I’m not going to ponder whether blogging has a future – because I obviously think it has one. People still feel a need to present their more structured or definite thoughts in one place, distinct from the places where they pose questions, copy cartoons, tell jokes or provoke spontaneous discussions about right-wing infiltration of Occupy. This contribution, for instance, is going to be cross-posted to my WordPress blog – whereas 99% of what I (and most others) contribute on social networks doesn’t strike me as begging for any degree of immortality at all.

But blogs have definitely ceased to occupy the territory many people somewhat naively continue to associate with them. What they once almost were is something they no longer much resemble: alternative publications as standalone entities somehow mimicking the traditional media – but full of fresh impetus and surprise. That’s still what they look like, but it’s not what they do.

In reality, except for the chosen few, blogs don’t get read or commented unless they are part of a communicational mesh – part of the author’s virtual mesh, but part of the reader’s, too. Very few people regularly visit a blog site the way they flock to the Guardian’s online fortress. If truth be told, I even suspect the Guardian is noticing the same thing and that the number of people doggedly going to their front page every day is decreasing, whereas overall readership is probably growing quite healthily. Nowadays, readers increasingly visit specific items rather than revered institutions. Most people under the age of 25 probably do little else, whereas some of us geezers still feel duty-bound to check certain established sources on a vaguely regular basis. But even we are doing less of it – we’re following other people’s links instead.

The point I’m getting at? That your latest blog article is actually least likely to be found via your blog’s homepage and very much more liable to be passed around as one such link, probably starting with your own efforts to advertise it on Twitter and Facebook. Which is all very fine and the way people do things nowadays – except that the links aren’t always particularly successful in soliciting comments. There’s something about leaving the (true) social networks to read someone’s blog that feels like entering a church. There’s a pastor here, who is actually the person doing most of the talking. Participation isn’t equal, in fact it’s very visibly and tangibly unequal and possibly even censored. The erstwhile revolution of comment streams, once the main attraction of blogs, doesn’t look all that motivating any more. Compared with discussion on the contact-based social networks, it’s far too hierarchical, far too much like a prophet-disciple relationship. Some guy gets to talk at you… and to respond at all, you get a little grey box with a captcha task to solve – then wait for your contribution to be approved by powers you often have difficulty recognising as power-worthy.

So to go a step further, perhaps linking your blog to your online social mesh isn’t really sufficient after all. Putting ads all over Facebook and Twitter no longer constitutes real integration – it’s retroactive, not seamless (and people receive it that way). To put your blog bang in the middle of your networking activities, maybe that is where it needs to start out – within the social networks, rather than grafted on to them. You can read more about that here: http://friendicablog.wordpress.com/

In effect, your blog site does cease to be a primary venue (but to be honest, it probably stopped working as one yonks ago). Instead, it becomes a showcase of the things you consider special enough to preserve and present in a slightly more exalted way to the rest of your communication – more like your photo album than like the events and objects the photos actually depict. By the time people notice an article there, the bulk of your real readership will have been and gone – discussion having taken place on other platforms. But that’s fine, isn’t it?  The main thing is that it happened, and that it’s still visible. Your blog site is the castle of your past, rather than the marketplace of your present and future. It still has purpose, but that purpose may be rather less vivid and more conservational than you originally assumed. Your blog itself is a different matter. But it’s in the articles as they emerge, not in the place where they are presented.

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In a sense, it’s rather funny that Friendica’s perceived crown jewel is its ever more powerful connector to Facebook – because Friendica does, after all, aspire to offer a decentralised alternative to the commercial networks. But Friendica also set out to break down barriers between social networks, and so it makes plenty of sense to build a very good bridge to the most popular venue of all. The point is that Friendica will take you where your friends are – or them to you – and that privacy considerations are your own to calculate. You can have full privacy with Friendica, but you can have full freedom, too. So if that freedom takes you to places where privacy may be violated, it’s for you to decide whether the sacrifice is worth it.

Another quandry with the Facebook connector is probably a blessing in disguise. It has improved so vastly over recent months that integration of your Facebook stream in Friendica – including pages – is now very nearly total (if you so wish). But that constitutes a significant drain on server resources – something you probably won’t notice at all on a private Friendica site with five to ten members, but a phenomenon that can easily grind a public, membership-for-anyone site to a standstill. You may not think your personal Facebook stream a massive burden on anyone’s computing power. But you probably haven’t seen just how many Facebook contacts some users actually have – it’s by no means unique for aficiondos to ‘maintain’ over 1,500! Now imagine numerous such users on a single Friendica server run by a friendly, but only averagely affluent guy who wants to do the world a free favour.

That means that public Friendica sites – which are all owned by volunteers and almost never fully covered by donations – are now restricting the functionality of this particular connector. Other gateways, like the bridges to Diaspora, Twitter, StatusNet, WordPress etc. remain fully intact. But Facebook integration needs to be tightly controlled on the vast majority of Friendica’s public servers.

That’s all the more reason for people who want full Facebook connectivity to run their own Friendica sites – or to find a buddy with a private site they can join. And this is where Friendica’s basic architectural paradigm really pays off. From the outset, the software was devised for the simplest possible installation routine in the greatest possible number of environments (including the most modest and reasonably priced – even including a fully connected server nesting in your desktop PC at home). Over time, installation and administration have become even easier and better documented. It’s probably safe to say that setting up a Friendica site is usually no more challenging than installing WordPress for yourself. And with the help of the Friendica community itself, I would estimate that at least one in three computer users are already capable of it.

Since even a very unassuming site will generally serve about five to ten users, the ratio of people technically able to install to those needing a room in someone else’s home is already pretty healthy. And when it does break down – because you don’t personally know anyone who has a site you can join – there’s always a programme called #friendshostfriends, the generosity of which commonly extends to the odd stranger met online. So even if you do need to join a public server for a while, because you feel genuinely unable to install your own, you can be reasonably sure that it’s a situation destined to change pretty fast (actually, you’ll probably end up discovering that self-hosting is well within your limits).

Oh yes… I called this status quo a "blessing in disguise" because… well: because it is. Ironically, it’s the desire for full Facebook connectivity that will drive many users off the public sites and on to private ones – which is incidentally something the public admins themselves almost unanimously advocate and welcome. The irony, in case you don’t already see it, is that the perceived need for a good bridge to the most central service of all is persuading more and more Friendica users to decentralise their own server landscape even further. And that, in turn, is speeding up implementation of Friendica’s ambitious decentralised vision rather amazingly.

It’s an darnededly weird feeling to say thank you to Facebook. But it’s indispubtably appropriate. So I might just bring myself to say it… here, at least.

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This may not strike Facebook users as a big deal – but in a federated, decentralised network of equal servers, it’s a tremendous achievement: the elusive ingredient that is almost trivial for centralised services and seemed almost impossible for federated ones. It comes courtesy of the Jappix project and some very clever hacks by a Friendica dev who likes to be known as Leberwurscht Brot (liverwurst sandwich). Currently, it’s being tested by numerous Friendica users – though it’s not yet in the official software package.

Once it’s more broadly available – probably very shortly – distributed social networking will have reached a new level. True, there are some purely XMPP-based projects around that obviously include chat already. But with the plugin, chat has now reached the first all-purpose decentralised network. And with this hurdle taken, you may just find that Friendica has more of the features you require than Facebook itself!

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The growing popularity of projects like ownCloud indicates that we may finally be entering an era of personal servers – but will it be a geek-only trend or might there be a repeat performance of the world-changing personal computer revolution?

Given an increasing need to keep multiple devices from desktops to smartphones in sync, the answer ought to be a no-brainer. But that doesn’t seem to be the case yet. There is still something daunting about the very word server that arouses awe (and actual fear) in the hearts of average users.

Visions of mainframes or Solaris powerhouses run by humourless tech zoo keepers linger to convince ‘normals’ that servers weren’t invented to promote equality of humankind (and to be fair, they weren’t – but that was quite a long time ago). There’s a suspicion that any self-respecting server will break instantly when accessed by a person without thick glasess and an unkempt beard. It’s also well known that servers invariably crash at three in the morning ahead of a crucial day – and then stubbornly stay down until they consider your real life sufficiently cocked up.

Today, the false prejudice of server management being an imperatively superhuman task gets in the way of people’s genuine desire to re-privatise communication. That’s why it’s important, but also insufficient to stress ease of installation and maintenance for decentralised social network platforms like Friendica. It’s important for those who read that far, but insufficient for those who panic and run away the moment they encounter the s-word. This may even be a simple issue of semantics. But it’s perceived reality on the ground – which means that fundamental culture change is hampered by deeply emotional inhibitions.

The bright side of that statement is that culture change very rarely comes without that caveat.

@Open Web

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@Bikepacking & Trails

Ready for another cross-posting orgy? This one should be going to Friendica, Diaspora, Facebook, my WordPress blog, StatusNet and a forum! Since it’s a mountain-bike forum, I’ll embed the MTB-News pic of the day, which I find rather motivating:

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As the user stats for Diaspora remain very stagnant, many people are wondering whether the (arguably) loudest project for a distributed, privacy-aware social network is on the verge of collapsing. The reasons are diverse: Diaspora hasn’t delivered on many of its promises yet, offers neither real decentralisation nor reliable privacy – and loses people’s content to boot. Personally, I’m still interested in knowing whether Diaspora hopes to become an uncensored Twitter alternative without volume restrictions – something the hashtag metaphor of Diaspora’s navigation system strongly suggests. It’s an ambition that would also suit the large degree of centralisation in the Diaspora grid. Centralisation? See those stats.

But who would it be for? That’s a question that is even more intriguing than the related issue of funding or investment. For instance: Will the real (western-world) victim of much discussed Twitter censorship please stand up? I’m not saying that I don’t deplore Twitter’s policy changes in this respect and others – just that switching platforms to guard against potential censorship only really makes sense if you’re migrating to a service that can’t be censored at all. And not just to one that makes promises.

For most people, the Twitter situation isn’t tangibly urgent yet – so why move to a system that could actually censor as arbitrarily as it wanted, because it’s de-facto centralised itself (like Twitter)? And of course: If that system is also liable to drop your posts or comments by accident, publicity-happy tweat freaks aren’t going to hang in there for long – as things stand, Twitter censorship is vastly less likely than whoops! content destruction by Diaspora. Once the last vestiges of Diaspora’s erstwhile, slightly uncanny sex appeal vanish, the project will have had it’s opportunity – and squandered it.

Despite my increasing frustration with Diaspora Inc., I can’t say I’m happy about that prospect. It’s a public own goal for the entire open web movement – ‘scored’ by a single player who had the audacity to hijack mainstream awareness of the struggle.

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I hadn’t seen this plugin for WordPress: Cross-post-to-Friendika (old spelling with a k). It doesn’t look as if it’s being maintained any more, but it currently works. So now I have two options: I can write a blog entry in Friendica and auto-send it to my blog site – or achieve the same effect vice versa, which is what I’m doing now. There’s probably no real advantage to this for me personally (once you’re in a browser, you can start from anywhere anyway). But it’s neat to be able to do it, if only as further proof of concept.

Please note: Comments on this article may be federated to social networks where the article also appears. You may consider this a privacy problem.

Someone wanted to send me a confidential email and asked me for my public key, and I was forced to admit that I don’t do GPG – the Gnu Privacy Guard. If pressed for a reason, I’d say I have never gotten round to setting things up. But that wouldn’t be quite true. I did have it all configured once upon a time, but there was no one to use it with in those days. So the endeavour died with the computer I installed the tools on, and I forgot all about it.

I should really revisit this issue, shouldn’t I? Running a blog that rants about privacy violations all the time, but not encrypting my own email properly? It’s just a tad embarassing.

So tomorrow… or so… at the weekend perhaps… soon, anyway… I’ll be urgently mending things.

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So I installed Drupal on www.cyberfrosch.de yesterday to have a German blogging site. So far, so good. Drupal works okay if you can live with less than seamless module installation (WordPress does a much better job of this).

And then I set about getting myself some mobile functionality, soon discovering that no iOS app and presumably no other mobile blogging app will update a user’s blog on Drupal 7. Delving into this bug, one learns that the contributor-written external blogging API is kaputt, has been so for yonks, is currently being repaired – with a target date of February 15, 2012. That’s okay, we can wait for this, even though it’s March, since the functioning module is going to be free when it finally ships.

However, I personally decided not to wait and installed Drupad for the iPhone as a workaround – and no, I’m not even linking to the crap, because it promptly failed to solved the problem in any way whatosever. That’s despite a price tag of almost four euros. After hacking .htaccess as advised on Drupad’s website, I thought I was getting somewhere. But it turned out that the next bug is insurmountable, described as follows on the Drupad website:

Drupad use JSON as a format between your Drupal site and the iOS app.If you get a message like The request did not success, unable to parse the response you may want to try the following to ensure that your Drupal installation works properly.

Another hack is now prescribed – but all it leads to is a test, which my installation then failed. In which case you receive this priceless piece of advice:

If you see PHP warning or error, try to fix them or ask for help on Drupal.org as they break JSON fromatting.

I’m too angry to correct the original spelling (something I generally do for people I appreciate). I mean, you sell me an app that is specifically only for Drupal, then inform me that Drupal itself naturally has to be repaired for your over-priced product to work? But of course, furious as I am, I’m still not energetic or naive enough to explore ways of getting a refund from Apple’s App Store. Which is presumably how some of these developers’ business models work.

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Have you ever tried telling a teenager to get off Facebook for a minute? You may as well add the advice that weeding the garden is heaps healthier and more enjoyable. Abstinence just isn’t an option – short-term or long-term. Neither is a direct introduction to alternative and ethical communication concepts like Friendica or status.net. The elusive secret lies in triggering a teenage trend – despite the fact that you’re 35 years older.

Now, doesn’t that sound perfectly freakin’ hopeless?

Well yes… it does. But fashion designers do something similar all the time and even get filthy rich in the process. Record producers were once of the same breed – the guys who made Led Zeppelin and AC/DC big wore ties. All words to the effect that there’s hope yet. But it’s also a bit paradox, because in the final analysis, teenage trends are voted in by teenagers. Other people may chuck stuff in their general direction (ever so unobtrusively, if they’re clever) – but it’s the kids themselves who decide what to pick up and play with. Hm… now, there’s something to ponder.

Trying to understand what they currently enjoy is one obvious ingredient. Another is knowing that they want to be adults and actually yearn to mimick us (but only in their heart of hearts). But the third ingredient is the gold-dust one: You have to grasp that something totally unexpected must be part of the solution. Maybe that’s the component you simply keep on guessing until you have found it.

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