osteophage | Recent Entries

Primarily I use this journal for three things: 1) crossposting some of my major blogposts, 2) offering support for guest comments, since this is not currently an option on Pillowfort, and 3) outsourcing the work of making an RSS feed for major updates to my personal site. I'm aware there's a way to make my own by hand, but I figure there's no need that when Dreamwidth works just fine.

It is very rare for me to make locked posts on here, so if you haven't been added to the access list, don't think much of it. I'm still undecided on how and when to make use of that feature here.

If you're looking for more of my media analysis, check out my essays on SQW or AO3. If you're looking for more posts in general, visit my other blog on Pillowfort. If you're here for the web stuff, you might be interested in WebDiscussions or the 32-Bit Cafe Forum.

In light of the Pillowfort announcement, I'd like to remind folks that I have a personal site, Coyote's Link Hub, as well as this journal here on Dreamwidth. You can visit the Pillowfolks DW community if you're interested in more about Dreamwidth or looking for more of us to connect with. For those of you interested in starting your own personal site, I recommend my beginner guide.

I'm keeping tabs on CT's Pillowfort Archival Initiative, and for WebDiscussions I have also broached the idea of starting a wiki and a forum. If you have any suggestions to offer on that front, please let us know.

Naturally this has been crossposted to Pillowfort.

Re: these comments about this post, IndieWeb Ethos and Pagecord, and the previous appearances of Bubbles on IndieNews.

Three anecdotes, in triptych:

1) As of April 21st, Khürt Williams’ last reply is chock full of negative parallelisms and em dashes in combination with assertions that don't make sense in context, agreeably conceding the main points while continuing to insist on the same conclusion. It’s enough to make a person wonder.

2) On April 23rd, after the blog feed aggregator Bubbles had launched to much acclaim, it came to light that the creator had fed all the blogs to one of Anthropic’s LLM products, without asking the anyone first. In the ensuing discussion, I ended up hearing from AetherAnne that aggregators like these are part of why she doesn’t have an RSS feed.

3) This past August, in a now-vanished post about the indie web, Olly of Pagecord made mention of using an LLM product for programming. In the subsequent discussion, it also came to light that he had fed it the entirety of another person’s blog without that person’s consent. In response to the negative reactions to all this, Olly claims indifference.

Together these incidents have me thinking about the tensions embedded in the indie web principle of “own your data.” For some, it would seem, owning your data refers strictly to unlimited dissemination, not to any personal control or assertion of boundaries. Only the infinite extension of the yes, without regard for the no.

That’s one possible vision for the indie web, but I don’t think it needs to be the only one, and I don’t think it deserves the last word. The indie web can favor small sites over corporate exploitation. The indie web can favor resistance over infinite intrusion. The indie web can favor autonomy and solidarity over disowning y(our) data to an LLM.

Crossposted to Pillowfort and my personal site.

The Lazybones Guide to Webmentions is a webweaver's guide to the simplest and easiest way to receive webmentions, which can be useful if you want to make it easier for people to tell you that they linked your stuff, especially if you don't want or expect people to email you. Note this guide does not cover anything about how to display webmentions, just the basics on how to let people send them to you in the first place.

With all the eulogies that have been written about Cohost since the shutdown announcement, some folks have gotten the unfortunate impression that they missed out on something unprecedented and unanimously adored. If you had a positive experience with the site, then nobody can take that away from you, but if you’re just going off of secondhand accounts, then for what it’s worth, you might have been given the wrong idea. Cohost was not exactly as groundbreaking as it’s been made out to be, and it was not a positive experience for all of us.

Crossposted to Pillowfort and my personal site.

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By combining blog feeds with an upvote button and the promise to reveal the best blogposts by popular vote, feed aggregator Bubbles has replicated problems with metrics-based recommendation algorithms. The expressly competitive framing of the upvote system has encouraged a competitive mindset, and the most-upvoted posts have ended up converging on certain topics more than others, running counter to the project’s original stated purpose. In light of these issues, the popularity of the project raises questions about what it might mean as an indicator of broader issues in the surrounding blogosphere.

For those unfamiliar: Bubbles is a site that automatically pulls the feeds from a long list of blogs and pairs them with an upvote button and a reply system through the fediverse. According to the About page, the idea is for Bubbles to help uplift “non-tech” blogging that might otherwise get drowned out. The project was announced in early 2026 to much acclaim from the kind of folks who have accounts on the fediverse. Subsequently it came to light that the creator of Bubbles had relied on LLM-generated code and had assigned categories to the initial list of blogs by feeding them all into an LLM, without permission, in some cases against people’s express wishes.

Even before any of these revelations, however, I had expressed reservations about the foundational concept. This post represents an effort to elaborate on my reasoning and to log a record of how we’ve seen those concerns borne out in the time since launch.

Crossposted to Pillowfort and my personal site.

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Pillowfort has built a site culture where positive interactions and productive conversations form the expected baseline of what a lively discussion can look like, and if other social sites were to follow its example, the same might be achievable for them too. To that end, this post is meant to help start a discussion about what other platforms would need to replicate. I have a few observations to start us off, and you’re invited to pitch your own theories in the comments. Regardless of what we come up with, the results are worth considering for those of us invested in the pursuit of better comment culture.

Crossposted to Pillowfort and my personal site. Note for off-site linking, I recommend using the version on my personal site.

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Deviation is a webpage template for creating a filterable image gallery, loosely inspired by an older era of DeviantArt. Its features include a mobile-friendly layout, dark/light mode, lightboxes for enlarging images on click, a filter system, and an easy-to-customize color scheme.

Overvaluing the appearance of moderation can be a mistake, in that it can give undue credence to assertions that go unsubstantiated. This pitfall can be illustrated by analyzing arguments that position themselves as moderate by making assertions with little to no supporting evidence. While offhand superficial assertions are not themselves a sin, they deserve to be recognized for what they are, rather than held in high esteem based on nothing more than an aesthetic—a superficial aesthetic of moderation.

To demonstrate the concept, this post presents many examples. The first section identifies some otherwise generally solid arguments that position themselves as moderate via the insertion of superficial assertions. For contrast, the second section highlights an argument that actually substantiates the kind of claim left unsubstantiated in the previous section. The mere appearance of a moderate stance is no substitute for substance, and when evaluating the quality of an argument, it’s important to look for that substance rather than relying on aesthetics as a shortcut. An example in the final section serves to illustrate why.

Note: this post draws examples from the LLM debate, but the goal here is to advance a more general principle. For more direct discussion of LLMs themselves, see this post or these links.

Crossposted to Pillowfort and my personal site.

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Severance employs a fantastical scenario at an imaginary company to depict a phenomenon that’s very real: the systematic alienation of labor. This theme has been widely remarked upon by those familiar with the framework, but not everyone is already familiar, and so it warrants explanation. To that end, this analysis presents a brief introduction to alienation as a concept, an in-depth exploration of how it applies to the characters of Severance, and some observations on how that theme relates to the real world.

Alienation of labor is a term used in political commentary to refer to an experience of estrangement between workers and their work. You might think of it as like wearing a mask, building up walls, or being reduced to a cog in a machine. These experiences arise from the sacrifice of autonomy involved in selling labor to an intermediary (an employer), which, within a given societal system, is necessary for most people in order to purchase what we need to survive.

Alienation of labor is dramatized in Severance at multiple levels of analogy and realism. For severed workers, the outer self is alienated from the work self, and the work self is alienated from the work. These workers are insulated from understanding the nature of their work, they are forced to work, and they are also (supposed to be) estranged from themselves and each other, buying into corporate mythology at their own expense. Together these factors combine to facilitate greater horrors.

Notes:

This analysis contains major spoilers for the first two seasons. Before reading further, I recommend watching the show for yourself.
Content warnings for violence will appear later at the start of a specific section. More generally this analysis deals with themes of workplace abuse, with brief references to suicide.

Crossposted to Pillowfort and my personal site. Note for off-site linking, I recommend using the version on my personal site.

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We're celebrating Pillowfort's anniversary this month, and since I've been there since 2018, I decided to put together a brief personal timeline of my experience with the site. Some of these things are specific to what I've been up to, but some of them are more general milestones for the site. How many of them do you remember?

I'm interested to see what other folks would choose to spotlight, so if you make your own timeline post, consider reblogging it to the Pillowfort Anniversary Festival. Alternatively, you can use enchantedsleeper's anniversary blanket box (prompt list) for some more general inspiration.

Crossposted to Pillowfort.

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In the controversy surrounding Cory Doctorow’s anniversary post, many people have engaged with the spirit of the thing, but I have yet to see any in-depth discussion of his choice to invoke the term purity culture. Purity culture is a term with very particular origins, and it’s not some general term for people being mean on the internet. It’s a term for a specific enculturation into a pattern of sexual abuse.

But before we get into that, let me give you an overview of why we’re talking about this again. I say “again” because — as long-time readers may recall — I posted about this subject before back in 2019. With that said, that post was written for a different audience, and there are some new facets to address this time, so let’s take it from the top.

Crossposted to Pillowfort and my personal site.

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General Ludd's Guide to Draining the Bot Slop From Your Device is a beginner-friendly guide to removing generative bot features from your search results, your browser, and your operating system. Let me know if you have any feedback for changes or additions.

Large language models and their associated bots are bad for the indie web in at least three ways: 1) their logistical consequences are bad for bandwidth, 2) their social consequences are bad for guides, and 3) their citational consequences are bad for surfability. These consequences are worth highlighting in light of how LLM-based chatbots have been used and endorsed on the indie web. The indie web may mean different things to different people, but if we’re thinking of it at all in terms of favoring small sites over corporate exploitation, then the indie web as a concept and a practice is fundamentally at odds with what LLMs are doing to the web.

Crossposted to Pillowfort and my personal site hosted on Neocities. For off-site linking, I recommend using the version on Neocities.

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Given that comments can be controversial on the indie web, it’s worth pointing out the use cases for comment sections as a feature. Comment sections are particularly suited to allowing for brief high-context replies, supporting public multi-way interactions, setting a (relatively) lower threshold for participation, and allowing the blogger to define the parameters for a discussion. These are use cases that cannot all be adequately addressed by commonly-suggested alternatives such as response posts or email.

Crossposted to Pillowfort and my personal site.

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Although normally spoken about as a cohesive whole, different aspects of the indie web ethos can wind up in tension with each other, which raises the question of which one ultimately takes priority. On the one hand, we have the general interest in onboarding, i.e. helping more people onto the indie web; on the other hand, the issue of onboarding can place some strain on other commonly touted ideals. At the end of the day, which form of independence matters most? And what does the answer entail for our understanding of who the indie web is “for”?

Note: this post uses the term “indie web” for convenience, but if you prefer some other similar term, you’re still invited to the conversation.

Crossposted to Pillowfort and my personal site.

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If you care about privacy on the web, then you should care about how anti-privacy laws have been challenged by Dreamwidth. Its unique role in these legal battles hasn’t been getting any dedicated press coverage, and so it falls to people like us to spread the word: Dreamwidth is proactively going to court against anti-privacy laws and highlighting itself as a positive example in order to show how these laws are predicated on assumptions that don’t apply.

Crossposted to Pillowfort and my personal site.
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Halloween (1978) is, if nothing else, a movie about labor. This is something I think has at times been missing from horror genre analysis and commentary, as well as subsequent genre send-ups like Scream (1996) and Cabin in the Woods (2011), which lean on “you can never have sex” while leaving out the salience of what those early slasher victims were supposed to be doing instead. Michael Myer’s primary victims were not just teenage girls, but specifically, teenage girls tasked with jobs—and not just any jobs, but jobs that had become a flashpoint of societal anxieties.

I am of course not the first person to point this out. The connection has been explored, for instance, by Murray Leeder and Miriam Forman-Brunell in their books on Halloween and babysitting, respectively. What I'm looking to do with this post is pull out this particular thread and give it the limelight, presented as a counterpoint to a more simplistic focus on abstracted sex.

When read through the lens of childcare as labor, Halloween presents a cautionary tale about workers who slack off on the job. Neglectful babysitters in this movie live up to the stereotype of irresponsible teenage girls who spend more time chatting on the phone and fooling around with boys than minding the children. By focusing on personal gratification and letting their guard down, they allow the telephone to become a vector of distraction, and they fail to identify a lurking threat that eventually spells their doom. The threat they face, crucially, stems from outside of the employer family, thereby deflecting attention away from the hazards of predatory employer-fathers.

Crossposted to Pillowfort and my personal site.

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Story of The Split is a zine about ace community history and a breakdown in community memory that has kept many people in the dark about the origin of the term “split attraction model.”

This zine is available in three formats: 1) a PDF for reading digitally, 2) a PDF intended for printing and folding, and 3) a webpage for reading online.

For those of us interested in more ethical, user-focused social platforms, it's worth understanding how these ventures can go wrong. To that end, start at the Good Web Graveyard: a link compilation on departed websites that had marketed themselves in terms of ethics. Avoiding exploitative business models isn't itself a guarantee of failure, but plenty of other things are, and by reading up on what's gone defunct, we can learn to recognize the warning signs.

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Coyote's Blog

Recent Entries

Sticky: State of the Blog

Preparing for the End and New Beginnings

On Disowning Your Data

The Lazybones Guide to Webmentions

If you weren't on Cohost, you don't have to miss it

Bubbles is a New Way of Recreating Old Problems

How Pillowfort Built a Comment Culture Worth Emulating

Deviation Image Gallery

A Superficial Aesthetic of Moderation

Mysterious Work & Alienation of Labor in Severance

Pillowfort Retrospective 2026

It Has Come To My Attention That Some of You Have No Idea Where The Term Purity Culture Comes From

General Ludd's Guide to Draining the Bot Slop From Your Device

How LLMs & Chatbots Are Bad For the Indie Web

The Case For Comments

Which Part of the Indie Web Ethos is the Bigger Priority?

How Online Privacy Has Been Championed by Dreamwidth

Reading Halloween (1978) Through the Lens of Labor

Story of The Split

Good Web Graveyard

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