a bridge between these worlds. On one side I choose what content to post and how it is stored, and it exists mainly on an island that few visit regularly. On the other side is nearly everyone I know, blissfully ignorant of my real home on the web and unable to see any content shared there without manual intervention or working plugins.

What really struck me, though, was the line in his bio: “Blogging since 2002, taking control of my content since 2018.”

I lost some of my pre–2002 posts, not through the actions of any evil silo (were there any, then?), but through my own idiocy in misplacing a crucial backup. And I never really got on board the silo first band-wagon, so in a sense I have always owned the content I care about owning. Most of my friends do consider it kind of weird that I didn’t see the photo they posted only to FB, but they’re only too happy to show them to me one on one. So yes, for now few people visit this island, and that’s OK. I enjoy the ones who do.

I'm using the IndieWeb in an attempt to make it easier for everyone to visit, and that works too.

My friend Jason was recently musing on the possibility of legislating firms to employ a certain number of people, based on revenue, in order to slow the pace of automation and the joblessness it leads to. I get that there's a problem,because no matter how good state provision for joblessness might be, firms contribute only a small part (if any) to the costs of supporting the workers they fire. Jason's idea is essentially an additional tax on firms to offset the costs of joblessness by creating unnecessary jobs. In my view there's a far better way; tax firms more, and spend some of the proceeds on a universal basic income.

One million webmentions. Very pleased to have played my own tiny part in this.

@cn suggested I use the date as the title of a Post in Known, to ensure that the contents of the post gets through to micro.blog intact, and, as so often, he is correct.

All I have to do now is remember to salute him next #micromonday

For all the joy of the #indieweb, and the pleasure of civil discourse, I am becoming incredibly confused by aspects of micro.blog. There’s the question of titleless posts, of which is this is one as an experiment, versus status updates. There are posts that appear to be contributions to an interesting conversation but aren’t because they have been cross-posted automatically from elsewhere. And there is the lack of a scroll back, which means that as I follow more people and choose not to check in the middle of my night, stuff vanishes irretrievably from my timeline. 

There are also issues with Known that are nothing to do with micro.blog.

None of this is insurmountable. For me, though, it does add friction.