If you have any doubts, then you're the target audience of this guide. Many people hesitate or even write off the possibility of making a website due to common misconceptions, poorly-written instructions, or simply feeling unsure where to start. So to help you over those hurdles, this guide is designed to address some of those misconceptions, walk you through resolving certain mental blocks, and present you with some tutorials to help get you on your way.
The first misconception to address is the idea that you don't already have what it takes to begin. Many people hesitate because they think in order to make a website, you need to spend money (you don't) or that you need to engage in advanced computer wizardry that a normal person could never possibly understand (this isn't true either). There are only a few things you truly need:
If you can check off all of those boxes, then you have all the prerequisites you need to follow this guide.
Crossposted to Neocities and Pillowfort.
( Read more... )Twitter and its imitators have adopted a structural design that is fundamentally bad for people. This isn't just a matter of who's in charge; it's a problem with the thing itself. Forcing users to adhere to a tight character limit, discouraging link culture, preventing people from editing their own posts, steering people into sharing things they hate, incentivizing rage bait with trending feeds, subjecting people to decontextualized encounters, encouraging conflict by discouraging tags, and leaving users powerless to clean up the resulting mess—all of this is bad shape.
Crossposted to Pillowfort and Neocities. For off-site linking, I recommend using the version on Neocities.
( Read more... )Hyperlinks deserve more recognition in light of all the ways their value has been sidelined and denied. From deliberate corporate link suppression to link-shy site cultures on social media to the dysfunctional state of deteriorating search engines, the web has changed a lot over the years since the days of early link-based web logs, and a familiarity with the importance of links can no longer be taken for granted. It needs to be expressly advocated.
To that end, I present a link compilation in praise of links. It includes things I agree with entirely and things I don't, spanning from the 2020s to the early 2000s, to supply a tapestry of perspectives, context, and examples on the value and importance of links. Links may have their downsides, challenges, and vulnerabilities, but my hope is that this compilation will (re)invigorate your appreciation for linking as a technology and a social practice, all the better to understand what's at stake when links are discarded and devalued.
Crossposted to Pillowfort and Neocities. For off-site linking, I recommend using the version on Neocities.Whatever the benefits of decentralization may be, hyping it up becomes a problem when it's presented as a workaround for ignoring the money question. The money question (i.e. "how are you funding this thing?") is what actually determines a platform's incentives—a problem that has been touched on but quickly brushed aside by major proponents of decentralization. Decentralization, they say, is supposed to make the money question irrelevant by making it easier for users to switch from one site to another. This argument overlooks the limitations of switching as a strategy, neglects to account for how things actually play out in practice, and fails to propose a less exploitative approach to funding social media.
Crossposted to Pillowfort and Neocities. For off-site linking, I recommend using the version on Neocities.
For those interested in creating a less toxic, more communal, more courteous web, part of that process should involve supporting the guest/host relationship. The guest/host relationship involves a certain set of obligations — obligations of mutual courtesy — that platforms can encourage by granting their users the power of host veto. This may sound counterintuitive for those used to more individualist thinking, since it's easy to imagine hypothetical scenarios where this feature could be used unfairly. Even so, the alternative is worse, and here's why.
Crossposted to Pillowfort and Neocities.
By now a lot of people have been lured to Bluesky with a mistaken impression of what they're in for. Foundationally, the reason Bluesky was launched in the first place was out of a desire to do less moderation, and so Bluesky's approach to moderation is all about creating excuses for offloading responsibility. This approach has predictable consequences.
Spelling all this out is unfortunately necessary because of how widely Bluesky has been touted as better about moderation. Identifying the red flags should have been the job of journalists who do this sort of thing for a living—and with few exceptions, far too many of them have fallen down on the job, instead hyping up the place as "safe" and "fun" as though there's nothing in particular to worry about. Can't be any worse than usual, right?
So let's set the record straight.
Crossposted to Pillowfort and Neocities. For offsite linking, I recommend using the version on Neocities.
As best I can figure, the reason people end up misapplying the concept of intersectionality is because the end up absorbing a decontextualized version of it as just... the abstract concept of combinations of identities. If that's all it were, then frankly it would be kind of pointless—so generic as to be politically insignificant and unremarkable. By contrast, if you actually understand its original context, then you can understand that intersectionality is shorthand for a particular counterargument, and in order to really grasp that counterargument, you have to understand what kind of argument it's responding to in the first place.
Crossposted to Pillowfort.
( Read more... )If there is anything about Cohost that you think is worth replicating, then it's worth understanding why it folded in the end. In the wake of the shutdown announcement, I've seen several competing narratives and explanations for what happened, and sorting this stuff out matters for figuring out what kind of lesson to take from it. So in light of that, this retrospective is my attempt to log and detangle some of those narratives, starting with a brief recap to bring you up to speed.
Crossposted to Pillowfort. Note, feel free to link to this post. Linking is the way that I prefer for people to share my stuff on other sites, if at all.
( Read more... )Originally posted to Pillowfort on January 4, 2022.
A post about Waterfall.social, its one-sided relationship with Pillowfort, and some of the eyebrow-raising choices involved in its development, funding, and promotion.
I did not find most of these links myself, but by and large I encountered them in private posts, so this is my attempt to construct more of a public overview. If you have sources to add, please link them in the comments. ( Read more... )When websites encourage their users to rely on unmoderated tag searches as topic subscriptions, they run the risk of encouraging the pasta convention paradigm. The pasta convention paradigm originates from Tumblr but is liable to crop up on sites with similar features with regard to bookmarking tags. Bookmarked tags, in these contexts, become treated as makeshift community pages, but they lack any of the appropriate tools for moderation, which sets people up for needless frustration and disappointment.
Crossposted to Pillowfort.
( Read more... )Note if this is the first you're hearing about Buzzly drama, you may want to go run a search for "buzzly" and "buzzly art." Some of the places this situation has been discussed are bluestone's Buzzly WTF post and PineAura's Buzzly Situation post.
In this post, I am more narrowly focused on the team's statement of goals/intentions and why their chosen strategy for those ends is absurd. ( Read more... )
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