I collected 241 items for 1997. And 10% of them are key texts. That's a bit odd.

The FOSS Academic Lifestyle Dream just got a bit dreamier. Previously, I wrote about Marp, which is a Markdown-based way to generate presentation slides. When I wrote about Marp last, I was speculating that it would be very useful: I’m going to do it: I’m going all-on on Marp for a while…. I suspect Marp is a future fixture of the FOSS Academic Lifestyle Dream. Well, it’s true. On Friday, I gave a presentation over Zoom using a Marp-based slide deck. You can see the files here. It worked wonderfully! And I did something more. Marp produces responsive, semantic HTML. HTML can be parsed with BeautifulSoup, a Python library.

Bluesky continues to blow up. I hear about it everywhere. It’s so backed up the Brid.gy system has slowed to a crawl. But instead of focusing yet again on Bluesky, this week I wanted to do something t...

This weekly Alternative Social Media update – the first of 2025! – is about getting caught back up with some things that have happened in the past month. First up, I’ll relate the latest changes at Meta to a specific interest of mine, Threads’s fediverse blocklist. Then, I’ll point you to a very fascinating back-and-forth discussion about Bluesky’s ATProto and ActivityPub (as well as OCapN). Finally, I’ll let you know the latest in ActivityPub Trust and Safety.

This week’s Alternative Social Media Update turned out to be more of a critique of corporate social media, specifically Meta’s Threads. It all started when I saw the news that Meta had donated $1 mill...