@pkra I was thinking of Hypothesis in this specific case but I have the exact same worry about Google Docs and Google's increasing chokehold over education.

The difference in Hypothesis's case is that the value of web annotations in education is still, well, hypothetical. (Which is a concern about ed-tech in general, tbh.)

@zap Yeah, the animation definitely worked.

@fgtech I know, right? The book overall is a quick read and full of very sensible ideas.

@smokey Google is the only one in this position, I think. But Google is also very Microsoft-y in that they believe they can handle anything so I don't really expect them to actually be worrying about this even though they should.

@kaa Those are good points. 👍

@smokey Not an expert in this sector either but my guess would be that the analysis here is largely specific to the various VC-funded, unsustainable services popping up and not applicable people and communities owning and using their own scooters or electric bicycles?

@artkavanagh That'd be my guess, yeah :-)

@thatguygriff Yeah. I know that struggle.

The worry I had in that post is more about the competitiveness of the web when making productivity apps and the like. There is a pretty hard limit to what sort of features a web app can practically provide without uploading your data to the cloud.

For example, if you wanted to build a note-taking app, Apple provides a lot of tools for building a privacy-respecting native note-taking app that syncs across devices but on the web you're almost always going to end up having to upload the notes to the cloud if you want to be useful.

@kitt Yeah. They are awesome and how publishers are treating them is incredibly short-sighted.

@jack Yeah, it's reached a point where trusting iCloud for anything important just sounds risky as hell.

@pkra Thanks! 🙂

@pkra 😄 Definitely wasn't writing this to shut people up about fixing concrete flaws in the platform. This was more targeted at the incessent sniping in social media where each faction blames somebody else for the web 'dying'.

@SuperMoof AFAIK the FTC tries not to get involved in regulating falsehoods in political advertising, those ads pretty much get away with lying in any medium.

And even if they did care, FTC fines are generally low enough for Facebook just to account for them as the cost of doing business.

@jack Yeah, I'm actually in the same position. His whole take leans heavily in a certain 'rah-rah American Freedoms' direction that I don't find particularly appealing.

The main point that I can get completely behind is that most of the damage done by Facebook ads comes from the targeting and that's what regulations should target. I'm a bit meh on the rest.

@smokey Thanks!

@smokey Yeah, and for some reasons these articles never seem to be read by those who need to read it the most.

@ChrisJWilson I have to confess that their short life was surprising to me: they don't even last their full EU 2 year warranty. Apple gets out of it by saying that normal battery wear and tear isn't covered.

@hutaffe I'm working on a website that works fine in iOS 12, Safari desktop, Chrome, Firefox, and Edge but is just utterly broken in Safari on iOS 13 🤨

@pkra Hah! Yeah. A lot of people really haven't thought the 'subscriptions everywhere!' scenario through.

@artkavanagh JSON feed, for most purposes, is as good as an old-fashioned XML feed. Most of the major feed clients support it now. So, it isn't just better than nothing, it's practically as good as the old thing. 🙂

@smokey I think most of the ones I encounter are the latter: blog systems with custom templates where either RSS feeds haven't been enabled (some 'modern' static site generators and CMSes don't have RSS support out of the box or don't enable it by default) or where links to the feed aren't included in the custom-built template so they're hard/impossible to find. Ignorance is the likeliest culprit, I think, not laziness.

@Gabz Thanks!

@jemostrom Good point.

@jemostrom Yeah, after digesting this a bit, it feels like it's got better overall composition.

@johnjohnston Thanks! John Warner is one of my favourite writers on education.