Social Reader is out!
Today we are releasing an exciting enhancement for Distributed Press: the Social Reader - a new way to read posts on the Fediverse.
The Social Reader is a privacy-first personal reader for subscribing to content published on federated social media.
The Social Reader is ideal whether it's your first step into the Fediverse, and you want to browse without creating an account, or you just prefer to use tools that are private-by-design.
Skip the need to manage a digital persona with this free, no sign-up tool: just follow and access all the beautiful content you want.
Local-first
Works offline
No account
🎉
This tool also works without internet connectivity: you'll have your own database locally, so you don't need to go online to read posts.
In addition, it has native support for subscribing via peer-to-peer feeds if you use Agregore, Galacteek or any other p2p browser. This makes use of the peer-to-peer published versions of people's sites, fostering the ecosystem to gradually adopt decentralized publishing flows. Consequently, streams are more resistant to outages or attacks, given that their data is distributed across multiple nodes. 💪
🎉
Try it out here: reader.distributed.press
Watch a brief demo 👀
Curious about operational details? Check out our documentation
Disclaimer: it is important to note that Distributed Press does not host any of the content accessed through Social Reader. Therefore, Distributed Press bears no legal responsibility for the appropriateness, accuracy, or legality of the content accessed or distributed through the use of this tool.
Human curration is what makes bookstores and record stores work.
Staff picks move books, even at a big chain. Reviews move books on Amazon, and get people to theaters.
But what incentive is there for people to undertake the act of intentional curration?
Film reviewers get paid to publish in magazines, but most magazines aren't turning a profit anymore.
No one gets paid for Amazon reviews. Rarely does anyone make money on their zine or their blog.
How can we support the people who help us find things?
@nixCraft Part of my continued screaming series on "stop using services that heavily advertise on Youtube and Twitch."
@yhancik @darius The old thinking was that you should be rotating your gender every 90 days for security reasons but that’s proven to be an ineffective approach. Modern best practices are to use a unique and complex gender for every interaction, to avoid repetition and store them in a secure gender manager. This makes it easier to change genders when one relationship is compromised, and protects you against gender-stuffing attacks.
If your “open source software” requires a datacenter-scale strata and is optimized for, or maybe only meaningful to, datacenter-scale problems, is not open source in any way that matters. “Free as in corporate risk management” and “free as in labor arbitrage” are not aspirations.
Even though I still don't have screen sharing or a KDE dark theme working, I at least have an Emoji picker via wofi-emoji on my niri setup. 💜
Are folks using #ai copilots for generating code successfully? Mine gets confused on syntax a bunch but it's a local model which is general rather than code specific. Like I wonder if I am prompting it poorly or something
With the Web becoming filled with LLM-generated babble and toxic bullshit, there is an historical precedent for a solution to the problem of finding information on the internet.
Once upon a time, there was a project called DMOZ, and it was a human-curated hierarchical link directory, divided into subjects.
I think that's a brilliant thing, and provided it was still 100% human curated, there would be great utility in such things -- each curator would be assigned to a "beat", a subject area where their existing knowledge allows them to identify real human-made content, curated for accuracy, and link it in the directory, with an entry and some kind of automated polling to ensure that dead links are brought to the curator's attention for maintenance or removal.
Did you know that Dansup who made PixelFed is working on a federated TikTok clone called Loops and it looks extremely good https://mastodon.social/@dansup/112331179499992996
Dansup has been posting a lot about the WIP and the design choices are very user-centric in a way that the Fediverse sometimes is not
@futurebird This is a good question and I wish I had an answer. The closest thing I have (it's an old book— it's been a while since I've done much Java) is "Bitter Java". It maybe is a slightly more advanced book, but. It is a book by a consultant who comes in to fix problems in other people's code. So it's all about "here's things people do wrong in Java— here's how to do them better". It's a very odd book, more philosophy than code, one of the best pieces of CS writing I've ever read actually.
Occult Enby that's making local-first software with peer to peer protocols, mesh networks, and the web.
Exploring what a local-first cyberspace might look like in my spare time.