Digging the digital

Frank Meeuwsen

Revisit your past self.

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I start every day with a private journey. I go through my Day One entries of the day through the years. It’s a fascinating lookback of the previous years. My thoughts, ideas, dreams. It’s all private, all mine.

Every once in a while I include interesting blogposts and quotes that resonate with me. This morning while reading the days’ entries of yesteryears, I browsed through other days and found one of Peter Rukavina’s older blogposts. He talks about keeping a daily log and the personal importance. More and more I feel the same way. Not to publish everyday like Peter does, more on that in a moment, but to write for your future self. To be able to look back 5, 10, 20 years and reflect on what has happened. What has changed you and how you feel about it. Even more meta, perhaps how much writing and reading has changed you.

After my Day One journey I opened the feedreader. To my surprise, Peter has done what I plan to do. Since I’ve enabled the On this Day plugin on my blog, I want to take a few minutes each day to visit the entries of my public blogs. From the angry 30-something tweet-like brainfarts from the early 2000s to my more recent explorations in the indieweb and newsletters. To look back, prune, improve and sometimes even unpublish some entries. Especially the older blogposts are mostly links to sites that are now defunct. Parts of the web that once were vibrant but now left to domainsquatters, silent server errors and dubious clickbaits. I just found out today July 17th hasn’t been a bloggingday for me since 2005. As of today that has changed.

Thanks Peter, for giving me that extra push forward to follow in your footsteps. After re-publishing 20 years of blogposts in 2020, I will revisit them through 2021 and 2022. Let’s look back in a year and see what has happened.

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Europe’s Software Problem – Bert Hubert’s writings (Bert Hubert’s writings)

Europe’s communication needs are currently almost exclusively delivered by Chinese hardware that connects us to US-based platforms. For a variety of reasons, this is not a good idea.
As stated recently by Charles Michel, President of the European Council, “Interdependence is natural, even desirable. Over-dependence, however, is not”.
Photo by Sara Kurfeß on Unsplash
At the core, the problem is that almost no consumer-oriented platforms or software products are being created in Europe, or more precisely, by European companies.

Bookmark: The Tower of Babel: How Public Interest Internet is Trying to Save Messaging and Banish Big Social Media

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The Tower of Babel: How Public Interest Internet is Trying to Save Messaging and Banish Big Social Media by Cory Doctorow (Electronic Frontier Foundation)

This blog post is part of a series, looking at the public interest internet—the parts of the internet that don’t garner the headlines of Facebook or Google, but quietly provide public goods and useful services without requiring the scale or the business practices of the tech giants. Read our…

Een duidelijke uitleg hoe vrije communicatie tussen ons wordt gehinderd door de private belangen van derde partijen.

The public interest internet is giving us tracking-free alternatives, interoperable services, and tools that put user needs and human thriving before "engagement" and "stickiness.”

Bookmark: Scripting News: Wednesday, July 14, 2021

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Scripting News: Wednesday, July 14, 2021 (Scripting News)

Brandon has broken through, a total server-land neophyte, broke through via pure persistence

Ik zag de berichten al langs komen van Brandon die probeerde om de software van Dave aan elkaar te knopen en voor hemzelf werkend te krijgen. Met doorzettingsvermogen, vragen stellen en gewoon dingen proberen is het gelukt. Te gek. Zo maak je je eigen plek op het web. Publiek. En met kleine stapjes.