Welcome to volume forty-three of Scrolls, a newsletter for sharing cool stuff from the IndieWeb, Fediverse & Cybersecurity realms. This week we ask “what is a personal website”? We build our small feeds on the Fediverse and we discover some cybertruths.
Come along now my wee-web-weirdos! 🤗
(Courtesy of @gintoxicating)
IndieWeb
What is a personal website? It is a garden, a homestead, a social hub, a stage, a secret clubhouse, a house ever-shifting. Let it be your manifesto — a (mostly) sovereign place on the web to be your entire self. It is what you want it to be — what we make of it. So don’t weep for an Internet lost. Be a part of its wondrous revival.
You know what else? Your site is an act of resistance. The AI surge seeks to lobotomize the web, but we’re not going down that easily. We get to decide how things go in our li’l corners of the web. So wake up! It’s time to be human and put silly human things on the web.
Small Web Finds and Features
Here’s some other awesome stuff from the web this past week!
- I love the personal site from AetherAnne. There’s a great medieval whimsiness to it.
- A writeup on how Sara crafted a neat custom <hr>. (Kinda like I did!)
- One of my favorite IndieWebbers, fLaMEd was recently featured on People & Blogs!
Fediverse
What makes a social network “good” in the eyes of the media, or corporations, or for some people, is often distilled into a single metric, monthly active users. At some point in the lifetime of social media, this notion of an all-encompassing “town square” became the most important thing. But I mean look around, have you been on the Internet lately (or ever)? Having a little (or a lot) less exposure to the enormity of cyberspace, and to the vitriolic masses that reside there seems pretty nice. With the Fediverse you can build a little feed just for you. The volume of interactions you have there will pale in comparison to the busy street corners of the larger platforms, but in exchange you get more meaningful conversations and relationships. Not unlike the real, physical world, you’ll have to take greater care in finding people and connecting with them. Everyone’s not in one place, you have to spend time meeting people, exploring, sharing, and being a citizen. In time though, you can build a comfy feed that brings you what you want, and nothing more. So come on over, the Fediverse is always open!
Cybersecurity
This cyberweekly is a bit all over the place. Dropping into listicle mode… ⬇️
- 🔑 As if understanding and deploying Passkeys wasn’t adventure enough, here’s the Passkey Path.
- 🤖 ExploitBench is a leaderboard/benchmarking system for AI bug hunters.
- 📒 While you still can, peruse The Risks Digest (by Peter G. Neumann).
- 🥶 Take some of the heat off your dev teams with this resource for dependency cooldowns.
- 🦈 Because yeah, these supply chain mega-campaigns are really picking up lately.
- 🔁 Haven’t you heard? Relay attacks are cool again.
Thanks for reading Scrolls! It’s friday, I am le tired… 🥱
