Welcome to volume ten of Scrolls, a newsletter for sharing cool stuff from the IndieWeb, Fediverse & Cybersecurity realms. This week, we kick write-it old-school, see what’s buzzin’ across the Fediverse, get into some neat cyber-frameworks, and a whole lot more!
Ten issues into this publication, I wanted take a minute to reflect on how I think this has been goin’, what’s “worked”, how I am using the newsletter and what’s in store for the future of Scrolls. Overall, I’m very happy with the reception of Scrolls and believe it has been successful in bringing cool stuff that I discover each week to a lot of people who would have not otherwise seen said stuff. This was always goal number 1. I think chunking each edition into three primary sections (i.e. IndieWeb, Fediverse, Cybersecurity) has mostly worked, but I’m admittedly having a harder time piecing together a useful “story” when it comes to the cybersecurity section in particular. I plan to keep it around, because the secondary goal of this newsletter is to really be a reference for myself, and I find myself searching through past issues a lot for things I had saved.
Two things I’ve been doing since the beginning that I’ve really enjoyed are featuring artists and their artwork, and taking the time to credit all the individuals who helped me source content for that week’s edition. The art makes the newsletter more visually interesting, and shouting out folks from across these communities helps with reach, helps boost cool creators and is just a nice community-oriented way to further engage.
So what about the future of Scrolls? Well, topics are somewhat cyclical, but content seems as evergreen as always, so I don’t really see myself “running out of things to talk about” and/or share. As an idea for the future, it might be cool to further emphasize creators through guest-posts / featurettes. If you’ve got any ideas, or have something you’d like to be featured or linked-to, always feel free to let me know!
Time to pore over this week’s awesome issue!
IndieWeb
The oft-misunderstood beauty of the IndieWeb, the “personal” web, is that it is a medium in which, in my opinion, perfectly blends the capacity to socialize at human-scale, with the ability to comfortably, and more meaningfully, express yourself. Modern social media is no doubt a technological wonder, but it is also relentless inundation. Humans are social creatures, but not THAT social. Connecting with 100’s or 1000’s of people—actually connecting with them, is an exercise an exhausting futility. Socially, we operate at community-scale and the IndieWeb does a much better job facilitating that. Here on the IndieWeb, we forgo the judgement of the masses and are free to just write, publish our crap, and y’know… just be ourselves—as it once was.
They say, everything old is new again—and this holds true for the web. These web-relics of a bygone era are staging a real comeback. We got webrings (e.g. a11y-webring.club), buttons and blogrolls galore! What these bring is that imperfect (human) creativity and community-like socialization back to the modern, uniform, sterile web.
The web used to be fun, and that’s because the web used to be us. Yeah, it wasn’t what Facebook thought we should be, or Instagram, or Linkedin, or any of these other platforms. This made the web an adventure, a garden of creativity, and a place of wonderment. Ready to plant your seed for a future Internet which embodies these ideals? When people come to your site, what do you want them to see? How do you want them to feel? How do you think it should smell? Create a space that expresses who you really are. (You might want to learn a bit about CSS to make that happen 😄). Make the web fun again, make the web us again.
Thinking of where to plant your little Internet seed? You could consider sourcehut, Codeberg or Ghost (among others)! But be careful out there, those scrapers are relentless. With any luck, time will bring a mass decentralization, a true re-wilding of the web. If and when that happens, we’ll need to rely on each other once more to fuel meaningful and digestible discovery. Tools like BlogFlock and Flithos could maybe help! I’m already there though, here some cool sites you should check out 😎 ⬇️
Check out these cool sites!
- Xkeeper’s blog from Xkeeper
- The Cozy Cat’s weekly Showcase Saturday
- Maya’s featurette on People & Blogs
- From Juhis With Love by Juhis
- Once Again From the Top by Jason Santa Maria
- Personal websites from Hastings & St Leonards-on-Sea (UK) shared by Paul Watson
- The floppy.museum
Fediverse
Alrightey-then! What’s buzzin’ about the Fediverse this week? 🐝
Emelia has some thoughts on moderation tooling, Martin is collecting verified Fedi accounts, Emily wants to see your stickered laptops, Alex talks about decentralized social networks & WordPress, Elena writes about PeerTube and Funkwhale has an update!
Cybersecurity
Want some weekend cyber-readz? I gotcha. Paged Out! v.6 has dropped, AHA! has some CVE writeups, Rasta explains how to Kerberoast w/o the TGS-REQ, Lorenzo shares a variety of advanced initial access techniques and Predrag laughs about some infosec sillies he’s encountered.
Hungering for more acronyms and methodologies? You’re in infosec, so of course you are!
- SNARE: A guide to documentation for threat hunters
- ISMS Mappings: A tool for mapping compliance frameworks
- TLCTC: Defines threat categories to connect strategic planning to operational security
- ASVS v5: The next-generation framework for defining security requirements for modern web applications and services
Finally, here’s a grab-bag of other infosec-goodies…
- Get inspired by Hacker Strategies from the ever-inspirational (to me) M. Taggart
- Merill Fernando’s podcast Entra.Chat shares best practices (and more) for those in the Microsoft identity world
- Lesley laments the not-so-genuine “Cybersecurity Skills Shortage”
- ovelny has a cool blog. Go look at it.
Thanks for reading. Peace out! ✨ ✌️ ✨
