Category: Site Updates

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Back in 2002, I set up this blog on b2. A year later, b2 updates had stagnated, I migrated it to a fork of b2 called WordPress.

In the intervening 21 years, WordPress has gone on to power a huge fraction of the web. But in my opinion the project has lost its way, starting with the move to the Gutenberg block editor in 2018 and trying to become everything to everyone instead of just really good blogging software.

In response to the Block Editor merge, another project forked WordPress to create ClassicPress. Initially it was more or less WordPress Minus Gutenberg, but they’ve continued to do their own development as well, from cleaning up old complex code to improving the way media management works. I sorta kept up with it for a while, but finally decided to really evaluate it this month, and it’s actually really good! So I migrated a couple of test blogs, then Katie’s Feral Tomatoes.

Then I started looking at what it would take to migrate this 22-year-old, 3,255-post behemoth of a blog. (And that’s after moving a bunch of posts to other parts of my site, and deleting a bunch of no-longer-useful posts like ‘Migrated from 1.1 to 1.2. Let me know what’s broken.” or “Check out this weird link!” with no commentary (especially when the weird link is long-dead by now anyway).

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I’ve been meaning to disconnect from Jetpack for a while now. This seems like a good time to do it, and to finally clear out the older Tumblr and WordPress.com blogs I don’t use anymore.

Tumblr and WordPress to Sell Users’ Data to Train AI Tools — 404 Media

It’s the kind of thing that you expect from Google or Facebook, or from any number of start-ups, but there’s been this sense that Automattic should know better — and with Tumblr being login-walled and ad-saturated, and the push to upsell in their WordPress plugins, and now this…it’s looking like they don’t.

I don’t think they’ve hit the “trust thermocline” yet, but selling user data is a pretty clear line.

As for AI access to the Firehose: My previous understanding of the firehose is that it’s basically an aggregation of what you’d see in a bunch of blogs’ public RSS feeds. Which, OK, fine. Analyze your heart out. Display my posts in your RSS reader. Just make sure private posts and comments don’t leak.

But LLM training isn’t the same as analytics, or showing a properly attributed post in a reader. And quietly changing the terms to allow more kinds of re-use on something most people using the service don’t know about? Not cool.

And not making it clear what is and isn’t included for which purposes? That breaks down trust.

Before this, I wasn’t worried about the Firehose. But now I’m not sure I can trust Akismet, never mind Jetpack, and I’m looking for a new spam filter.

Originally posted across several threads through my GoToSocial test site.

Update: Automattic did clarify that self-hosted blogs with Jetpack are not included in the training data. Only company-hosted blogs on Tumblr and WordPress.com. But I still uninstalled Jetpack from this site, just to be sure. Like I said, I’d been meaning to for a while.

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Over at Key Smash!, I’ve been helping beta-test the Pterotype plugin to hook up a self-hosted WordPress to the Fediverse. It gives WordPress an ActivityPub presence, so new posts and comments can be seen in Mastodon, Pleroma, and other ActivityPub-powered networks, and replies from those networks can come back as comments.

But Key Smash! is a simple test case. It’s at the top of the site, there’s no caching, it’s only got a handful of posts, and it hasn’t been bombarded by spammers for years.

So I’ve installed it on here. Older posts won’t federate, but new ones (starting here) should, and replies should show up as comments. With luck they’ll land in the moderation queue instead of the spam queue.

You may be able to follow the site by searching for this post’s URL in Mastodon/etc. Maybe. I need to report a bug in the handling of sites that aren’t at the top level: To find the site I need to search for @blog@www.hyperborea.org/journal – the first time. Then that search stops working, but I can find it at @blog@www.hyperborea.orgjournal instead. But that only works after I’ve searched for the first one.

Well, that’s part of why I set it up here: to help beta test.

Update: Submitted the username/discovery issue to Github.

Update: You can now follow the blog directly at @blog@www.hyperborea.org

Update (Dec): I turned it off temporarily due to spam problems. Spam comments were visible through ActivityPub, and couldn’t be deleted due to a FK constraint on the Pterotype tables.

Update (2019): Pterotype appears to have been abandoned. 🙁

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This blog has been around 15 years. Social media has mostly moved on, to silos like Facebook and Twitter. People don’t follow random personal blogs. Topic-focused sites are what people actually read, and even that mainly following links from silos.

Meanwhile there are so many major things going on that make the things I post about here — comics, fandom, photos of things I found interesting, random tech thoughts — seem trivial.

So why keep a blog going? And why write about trivialities, and not big things like the battles over civil rights, healthcare, environmental protections, war?

As for the first: Some of it is stubbornness. And some of it is wanting to keep part of my writing/photo presence somewhere “permanent” (to the extent that anything online is).

As for the second: I’ve never really liked talking news and politics online. I rarely feel like I can add anything that hasn’t already been said (probably better) by someone else. Also, online conversation has gotten way too toxic. On the other hand, while the little things may be trivial, they add up. They add up to your life. It feels like I might actually have something to say that’s not already been said a thousand times by people more familiar with the issue than I am.

Plus it’s a way to assert some normality in a world that feels decidedly abnormal.

I’m not likely to come up with anything super-profound on the most important topics, but I can make short statements, and I can amplify other voices. And I’m trying to come to grips with the fact that that’s important. I’ve been reading a lot more and posting a lot less over the past year or so, but even if I can’t say anything profound, I shouldn’t stay silent.

So I’ve been microblogging, and linking, and reposting — all things that are better suited for a service that’s built around those use cases. When I have something longer to say, I do try to pull it in here, because a blog post is better than a Twitter thread… But I think more people probably see my retweets than my blog posts, anyway.

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That took a lot longer than I intended.

But I’ve finally made all of Hyperborea.org run over HTTPS.

It’s been possible to view the whole site over HTTPS ever since I turned it on for the admin area of this blog years ago, but I left HTTP as the canonical URL and didn’t redirect anything until I updated the Les Mis section, and later this blog. Now, any page you visit on this entire site should load over an encrypted connection.

(Well, any page except for the old Dillo RPMs page, since that minimalist web browser still only has experimental HTTPS support.)

The problem is when you have decades of hand-crafted web pages to go through, it can take a while to make sure everything embeds only secure or same-origin content. Every image, every script, every video. I had to update lots of absolute links, remove some widgets and ads, update other widgets, embedded videos and metadata…and just a bit at a time in my spare time.

Finally I switched on the redirects this morning. Even that took longer than expected, because I’d forgotten that mod_rewrite rules in a directory override any parent directory’s rules, so I had to copy the HTTP-to-HTTPS rewrite rule to each folder that had its own rewrite rules. Then I had to fix the interaction between mod_rewrite and ErrorDocument that was causing custom errors to redirect to the error template instead of loading it behind the scenes.