I use a lot of apps, and, I love my iPhone.
BUT
I really love the Web.
A few things lately reminded me of what a great and – so far – durable, open set of of technologies the Web is based on.
You can build such cool stuff on the Web! There are whole sites dedicated to collecting together other sites of cool things you can do with the web – see Single Serving Sites, or Neal.fun. And remember, there is no page fold. If you’re itching to build, I wrote about Glitch a few weeks ago, if you want somewhere to try new things.
The writing trigger today was largely prompted by reading the latest edition of Tedium, specifically, commenting on the Patreon situation with the App Store.
[…] it is also reflective of a mistake the company made many years ago: To allow people to support patrons directly through its app. Patreon did not need to do this. It was just a website at first, and for all the good things that can be said about the company, fact is they built on shaky land. To go to my earlier metaphor: They built their foundation on quicksand, perhaps without realizing it, though the broken glass wasn’t thrown in just yet. […] That shaky land isn’t the web, and if Patreon had stayed there, this would not be an issue. It’s the mobile app ecosystem, which honestly treats everyone poorly whether they want to admit it or not.Ernie @ Tedium
In turn, Ernie links to John Gruber’s assessment of the situation, which is also worth reading.
Look at that – hyperlinks between content published freely on open platforms, that can be read, studied, accessed around the world, and discussed, all within minutes and hours of publication. Mind blowing! Thank you, Sir Tim Berners-Lee!
I spend a bunch on apps, and in apps, and with Apple, directly and indirectly. They have a good ecosystem, it is all convenient (but spendy) to me as a consumer… but, I don’t think this whole situation with them milking creators and creatives is OK at all. The trouble is, that the lines are all kinds of blurry here – if they carved out a new category and set of rules around apps that sell subscriptions for creators that had, say, a zero or just a lower fee than other categories, then you’ll get into situations where others try to find ways into that category to avoid the higher fees.
Plus, of course, with the state of capitalism and big tech, we increasingly don’t own what we buy (per Kelly Gallagher Sims’ excellent Ownership in the Rental Age post; I also again highly recommend Cory Doctorow’s books, Chokepoint Capitalism, and The Internet Con)
I use closed platforms, and I use open platforms.
The closed ones make me increasingly sad and frustrated.
The open ones can take more tinkering and effort, but I get a lot back from them. They need sustaining. They don’t come for free. They need us to contribute, and to find ways to pay to support the creators and makers and builders and engineers.
If you like creative, quirky online sites, you should subscribe to Naive Weekly. I’m still enjoying things I found in it last month.
Now, I’m off to continue exploring… everything.
Long live The Web!
PS the winners of the Tiny Awards 2024 are announced at the weekend… 👀
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Today, I received some fun post from some lovely people in New York City.
Those in the know, may recognise these stickers as the logos of Glitch and Fastly.I’ve been using Glitch to write and host web apps for quite a few years now – it is super helpful when working in a role like developer relations, needing to rapidly spin up demos, examples, or to demonstrate new features. A couple of years ago, Glitch came together with Fastly, and in the past couple of months their new developer platform vision really started to come together.
If you haven’t been keeping up with what they have been up to, and were not able to be at their recent special developer event in NYC (don’t worry, I couldn’t get there either), there’s a helpful ~6 minute video that summarises the announcements. I’m particularly interested and excited about this because I know and respect the folks involved – Anil Dash, Jenn Schiffer, Hannah Aubry, many others across their teams – and I know that they get and they care about developer experience, Open Source, and the free and open web. I’m talking about the big stuff, the infrastructure, the stuff that needs to invisibly just work in order for the web to run; and also the smaller things, the quirky indie little pieces, the fun and new experiences, helping people to learn to code and to be creative. It’s no exaggeration to say that Fastly’s Fast Forward program is a massive supporter of Open Source, open standards and the Fediverse. All of these things are reasons why I love Glitch & Fastly.
I’ve been running my main profile links page on Glitch in Bio for several years now (it’s a bit like a Linktree/link in bio page, but better than one of those closed platforms). Beyond that, I also host some Fediverse examples such as my own Postmarks instance, and a gallery of examples of Mastodon embeds; and also pages that add resources to my recent talks. With Fastly, I can also run things on my own domains, and make sure that things are cached and perform well.
[ if you’re curious about the sorts of things I’ve been building or working on from a code and web perspective, I’ve also spruced up my GitHub bio, and I have a more general gallery page on GitHub that has links to the source and deployments of different projects – some of which are links to those Glitch apps above ]
Thank you for the stickerage, Glitch friends! And, congratulations on the new Fastly Developer Platform! I’m looking forward to continuing to use your cool technologies 👍🏻
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Resources page for Andy Piper's talk on the history of Computer Art, pen plotters, and more. Explore further with links to exhibitions, contemporary artists, tools, and reading materials.
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