While Mastodon promises to solve some of the problems of centralized social networking – and may inevitably create new ones in the process – the sudden popularity of the ActivityPub protocol led me to reflect about how I want to partake in that. I ended up connecting this blog to the Fediverse […]
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Ah, this is just down my alley regarding technology non-use, luddism and related perspectives: This article tells the stories of people who consciously resist new technology in favour of older versions. The reasons are manifold, but a lot of it has to do with ownership, control, or nostalgia […]
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Browser manufacturers are in a constant battle of finding ways to protect users from being fingerprinted by websites they use. I just recently was very surprised to visit an online store (with emptied local storage, all cookies deleted, and trackers efficiently blocked) which instantly recommended […]
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As much as I am fascinated by the subject, and passionate about promoting that it is an abuse of designers’ power of influencing people’s behaviour, I deeply dislike the term “dark patterns”. Enough so, to dedicate an entire page in my resources on the topic. What I really […]
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MastodonDataProtectionGuidance
codeberg.org 
A collection of guides, templates, and tools for Mastodon and other Fediverse Admins / users, written from a data protection perspective.
This repository by Carey Lening, Data Protection Consultant, researcher, and Mastodon instance admin, aims to be a Data […] -
Robin Berjon points out how having Tweets embedded in websites is – like most “embeds” – a risk in terms of security (for the end users, mostly, but in theory also for a website itself), but also carries the risk of extracting meaning from articles should they really vanish into the […]
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Aral Balkan presents an example how the massive amount of communication involved with federation can turn operating a Mastodon instance into a liability.
[…] you see, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. And, on the fediverse today, that appears to be “engagement when […]
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Charts.css
chartscss.org 
Charts.css is a modern CSS framework. It uses CSS utility classes to style HTML elements as charts.
A brilliant idea: Charts.css turns semantically marked-up data tables into visualizations using various types of graphs, and all with pure CSS. This makes for lighter code […] -
Mandated by law under certain circumstances, but always good practice and a sign of inclusive thinking, accessibility statements (and placing them in a navigation scheme) may sometimes be considered merely a compliance chore rather than a subject of good design themselves. In an article on the Deque blog, Patrick Sturdivant highlights a personal perspective on how important a part of UX such statement can be.
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My Grandma is Not a Cyborg
futuress.org 
The story of early fighter planes designed for an idealized body type leading to about 90% of accidents due to operational issues is well known to anybody who ever attended a university class in usability, ergonomics, or “human factors”. Sinem Görücü tells a similar tale through her […]
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Punkt. MP02 Pigeon
punkt.ch 
The Punkt MP02 is marketed as a “voicephone” – a 4G mobile device that is stripped down to the very bare functionalities of voice, text and serving as a hotspot for a tablet or PC. It’s not just a cool example of a very minimalist product for people mindful of their relation to […]
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Privacy Pledge
privacy-pledge.com 
Meet the Privacy Pledge – a simple list of five key principles, designed as a commitment by those signing it:
We, the undersigned, commit ourselves to rebuilding the internet so that it returns to the ideals set out by its founders: a democratic platform designed to facilitate the […]
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Joschi Kuphal: #Unicode #LinkedIn #assistive
linkedin.com 
“Formatting” social media posts by using special unicode characters (that, for example, look like bold text but aren’t) is one of the most common ways to create completely inaccessible social media posts. Joschi Kuphal’s screencast demonstrates the problem:
Most […]
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Privacy as Product
berjon.com 
Privacy is a strategic product concern that is key to digital businesses and should be treated as such, not a nuisance to be lawyered away with wobbly incantations.
Robin Berjon’s critique of the “underdeveloped and unsophisticated approach to privacy and data […] -
Growing up in Munich in the 1980s meant to be surrounded by graphic design from the Ulm School of Design: the corporate branding of Lufthansa, Braun and others, but most prominently the iconic work surrounding any remnants of the 1972 Olympics. An exhibition at Berlin’s Bröhan Museum marks […]
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“McLuhan’s view is that mediums matter more than content; it’s the common rules that govern all creation and consumption across a medium that change people and society. Oral culture teaches us to think one way, written culture another. Television turned everything into […]
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The Optional Chaining Operator, 'Modern' Browsers, and My Mom
blog.jim-nielsen.com 
These are the kind of stories that would deserve so much more space in education and practice of technologists:
The real-life impact of our technical decisions really hit home to me once again: my Mom had trouble volunteering and participating in her local community because somebody […]
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This is not the first report of how social networking sites run opaque “research” experiments on their users, and it is not going to be the last. But turning the users of your service into lab rats without them being aware of it, with potentially life-altering outcomes […]
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Accessibility is systemic
adactio.com 
Jeremy Keith making the case for promoting accessibility on a system level:
Imagine someone who’s an expert at accessibility: they know all the details of WCAG and ARIA. Now put that person into an organisation that doesn’t prioritise accessibility. They’re going to have a hard […]
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Hands-On Sustainable Web Design
branch.climateaction.tech 
As an assumed 3.8% of global greenhouse emissions stem from “the digital world” (hard to define that more precisely, I assume), Laurent Devernay’s primer on how to make web design more sustainable is probably not the cure, but an important step in the right direction. Saving a bit […]
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Different brains are beautiful because they think differently on a whole other level.
What an intro for an article about UX for neurodiverse users! Different brains are beautiful indeed. This article by Ashlea McKay starts from some key facts about ASD and then builds a […] -
This must be the most thorough walk-through on accessible navigation patterns on the interwebs?
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Minimum Viable Data Collection
hidde.blog The question all website owners should be asking, is: do we really, really need these trackers to exist on our pages? Can’t we do the things we want to do without trackers?
Hidde de Vries presents simple thought exercises to reflect on tracking. He starts with […] -
Why your website should work without Javascript
endtimes.dev 
For some reason, the myth that users without JavaScript don't exist, refuses to die. So thank you to the author of this comprehensive collection of both statistics (1% of millions is still a lot of people!) and – more importantly – all the other reasons that may, even temporarily, turn web users into "users with no JavaScript". -
Stumblizer
indieseek.xyz In the good old days, there was no full-text search for the web. It was all about directories; phonebook-like services (Yahoo being the most prolific, I assume) that categorized the web. Indieseek.xyz continues this tradition, with a strong Indieweb flavour. But the most fun feature of the catalog […]
theguardian.com 
ctrl.blog 
amyhupe.co.uk 
ar.al 
nytimes.com 
nytimes.com 
uxmastery.com 
web.dev