Welcome to volume forty-five of Scrolls, a newsletter for sharing cool stuff from the IndieWeb, Fediverse & Cybersecurity realms. This week we’re doing whatever we want on the web (because we can), and then maybe from there we’ll walk straight into the woods.
IndieWeb
What’re your hopes for the future of the web? Where do you see it going? Is the future something open? Will it be something that is good? Would you believe me if I told you that the web (at least some part of it) could be exactly what you want it to be? What you make of it? This isn’t hyperbole. You can just go do things… on the web… to make it yours.
On that note. Here’s some stuff you can go do right now: Memorialize someone with X-Clicks-Overhead, make your site more accessible, go on a blogging adventure or just post something daily. It’s fun!
☕️ Keeping what I’ve said above in mind, let me weigh in a bit on this whole “buy me a coffee” debate 😄. I’m going to (probably poorly) synthesize/summarize the opposing sides of this conversation. The original post bemoans the annoyance of rampant capitalization and constant advertisements. Yeah, I get that. Especially with the abundant nature of Substack and other similar platforms constantly modal-begging for subs and money, I get the fatigue here.
On the flipside, you have things like Brennan’s take, where he makes the case for mutual aid, supporting indie creators and community in general. He admits there’s some bias in his stance given he himself makes a living blogging and thus depends on this sort of support. But you see, that’s awesome! It’s amazing that he can do that. Not everyone can, and there are many who could, but don’t. But you wouldn’t know unless you tried, and speaking for myself, I get a lot of joy from reading what he has to say. So I’m glad that there are people willing to send him a coffeesworth now and again so that he may use his talents for blogging, instead of whatever else he’d be forced to fallback to inorder to survive in this crazy world.
But y’know, setting either one of these arguments to the side for a second, I think the web — our web, this “indie” web, is one where we have freedom to express ourselves without boundaries. So yeah, just go do what you want.
Small Web Finds and Features
My favorite part of Scrolls: here’s some cool stuff I found this week!
- 📄 Learn to cut and fold an 8-page Zine
- 🚫🤖 Agents not welcome! Introducing AAA-NO-SLOP.md
- 🥘 GitHub’s cooked, try gitdot!
- 🏆 Go nominate something you like on the web for a Tiny Award!
- ✈️ savearoundtrip taught me a little about HTTP/3
- 📖 Old Book Illustrations is fun to click-about
- 🦡 RootBadger is attempting to mix old-world, usenet-stylings with modern socials
- 🌷 Stroll through a beautiful little digital garden
- 🥁 It’s time to vibe, check out c3sets
Quick note here: I know that “AI” employs a lot of emoji-laden list-ey responses (like what you see above), so if you’ve ever thought that someething here resembled that I understand. I hope it’s obvious that nothing I write (or find) here uses AI in any capacity. I like emojis, and I kinda recently learned about em-dashes. AI isn’t taking either of those away from me. 😄
Fediverse
Jus’ a bit here…
Yawnbox.eu has some guidance for defending the (Mastodon) user & Harmony is a new federated chat platform on the scene. (I haven’t tested/vetted it yet so tread carefully)
Cybersecurity
Infosec survival tips from the front lines…
Thanks for reading Scrolls!
ℹ️ Another quick note! Scrolls will be on a 3 week hiatus starting next week. In that time though, I’ll still be (doing my best) keeping an eye on things across the web. Scrolls will return during >Shark Week 2026 in July! Bye now 👋
