Original subtitles

Bienvenidos y bienvenidos. Este es akasha

Hub, una comunidad en un espacio independiente

autofinanciado de mentes inquietas,

curiosas, profesionales que quieren cambiar el mundo,

quiere cambiar el status quo y están aquí

para proponer respuesta, no sólo quejas sino

respuestas a cómo está oyendo la sociedad hoy

en día. Sin más, creo que voy a pasar la palabra

directamente a Chris, que nos va a introducir

el tema de hoy. Un aplauso para Chris. Gracias.

Thank you Akasha Hub for hosting this event. Thank you all for being here.

My name is kris de decker and I'm the founder of Lowtech magazine and you may have

heard about the website in recent years because it's solar powered.

That's mainly why people know it these days.

It goes offline when it's bad weather.

It kind of summarizes the whole philosophy of Lowtech magazine in the sense that

Lowtech magazine is a journalistic medium

that is critical about technological progress.

Rather than following the newest innovations,

what we do is look to the past for inspiration.

The website is actually, obviously, it has...

high tech components, but it's operated as

if it's an old-fashioned sailboat or windmill

in the sense that it depends on the weather.

But I'm not going to talk so much about the website as it is now, but how it was.

And that's the next slide.

So this is a low-tech magazine in 2007.

So I went to the Internet Archive, and this

is one of the earliest screenshots I could

find in the Wayback machine.

So it's from December 2008.

And this website was built on a blog platform called Taipat.

So it was a blog, and I was a blogger, and I was part of the blogosphere.

And it's been years since I introduced myself being a blogger.

I got kind of lost that people don't call themselves bloggers anymore.

But actually, after tonight, I may introduce myself again as a blogger.

And the low-tech magazine that you saw in

2008 was built in a time before social media.

So it was the Internet that was.

It's no longer the Internet that is.

And the idea for this event came actually from another blog.

It's called From Jason.

And Jason, I assume it's written by a called Jason, but we never know for sure.

Jason wrote an article asking where have all the websites gone.

And in it, he takes us back to 2009, to the

period before the social media, the period

when I found the low-tech magazine.

Jason tells us that there is good news and there is bad news.

And the good news is that the websites have not disappeared.

They are still there.

The problem is that we cannot find them anymore.

And the point that Jason makes is that why

can't we find them anymore is that humans

no longer curate the Internet.

So we have outsourced the process of discovery to corporate algorithms.

So what does that mean?

Well, nowadays when you get on the Internet,

you usually go to social media and the content

that is presented to you is selected by an algorithm.

And that algorithm is programmed by companies

who want to make money, who want to get your

data and so on.

And these algorithms are not made to make you smarter.

On the contrary, they are made to keep you scrolling.

So every platform, their aim is basically to keep you on their platform for as long

as possible.

And then you get things like this.

Whenever in my case when somebody sends me a

YouTube movie and I watch it and that movie

can be interesting, but then three hours later, that is what I see.

And I somehow end up always watching the most dangerous roads in the world.

The plane crashes.

There's a car crashes and so on.

But I would never by myself go like, okay,

let's watch some three hours of the most dangerous

roads in the world.

There's no way I would do that.

So it's the algorithm pushing me there.

And after two or three hours, I'm totally

wasted and I'm not really exactly happier.

On the contrary, I feel like what did I do with my time?

I'm wasting my time.

So how did it work before?

There's some people here who are obviously

too young to have known the internet before

social media.

So they may wonder like, well, yeah, how else would you do it?

But there was actually another system, the

human curated system that worked very well.

And it had some elements that were really important.

And the first is a concept called Link Love.

Link Love is basically, there's a beautiful

demonstration here in Jason's blog post because

he says that the websites are still there and he says they're amazing even.

And he puts Lowtech magazine there.

And what happens is that when I look at my

visitor statistics, I suddenly see all this

traffic coming from a blog called From Jason and I don't know the guy.

So I go have a look.

What usually happens if somebody links to

you, they are kind of interested in similar

things than you are.

And so I found this blog post and then I

posted it myself on my website and then I made a

whole event about it.

So I kind of returned the Link Love.

Another component of the early internet was the block roll.

And a block roll is basically a collection

of links to sites that you like to read, that

you think your readers would like.

And you usually put it in the site column of your blog.

And this is another website I run and it still has a block roll.

It hasn't been updated for years.

So I went through all the blocks, like half of them have disappeared obviously.

And then the third part was the RSS reader.

And this is not mine because I stopped using it unfortunately.

But this is the example of a RSS reader.

What it does basically, how it works, and

some people may still use it, they still exist,

is that you put all these blocks that you want to follow.

You put them in your RSS reader.

And every time that there is an update on

one of these blocks, you get a note of the

new blog post.

So that means you don't have to, every morning

you don't have to go through your whole block

roll to see if somebody published something new.

With these three elements, you can actually

have a communication network that can do everything

that a social media platform does.

With the exception that there's no platform, no corporation in between.

It's just between people.

So in the old system, like we could for

example, rather than making a profile every one of

us on a social media platform, if each of

us would make their own block, put a block

roll of the people they are following or they

want to follow or they want to get in contact

with, then you put them on in your RSS reader.

You see the updates.

If there's an update that you like

especially and you want to share it, you make your own

blog post about it and you link back to the

source that you want your followers to read.

So essentially you can do everything that social media does.

You can do it with this blogosphere idea that we had before.

So until about 2012, 2013, almost all the

traffic on Lowtech magazine came from human

curated blogs.

And like I said, I went through my block

roll and to see which ones were still alive and

some are still alive.

Like this is one, Ranpriyar, he's been around longer than I am actually.

And it's also a good example because it's the typical personal block.

The guy, when I started following him, he

wrote about technology, energy, stuff like

that, that completely changed.

He's now writing about LSD mainly, but I'm kind of like, okay, he's a good writer.

He's a funny writer.

And we exchanged a lot of link love among each other.

This is another example.

So blogs were not all personal products.

So you also had community blogs and this is one of the ones that have survived.

So I think it's 20 years old by now, Arts and Letters Daily.

It's just a curated blog of interesting content on other sites.

Kottke is another one who survived 25 years.

They're even advertising this as a kind of a look how long we've been here.

So again, all this guy does basically is

surfing the internet, looking for interesting

stuff and then posting it on his blog.

And then there's Slashdot.

So you may wonder like, okay, like this

blog is fair, cool, but how do you get like the

tens of thousands of visitors that you can

get through social media if a post goes viral?

Well, you go to Slashdot, for example.

If you see the date, December 2007, this is

like more or less one month after I started

the English Low-Tech magazine.

And some morphovar kind of published this on the Slashdot community blog.

And I lost, I don't know exactly how many,

but it was like 40,000, 50,000 visitors in

one day that came to the blog.

And it's really kind of, it was the kickstart of Low-Tech magazine after that.

Like it was one month old and it already had a lot of traffic.

Morphovar was me.

I put my own post there, which is not

really how it works, but somehow you have to make

a start if you start a new medium.

And of course you can do this forever, but I hope nobody of Slashdot is here.

Next post, the oil drum was another

community blog that was very important in those days,

which had a lot of traffic.

But that worked in a different way, and

that's the kind of the concept of the guest post.

So rather than posting an article on your

own blog, you could be asked by one of these

community blogs to actually republish something on their blog.

And again, that brought a lot of traffic.

It makes you, yeah, lots of people get to

know you and you get like, I don't know, there

were like 500 comments on this article,

which was obviously not the case on my own blog.

This was kind of very short internet how it was before social media.

But then around 2010, I mean, there was

not abrupt change between the old and the new

internet obviously, but around 2010, 2011,

it became more and more, the traffic from

Low-Tech magazine came more and more from social media.

And one of the big traffic sources was Facebook.

And what you do then, of course, if you see

like, okay, traffic is now coming from those

sites, you start to build up a following there.

And so this, I made the screenshot yesterday.

So I got to 15,000 followers.

And then on Twitter, I got like, I don't know, 13,000.

And before that, there was actually

StumbleUpon, and then you have Instagram more recently,

and so on.

So content producers like me, what they do,

they spend a lot of effort in building a following

on the social media.

But then around 2017, Facebook decided that I

can only reach my followers if I pay Facebook.

And so what they actually did is they sell their followers back to me.

So I spent all this effort in creating these 15,000 followers.

And now, so as a test, I put this event in

front of the eyes of my 15,000 followers,

and I got two likes.

So that's all.

So what does this mean?

It's like, yeah, Facebook just maybe shows it to 10 people.

And if I want to show it to the rest, there's the button, boost the event.

And if I want to reach my 15,000 followers, it costs me around 500 euro per post.

So obviously, I'm not going to do that.

And so, yeah, I'm basically back to where I am.

I have a blog and I have a newsletter, and

you will have to look very hard on my website

to find a link to my social media because I don't want you to go there.

Because I know that by now that whenever I

build a following on a social media platform,

it's just temporary.

And so the only effort, what I try to do is

make people subscribe to my newsletter, my

email newsletter, because I own that.

Nobody can take it away from me.

Next one.

And then I have the luck that I have a platform.

So I kind of, throughout these years, like

17 years of blogging, I kind of had to move

from one social media platform to another.

But my blog was always the foundation.

The problem is that many content producers

these days don't even bother to have their

own blog.

And they build their content straight on the platform.

And this is an example.

wrath of Gnon is like an account on Twitter that I like a lot.

And so this guy has no website.

He has nothing.

He just has his Twitter account.

And I know other people who do it on

Facebook, for instance, there's many people doing it

on Instagram.

Well, one day, Twitter is going to change the rules.

Maybe they do the same as Facebook, like,

hey, Mr. Rat of Gnon, you still want to reach

your 150,000 followers.

You can pay.

And what you can do then, nothing.

You lose everything.

You lose your followers.

You cannot-- it's not like an email newsletter.

You cannot just download your followers and

take them to another social platform or your

newsletter.

You've lost everything that you invested 10 years of time in.

So these platforms, these social media

platforms are, in my view, bad for those who visit the

content consumers because you all get the same crap.

So you get basically-- we all see the same content also.

In the early days, like the 2000s, everyone

was looking at very different things on the

internet.

We all see the same stuff, like the things that go viral, the 4U news feed.

But for content producers, it's also very tricky in the sense that, yeah, it's very

hard to build a reliable business on top of a

platform that can change the rules any moment.

So yeah, this is a bit of a short

introduction of this kind of the-- make people be aware

that there was a completely different

internet before social media in the 2000s and that

we are now in a totally different era.

And there's two people more that come to have a talk.

It's Tim and Ruh.

And they are more kind of going deeper into the possibilities of what we could do.

Because of course, I'm just-- in the

tradition of Low-Tech magazine, I'm like, if I want

to find a solution for something, I just go

look to the past and I say, look, the solution

is there.

We just have to go back.

But probably there are ways to kind of go

forward rather than go back, but in a different

way.

So I don't know who wants to take the mic now, Roel.

So I give the word to Roel Roscam Abbin.

He's a researcher into alternative platforms.

He also worked on the Solar Power website.

Thank you.

So yeah, so the whole idea of this evening is

to look at which ideas from the past internet

can inform the internet of tomorrow,

looking specifically at kind of the issues that we

have with the current platforms, both as end users or as professional users.

And I'm going to talk a bit about a concept which is called online federation.

And this is also the subject of my PhD research in interaction design.

So I'm normally a doctoral student in Malmö.

These months I'm now doing an exchange

here at the WOC in Barcelona, where people are

doing very interesting work on alternative platforms.

And so, as I said, in my doctoral research,

I look at online federation as an old idea

how online systems should work and that I think would be an interesting provocation

for the discussion for later.

But first to make the point, I need to expand a bit more on...

So to make the point, I need to share some

more background on basically what Chris was

explaining on the problematics of the

platforms and why they have becoming worse and why this

creates an opportunity, I would argue, for

old ideas to change the way we do things in

the future.

And so one particular theory, which I think

is rather compelling, is a theory by Canadian

sci-fi writer and blogger Corey Doctorow, which he calls "ensitification".

And the idea behind it is that platforms

as intermediaries between different parties,

for example, writers and their audience,

because let's not forget blogspot and WordPress are

also at the end of the day platforms.

They are often useful and necessary.

But in most contemporary online platforms,

due to the desire of their parent companies

to earn ever more money, a particular dynamic has

set in, which Corey Doctorow calls "ensitification".

And to quote him, he says, "It's a three-stage process.

First platforms are good for their users,

then they abuse their users to make things

better for their business customers, and

finally they abuse their business customers to claw

back all the value, so that means all the

revenue that's being created for themselves,

and then they die."

So the basic premise is that platforms subsidize different classes of users.

First end users, and these are people like

you and me, are enticed with cool features,

such as being able to find all your high

school friends on one social network, being able

to store extremely large amounts of data for

free, giving you a massive audience to publish

to, sharing your account with friends and

family so they also can watch the same series

as you.

All these kinds of benefits that we find

in platforms are actually being subsidized.

Once end users are convinced about the

platform, so that means once we're enticed into the

Facebooks and the Netflixs and the Google

search and whatnot, they start to subsidize

features for business users, such as, for

example, Chris or Tim, who will speak later.

In this process, most often, according to

Doctorow, the platform becomes worse for the

end users.

For instance, what they might do is start

collecting a lot of data on end users so that

they're able to accurately target them with

advertisement, and the platform subsidizes

behavior by making those advertisements very

effective or cheap, or by paying the people

that have those advertisements on their

websites, paying them a lot of money for every click

they get.

By subsidizing this, this becomes

interesting to these business users and convincing them

to stay there as well.

In order to do these kinds of things, they

necessarily need to make things worse for

users, the end users, such as, for example,

showing more advertisements in the timeline,

so sponsored content rather than the

original things you signed up to see, so that's the

kind of algorithmic curation that Chris was talking about.

Once you have the business users convinced

and they have become dependent, you can stop

subsidizing those and start actually making a lot of money.

For business users, it means that rather than

having a system where you can reach everyone

that you follow, you require increasing

amounts of advertising spent to reach your actual

source, like Chris showed us.

Also a lot of these business users, they

cannot move away because all the end users are on

this platform, so you're kind of holding each other hostage, as he calls it.

Effectively slowly the platform becomes

worse for all groups until some people start to

leave, then more start to leave, and then

eventually the platform collapses on itself.

This is a slow process, but it's happening nonetheless.

However, where does that leave you with all

your followers, with all your creative work,

with your audience, and these kinds of things?

At the core of this process is the

financing model for platforms where venture capital

investment needs extremely high returns,

creating a lot of pressures for this process.

This pressure in return creates very large

platforms that everyone is on, because everyone

is on it, no one can leave, and these

platforms become powerful enough to change the rule

of the games, what it means to be on those platforms.

Eventually in a period like now, when platforms

actually need to start making real money rather

than subsidizing everything, you see that a lot of changes are happening quickly.

You can no longer share your Netflix password

or your Netflix account with your neighbors.

People are saying you cannot store as much

free stuff anymore, so all these platforms

are slowly rolling down that offer.

That kind of coincided with the reasons

why this is happening, with the fact that for

a very long time, if you had a lot of money

and you wanted to borrow more money, it was

basically free to do so.

This is a graph of the interest rates of the Federal Reserve in the US.

You can in a way see that the platform era

that started around 2007, some people say,

kind of coincides with when interest rates were super low.

There was a lot of money to go around to do all the subsidizing.

As interest rates go up, money becomes more expensive.

You have to stop subsidizing, you have to

start asking for more money for everything

you do, and basically platforms become worse for people.

Then the question becomes, what if the role

of a platform was not to extract rents from

people and businesses that are using it, but

instead to just connect them in the different

ways they want?

For that to happen, though, platforms have

to become much less powerful intermediaries

than they are now.

They can no longer change the network to their own advantage.

Now after having set out this economic

context of platforms, we can now return to one of

these old ideas for the internet.

What if platforms were not very powerful,

because there would be many smaller ones that

fulfilled the role of one platform now?

What if instead of one Facebook, we had

10,000 smaller Facebooks that could set their own

rules, have their own features, so that if

you don't like the advertisement on one, you

could move to the other?

If you don't want to be on a corporate social

network, you can join one that's done by your

local association.

If you're on one that is disappearing for

whatever reason, you can move your followers

elsewhere.

All of this without losing your existing connections.

Before we had platforms, we had protocols,

and perhaps after platforms, we should have

protocols once again.

So one place where this experiment is

happening of protocols over platforms is in a social

network called the Fediverse.

Others they call it the federated social web.

But both names point to the fact that it works

around online federation, a system where multiple

providers make up a communications network and share the power as they do so.

Online federation is the technology of yesterday's internet.

This is a map of different social media

platforms with different kind of federation technologies

that connect them.

The first internet systems were built around this way of working.

The email system, for example, is such an example.

And one of the reasons why email didn't yet

go the same way as other platforms is really

because it is in the platform.

It is a set of protocols.

Microsoft and Google, of course, control

the majority of email and are trying really

hard to turn it into a platform.

But so far they haven't managed.

Which is one of the reasons why Chris, when

he needs to abandon Twitter, can still point

to his followers, to his newsletter as a kind

of technology that persisted, that was there

before the platform era and will be there probably long after.

So the Fediverse is an attempt to build a

different internet where the platforms that

are part of it are less powerful and more useful.

And as I said, the idea of the Fediverse is to build it up of multiple providers.

So to give some example, how you would

visualize such a thing, on the right you could imagine

a network diagram of something like a

Twitter where everyone is part of the same Twitter.

And on the left you could imagine the diagram

within the Fediverse where people join different

smaller clusters that together form their own network.

So each of these providers is run by a distinct entity.

It could be an association, social network

cooperative, an individual volunteer, or even

a company.

They each run a small part of the network and each needs the others to be useful.

However, at the same time, each of them can

also decide what their part of the network

is about, how things are done, what things should look like, or how money is made.

These providers can be very big, home to

millions, or very small, home to a single individual.

And if they disagree with each other on

policies, they can also cut the connections between

themselves.

And if people want to switch from one to the other, they can.

Because it is technology of yesterday's

internet, we to a very large degree already know how

we can build these systems.

It's a one advantage.

We don't need new technologies for this.

No blockchains, no cryptocurrencies are necessary.

But at the same time, there are still many things that we need to find out.

Large platforms, before they increasingly

became bad, as I mentioned before, did some

things very well and also fixed some real

problems that we had in the internet before

the platforms.

They made it easy to find people and things that people wanted to find.

They are good at being a trusted

intermediary between, for example, a buyer and a seller.

If you are on Facebook Marketplace, you

don't need to doubt whether Facebook Marketplace

itself will directly scam you.

They allow for different ways of making money online.

They allow you to pay the people that you actually want to pay online.

The Fediverse, as it stands now, is not yet good at these things.

But it's also not sure whether it will ever be.

But that's also only because few people

are dedicated to working on these problems at

this moment.

And I think with more experimentation,

more money and more attention is a good way of

finding out.

What happens when instead of recommendation

algorithms, we can rely again on other people

curating cool stuff?

So if you're interested in this kind of thing,

where do you focus your experimentation, your

money and your attention?

The largest, most well-known Fediverse

platform is called Mastodon, which is like Twitter

in terms of features.

It's made for short messages.

The microblog, where you can just share the

interesting link and not have to be an actual

writer.

That's the most famous one.

And it's also the one that got people excited about these ideas again.

Even WordPress, the good old blogging

software, now supports becoming part of this Fediverse.

And in that sense, it has potential to become

the next generation RSS, where within one platform,

people can follow and interact with your

blog from other Fediverse applications, because

RSS was only about reading, but not about commenting, for example.

So the federated open web is the way

forward, or at least an important threat to the big

platforms, which we can gather from the fact

that Facebook has shown interest in it historically.

So this is leaked from court proceedings,

where already in 2012, they were never afraid

of another large social media.

What they were afraid of is all the smaller ones.

But also, Facebook's parent company is now

launching a tool which will connect to this

Fediverse.

I don't think it's overall positive

development, but it shows how the model is something the

big platforms are forced to consider.

So large news organizations, governmental

agencies, cultural institutions, scientists,

directors, are already trying it out, either

by becoming their own provider or by joining

another provider.

For each person that tries it out and adds

their value to the network, the network becomes

more valuable.

You are probably not on it, because your friends are not on it.

But your friends are not on it, because you are not on it.

So how do we break the circle?

I don't know, but I think it's important to try.

And at the very least, one can realize that

one can be on, let's say, Instagram, as well

as on these other platforms at the same time,

and be more mindful of where literally you're

adding value to the platform.

So to conclude, to be clear, I don't talk about these Fediverse platforms because I

think they're perfect or they're the

solution, because they are a way to concretely try and

work on a different internet for tomorrow.

It's one of the few ways that we currently

have to try something else, or to at least

to be aware of something else before

inevitably the platform that you're currently depending

on will also go to shit.

This is my contribution.

I explicitly didn't talk that much about

specific platforms, because there's people from the

local Barcelona Fediverse community that have weekly meetups.

So if you're interested in these kind of

ideas, I can really recommend going to one of these

meetups.

And yeah, and if you want to support the work

that Chris and me are doing on Low Tech magazine

or hosting these kinds of evenings, please

become a member of the Low Tech magazine Patreon

or buy one of the books.

And if you want to reach me, you can reach

me on historic protocols and the protocol

of tomorrow.

So thank you.

And now to Tim.

It's really nice.

Okay, I'm going to explain a little bit what

I do in my work, and then I will speak about

the 128 kilobyte challenge, which is amazing.

So stay tuned.

I'm Tim.

I tell you a little bit about me, okay?

I teach creative coding, like programming for artists, designers.

I do this in many different contexts, like workshops, online, offline.

But my main job is to build an e-learning

platform for creative coding on my website,

timrodenbroker.de.

So I teach mostly in the realms of graphic design.

So people that are actually anyway connected

with design, visual design, UI, UX, that kind

of stuff.

So I think it's super interesting to question technology.

And through programming, we actually get

kind of a glimpse into how the things work that

we use on a daily basis, right?

And I think this is super, super interesting and motivates me a lot.

I really burn for this and it's a lot of fun and I really enjoy it.

So I got this kind of motto that I use internally

for myself, which is actually demystify technology

to show what it actually consists of, right?

So we are actually bombarded with marketing messages.

I don't know if you saw these recent AI, Sora,

Gemini ads that try to sell us like the super,

super high tech stuff.

It's, yeah, we are actually very influenced,

I think, also by the positive vibes that these

companies try to plant into our heads.

I think demystify technology is a nice way

of putting what I try with my teaching in

creative coding.

Yeah, we have a problem because programming

is something or it changed a lot in the last

years, to be honest, but actually

programming has ever been something like that, what the

nerds does and now everything goes no code

and we don't have to think about what we're

actually doing there anymore, which is a big problem, I think.

So yeah, making programming cool is something I find super interesting.

Like how can we make it interesting for people

that actually just would like to use something

that is no code, for example?

I love to work with limitations.

That's actually something I'm writing about

right now and limitations are really, really

powerful also as a creative, let's say, framework, right?

Okay, I'm not going too deep into this.

So this is the programming language I teach.

It's called processing.

It's made for artists and designers and yeah, it's fun.

It's quite easy.

It's very close to how visually oriented

people think and it's a beautiful tool to teach also

to create quite amazing artworks, whatever kind of tools.

Super nice.

So it started offline.

These are some recent photos, but I just wanted to illustrate what I did.

I think 2018 was my first teaching assignment since then.

I actually did a lot of stuff because there were many people asking for this.

I gave lots of talks, sometimes on big stages.

I was quite different in this time, to be honest.

I started to think completely different about what I'm doing today.

This, for example, was a design conference

and I was actually praising in a way that

everybody should learn to code now, which is wrong.

But yeah, I learned a lot about myself and

also about my confirmation bias I was in.

Anyway, this was my second class in Germany, design and university.

This is a workshop I did with my friend,

Martin Lourenz, here at Power in Barcelona lately.

When COVID happened, something really, really strange happened.

All the universities were forced to do everything online.

I thought, when everything is going

digital, I built my own online school because I was

super frustrated by the rigid and very conservative design academies in Germany.

I was thinking, how could it look like?

The thing is that when you build an online

school, one thing is amazing, you can reach

way more people.

When I teach in a class in Germany, in a small

city, and it's a graphic design course, there

are maybe five people that are really

interested in what I'm doing, but 20 who think, "I don't

have to do this.

It's not really important."

If you think it globally as an internet

platform, you can actually reach everyone who wants

to learn this.

This is amazing, I think.

I did workshops online at that time, but it's also crap, to be honest.

I don't know, I learned a lot.

Online has big limitations.

But exactly, I already said this, I wanted

to reach people beyond the dusty German design

programs.

If that worked, I will more explain you now

exactly how my platform architecture looks

like and how it grew over the last years.

First of all, I have this website.

It's my fortress, I would say, because there's all my content.

I was always aware of this problem that when

you have social media and put everything there,

it's going to be lost, it's going to be gone.

Because I used Tumblr in the beginning, it

was my sketchbook for some time, and then

I think, "Who bought Tumblr?"

It was just disappearing on very crappy.

I just built this website with WordPress.

There I have my online courses I offer, which

are actually only video courses, as you know

them from LinkedIn Learning or Domestika.

It's a terrible company, by the way.

I hosted all this stuff on my own website.

I always tried to build a platform.

I never made a course for any other platform, which paid out very, very well.

I forgot a blog.

I interview many amazing people because this platform also got known at some point.

I do this now since, I think, five years.

I do interviews.

I also write.

My new blog is called

downgrade.timburtenboker.de, which is actually about limiting limitations.

Now I also create a platform that I want to

present to you in a moment called the 128-kilobyte

challenge.

Yes, everything is working with Patreon.

For Patreon, well, I have got mixed feelings.

Patreon made it possible that I built this.

I make my whole living out of it.

I even can sometimes hire freelancers to work for me, which is amazing.

Sometimes I teach.

Sometimes I do some freelance work, but I don't have to do this.

I have the whole time, the whole day, to work on

my teaching and on my ideas, which is absolutely

fantastic.

At the same time, this is also an

in-shitty-five platform because Patreon is going through

a weird phase with a lot of venture capital.

It's a disaster.

Anyway, it works.

Social media.

I always take this as my orientation to make

sure I'm not getting swamped away by messages.

I have a community on Discord, like a Discord

server, and also I have some other community

tools, but mostly it's Discord.

I keep myself out of the bottleneck by

having people there that are very helpful and help

also the beginners.

I create the courses.

The courses go to the person that does the course.

The person communicates with the community,

and I also communicate with the community,

but the people never communicate with me.

That makes sure I'm not the bottleneck and I have enough time to create my stuff.

There's this beautiful Discord server.

I don't know why they didn't send any

invoices to me because it's free and it works super

well to be honest.

It's amazing.

Probably at some point they will also

in-shitty-five, but at the moment it's really good.

There are, I think, 1,000 people or something.

I never checked this number exactly, but some time ago it was 1,000.

I used Tumblr many years ago.

It's dead, actually, but it's the first

stuff I did in my creative coding experiments are

visible on Tumblr.

I'm actually married to Instagram.

This is a big deal.

When Tumblr was dying, I was using

Instagram when it was still a photo platform to post

my experiments there because that's what I do.

I experiment a lot and try out new things and share my ideas.

The last years, Instagram became such a disaster with the reels.

When I opened the application, I got puppies and stuff I just don't want to see.

I like puppies, but not those.

It's also pretty much logged in.

I'm happy because the most important ideas also can be found on my blog.

This is very important.

Before I want to ask you, who uses Instagram on a daily basis?

Let's raise your hands, please.

Can you tell me about how much time you use Instagram in a day?

I know it's the double when you say this.

I know this.

10 minutes?

It works for you?

Who uses it more than 10 minutes?

Me too.

Let's say you use Instagram for an hour.

This is realistic because many people use Instagram for an hour per day.

Let's check how many data is going through

Instagram when we just scroll on desktop,

which is important with open developer tools.

I'm very sure that they are checking if we are actually spying on the website.

If we open developer tools, we get way more static content.

I made a test.

I don't have any proof for that, but I see that it's more static, less video.

Let's see what happens here.

It's very small, actually, but I'm just scrolling down my feed.

I think here's the number.

After one minute of scrolling, I have 300 megabytes going through the line.

It means when we use Instagram for one hour, you can imagine this is a lot of data.

This is a lot of data just for this addictive shit.

I think this is a disaster.

I feel also guilty of it because I'm the one who puts content to Instagram.

I'm the one who just makes things that

people watch and some people watch my videos.

It's a problem, I think.

I feel locked in, in a way.

I was just thinking and dreaming up

something that could maybe potentially rescue me.

It's just an utopia.

It's not there yet, but I wanted to show you what I built.

I think it's really interesting.

It's actually called the 128 kilobyte challenge.

These were the questions that I was just asking myself.

How could a dedicated social network for a creative coding community look like?

What would be a minimum viable product?

I don't know if you know this term, but it's just a minimum version of this thing.

What if an animated post size would be limited to 128 kilobytes?

That's not much, I tell you.

It's really, really just a little bit.

How does this limitation influence the identity of the platform?

This maybe is interesting for those who are

into graphic design because this is a term

like the identity.

What kind of identity does this platform get through this limitation?

I was used to limitations because Tumblr

restricted me to use two megabytes of gifs, which was

really, really not a lot.

Two megabytes for a post is just a little bit.

It's really difficult to stay in that range.

But 128 kilobytes, it's crazy.

I made this emoji to make you feel how I feel about this.

When I create these projects, I often work with a magic triangle.

This is a creativity technique I developed

when I was a bachelor student just on a sheet

of paper.

It's all about setting three restrictions,

three limitations to create a self-initiated

project.

The framework here is I want people to

post gifs with maximum 128 frames, maximum 128

colors.

I want them to use processing or P5JS, which are creative coding languages.

The rest is up to them.

This is a blown up gif with 36 kilobytes, which is quite good.

The thing is everything became super

blurred because these 128 pixels are super, super,

super small.

I found a CSS function that actually makes it sharp.

I don't know if you see the difference, but this is blurry and looks broken.

But as soon as you make it sharp, it becomes more interesting.

It becomes more like a conceptual thing.

That's something that I found super interesting.

These are already submissions by friends

who were invited to, from the creative coding

community to post something.

I forgot to put the names there.

Oh my goodness, this is bad.

Sorry.

But yeah, this is how it could look like.

These are objects to think with.

These are objects to work with as creative coders.

Really nice.

It's very connected to the demo scene.

Has anybody heard of this?

The demo scene was about creating super,

super small programs that create video graphics

for computer games.

Super low fidelity in the 90s.

It's a whole art community.

It's a big, big thing.

This is how it looks.

This is the 128 kilobyte challenge.

It's a feat with gifs.

It is a link.

There's a lot of link love going on here.

I'm linking the people that just submitted something.

There's something like a manual, like how it works so people can learn how they can

submit, how they can participate.

These are the rules.

At the moment, I do it with Google Forms, which is pretty much a hack.

They just can upload a gif, which is also

nice because I can make sure that the quality

of the submission stays in a specific level.

They don't have the power to submit it themselves.

There's still a curational process going on.

I'm thinking of asking some of my friends

and peers to help me with this, to also build

this kind of firewall because I was getting

a lot of crap already in the last days since

I promoted this.

We were thinking, wow, because he makes lots

of these high tech VR experiences, web, XR,

and stuff.

He's very, very good in webGL.

We were thinking, what if we create a gallery

with dimensions of 128 x 128 voxels that people

could walk through in the internet browser

where we could hang these gifs and make an

interactive super lo-fi exhibition?

I don't know if that's a good idea, but I

just put this video inside the presentation

as well.

Yeah, exactly.

Imagine, even also, you go to the exhibition

and you will be dropped out in 128 seconds,

which would be nice.

That's it.

Gracias.

This is my website.

Thanks.

Questions?

Hi.

My question is directed at you, or you, I guess.

I completely agree with your analysis, but

I do also want to ask if this, especially

when we talk about federated platforms, there

seems to be a challenge of usability for non-technical

users, which is pretty hard to overcome.

I'm a Macedon, but when I talk to people

of why they should be a Macedon, they mostly

don't care.

Maybe this is because platforms have been

good to users and things will change and they

will start caring, but I think it's also

because generally, a lot of people don't want to think

about whether a platform is federated or not.

It might not be their highest priority.

I do wonder, why doesn't everybody host

their own website at home on their hardware that

they own with a solar panel?

Why does everybody just go and open a website on WordPress?

Because it's easier.

So, the...

Your own static website with solar power is not that easy?

Exactly.

So, that's a bit the problem that also with

the solar power website, that we build something

that many people like and want to build

themselves, but it's actually not easy to build.

I think you're right, it's a problem.

You cannot expect something to go mainstream if you have to learn to code before.

That's also why...

Rul talked a lot about Macedon, but I'm not a

Macedon because for me, it's too complicated.

I could, of course, if I have spent time on it, I could manage, but I'm not willing

to do that.

And so, the older blog that I had on

TypeAd, I've used TypeAd for 15 years and I found

it amazing because it was even simpler than

WordPress in the sense that you didn't have

to look for a host, it was all in one.

And it's amazing to have such an

accessible platform, like really everyone could make

their own website.

And if we want to see alternative social

networks or sustainable blogging breakthrough, then

we need a solution like this.

And we were surprised after launching the solar power website that nobody seemed to

want it.

Like there's not a kind of, you could think

of a WordPress-like system to build sustainable

static websites, but nobody seems to really make work of that.

But yeah, Rul, we'll have more to say about this.

Yeah, I think it's a super good question that

you bring in, the whole idea of usability and

that nobody wants federation as a thing in

itself, and I completely agree with that.

But we want these other properties from platforms, right?

We want to have the kind of independence, the rules of the game don't change on the

UF to how you use them, et cetera.

A few ways that we have are regulation and

there are things coming, et cetera, but at

the same time, it's also a lot of the

issues with these other platforms are also issues

of a lack of investment and a lack of different perspectives on these issues.

So yeah, I agree that as it currently is, it's not perfect.

I'm also definitely not saying it's a

solution, but again, it's one of the few ways we have

to very concretely kind of try to build other types of systems.

There's also another problem and that's what Tim asked, who's on Instagram?

We are dealing with addicts.

So many people are addicted and it's like,

imagine you tell the heroin addict, hey, it's

bad for you, we're going to give you methadone.

Well, good luck with that.

It's a bit like...

Yeah, methadone is like a methadone for Instagram.

So it's never attractive as an addict to go to

a kind of another drug that is less dangerous

and will kind of save you in the long term.

So I think what is very important, we have to recultivate this whole thing, right?

I mean, the problem is that we faced

things like programming, oh my goodness, like we

are traumatized by bad programming teachers from school and so on.

And I think this is a very big problem.

I think we should start educating people

that it's not that different to build a static

website, for example.

I think everybody can learn this.

It's a one page tutorial.

Learning a little bit of markdown is so liberating.

And I think this is something I try to tackle

in my teaching, like cultivating programming

in a way that it's fun, that it's joy, that

it's connecting, it's a community where people

help each other and so on.

And this is where I would say that would be a very nice step.

And I personally love websites.

I think blogs and websites are beautiful.

I would even prefer having more like this

blog-over than different social media platforms, maybe.

Wow, that was a bold statement, right?

Yeah, but actually what Tim says, like there's two ways to solve it.

So either you make platforms so that every idiot can make a sustainable website, or

you kind of learn people how to code.

It's also what we had, the discussion we

had in the team for the Solar Power website.

Because of course, I mean, I had an old team

who made a fantastic website, but then I have

to manage it.

And it was way easier to manage my old TypePad website.

Every time I have to change something now,

I have to call someone, you know, hey, Ru,

or hey, Marie, could you change this?

And I could do everything myself.

So there's two ways to look at the problem.

Like either we build very accessible tools,

or we all get more knowledgeable kind of--

we get to learn how computers work and how coding works.

And the long term, that's maybe a better idea than building accessible tools.

Or we can do both.

Sorry.

I mean, if we start very early, like in--

oh yeah, sure.

If we start educating people in coding very, very early, like building into--

making it an elementary cultural technique,

like reading, writing, and math, that would

be amazing.

Putting this into the curriculum in the elementary school, maybe even the basics.

I think that would be super nice.

Mark Mullen from Rorschach.

My question is that--

I mean, there's clearly something happening that

people are coming out from different directions.

From open source, or from lowering screen

time, or from anti-capitalism, or anti-venture

capital models of finance for sort of self-reliance and learning to code.

But it's all arriving at more or less the same thing.

And inshitification refers to the sort of corporate, mostly American sort of walled

gardens that are all becoming walled deathscapes.

What's the word or the term for this

movement, this thing that you're all talking about?

How do you-- what is it that we are moving towards?

De-sitification?

De-inshitification?

Is that-- or de-sitification?

I mean, that's not-- it doesn't-- it's not that graceful, but is there--

I don't think it's one movement.

I mean, there are many of the same kind of analyses, but there's obviously--

yeah, it's federated.

That's what I would say.

No, I definitely don't think it's one movement.

But I think one of the things that you see

now and why we wanted to bring a specific

perspective of also people that have a business approach is also plural.

So for example, now there's a lot of

regulation from the EU coming and from the US as well,

like antitrust law.

So that's one way of addressing this issue.

So the other way is educating your friends and family around you.

The other way is prototyping your platform.

So I think-- I don't think there's one way

out, but I think there's very many different

kind of groups of people that are suffering

the negative effects of this kind of-- yeah,

this extreme commercialization of the platforms

we've come to rely on that are part of our lives.

Yeah, don't have so much a question.

Just one thing.

Yeah, maybe it is a question.

Like going back in time to the first internet, there's one thing

that is the peer-to-peer sharing, the torrents that started there.

I think that's one thing that proves that users

will completely jump on something if it's actually

a solution for whatever it is.

And if you say now, yeah, Netflix is going

more and more hard, then Disney Plus also

is increasing their stuff, and then people do not get to their movies anymore,

probably torrents will go sky high again.

So yeah, this peer-to-peer network, I think that

we can go back to this one, so if we go to the past.

I also would like to put one thing out there.

There's something interesting that I discovered when I repaired these computers.

I don't know.

Do you think you can repair a computer if it's broken?

Is anybody here able to do that?

Raise your hands.

Many people seem not to know, but there's a beautiful platform out there.

It's called iFixit.

So iFixit is sharing tutorials, and it makes it super, super easy.

They explain everything in detail.

If you want to change the battery, no problem.

It explains it.

They even bash the company, say, wow, they took glue to make us not open this case.

They're putting a lot of pressure onto the companies as well.

And I think Apple even implemented the law.

How is it called?

The right to repair.

So they are slowly implementing a store, as

far as I understood it, where they sell parts.

It's coming from the bottom, because people started to repair the computers.

And I think we all can do it.

I'm very sure it's not that difficult.

If you have to build your own website, you have to repair your own computer,

you have to do everything yourself, then you don't have time to work anymore.

But your friends.

Yeah.

Judas perspective on the problem?

No, I'm just-- I mean, this is the reason, I think, why it doesn't happen.

It's all very convenient what the platforms have to offer, for example.

And like, OK, you can buy an old ThinkPad, which I did, and you repair it.

But it's going to cost you time.

And if you're short on time, then you kind of-- and you're not short on money,

then you just buy a new Apple laptop.

It's the same with-- or building your own website,

or just jumping onto a platform like this guy on Twitter.

It's easy.

You just start posting something, and you don't have to invest any time.

It's convenience who always-- not only the internet, but with everything.

It's convenience that makes us go into the wrong direction.

And that, of course, hangs together with a lot of more systemic issues,

like that we all have to work very hard to pay the rent.

Because, yeah, that's a whole different topic.

If I can, as you mentioned, convenience get us to the wrong direction

as far as the opportunity is in the wrong direction.

So if we basically-- if we have a service that goes in the right direction,

well-designed, so the convenience is in that direction.

I can just imagine something like this that is just plug and play,

website, solar website, that is plug and play,

and costs less than to have WordPress somewhere.

Probably people will switch towards there.

If we are offering something cooler, people are moving.

If we are offering something that implies more effort from the user,

and this is not going to change at all.

Only geeks will go in that direction and keep pushing.

We need to do that in the old style, but nobody's going to do that

if it's not convenient.

That's my point of view.

I don't agree very much, because I think this is a paradigm,

and this is also a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If we think we cannot do it, and this is actually common sense,

I think we will not be able to do it.

But if we start research here, especially hosting websites and this kind of stuff.

Personally, I would like to have an example where people actually struggle more,

and everybody moves towards more struggle and better solution.

I don't see the convenience of modifying the brain of millions of people

towards something that's deterrent for them.

That's my point of view.

Thank you.

Actually, I don't have a question.

I would just comment on something.

When you asked us if we can repair our computers,

it reminded me of my grandfather, who was really suffering

because of the digitalization, because he was a mechanic,

and he could repair almost everything.

But then there came the digital watch, and he said, "Oh, no, I can do that."

And then making a book.

Now we are with the digitalization.

We have the impression it's very convenient,

and that's also the reason why we don't do what you guys are doing.

But I think we are now coming from an era of abundance

to an era of where this abundance is disappearing as we see with the energy crisis.

Also, the question of the raw materials that we need now for the transitions,

also digital transition.

I think this is my hope,

because when we are in need, and this is also the generation of my grandfather

or our grandfathers that knew a lot of crisis, war,

and there were not a lot of material, so people get very creative

and invent and substitute.

So I think you are like the pioneers in that way, I would say, for a new era.

Thanks.

We'll bring the water.

Hopefully not.

When there's not enough material or people get creative,

and they always find ways, and suddenly

things become mainstream that before didn't want.

Yeah, the other way around, if we're in a time of abundance, we get left with that.

Exactly.

So picking up from where you left off, I think if we pull the threads,

it goes back to the growth myth and et cetera.

I think the economy must be always growing and et cetera.

And I think one thing that I connect with is also the lock-in effect.

I don't think that happens only in platforms.

I think that also happens in terms of hardware, for example.

If you're using, say, Android or if you're using PC,

all the suite is made to get you trapped within, in terms of compatibility.

They don't make it exactly easier for you to switch

or to open up to communicate with other interfaces.

In terms of...

And there is an idea I want to share, because I

had a conversation about this today with a friend.

And I think that's why when we speak on stages

like this, it's super important that we don't

are like the radicals that do it the right way

and the other people don't do it the right way.

This creates a big contradiction.

Like it actually splits the people from these ideas.

It disconnects them.

And yeah, this is not absolutely not related to your thing that you said, right?

Sorry. Just realize this.

Now, what I wanted to say is that there are a few interesting initiatives going on.

I think it's pretty old by now.

I think it happened already a couple of years ago.

Like a phone that was like, it was part of this line process

that you could repair and upgrade the phone parts as you wanted.

So you could remove the camera, you could remove the memory.

And it was almost like a Lego type of phone.

So I guess it goes back to the...

Like you need to think of these things within the design process.

But I guess most companies don't have any

interest in doing that for the user, right?

Like, again, lock-in effect.

But also, as people who are, let's say,

use social media and have a lot of following,

they can, of course, make a big difference

because we are living also in a time when

individuals have a lot of power.

We can grow with our ideas.

We can get very big inside of the platforms

and then start to evangelize for the things

that we find right.

And this is also something that we should not underestimate.

I think it really makes a lot of sense to

speak up and share these opinions and perspectives.

Right.

Definitely.