OLDaily

Bridging the Indieweb and the Fediverse with Bridgy Fed
Neil Mather, DoubleLoop, 2019/05/08

This is a two-part article (part 1, part 2). The 'indieweb' is a collection of individually-owned and independent web sites (as opposed to pages on centrally managed services such as Facebook). The fediverse is a collection of social networking sites like Mastodon that support multiple user accounts,  operate independently but are connected to each other (constituting a 'federation'). They are similar in origin and intent, but use different underlying protocols (ActivityPub for the fediverse, with Micropub and Webmentions for the indieweb). The first part of this article lists a number of ways to bridge the two systems: POSSEing, pterotype, wordpress actvitypub, and Bridgy Fed. The second part looks specifically at using WordPress Indieweb plugins and Bridgy Fed; "it works pretty smoothly," but of course if you're not using WordPress then you will need a different approach.

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Distributed consensus revised – Part II
Adrian Colyer, The Morning Paper, 2019/05/08

This is the second part of Adrian Colyer's summary started yesterday of a PhD thesis by Heidi Howard on consensus algorithms. In this post he describes some simple revisions to the classic Paxos algorithm, then looks at a significant proposal: Multi-Paxos, which is an optimisation of Classic Paxos for consensus over a sequence of values. Again, the summary should be widely accessible if followed carefully step by step. Note that while all of this may seem pretty far removed from online learning, a lot of the thinking here underlies how decentralized learning needs to be designed in order to be robust and reliable (and hence to avoid the failures of centralized systems).

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Ethics of identity in the time of big data
James Brusseau, First Monday, 2019/05/08

This is a delicious question. Should I be able to have multiple identities - that is, multiple versions of myself (think: my self at work, my self at home, my self in an online game), or should I have only one identity? It's a delicious question because the obvious answer to both questions is "yes", and yet they can't both be true - either I have multiple identities, or I have one. Which is the more ethical choice? When Mark Zuckerberg says "Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity," we recoil. Who is he to say we should have only one identity? On the other hand, when it comes to credit reports, criminal records, and drivers licenses, it's very clear we should have only one identity. But should prospective Tinder dates see your credit report? What about our educational records - can we just drop that ugly semester at the community college? This article begins to investigate this issue, one which will not go away.

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