Did a new round of delightful chats with on the Hope in Source podcast.
In this first one we dabble in technology as an embodied process, how our cultural aversion to deleting data is a mortality issue, and lamenting the protestant work ethic.
Conversation
We also touch on digital gardening and the burden of maitenance.
Just like code needs to be maintained, what happens when your public knowledge base always needs tending?
In a real garden plants die (or you eat them). How might blog posts "die” or fade over time?
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What about a system where if you don’t update a post for 20 years, and no one reads it in that time, it deletes itself.
The degrading web? Decomposition organically built into the database?
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It's it what fleets are about, in 24h?
Regarding posts you don't update, standard do their job well and most of ours posts won't be readable before 20 years.
Forgetting is by design
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24 hour fleets feel like they're serving a very different purpose to posts in a personal knowledge base though.
Thinking of how posts with a relevancy timeline of 10-15 years could be designed...
IMHO if standards do their job well our posts better be readable in 20 years
I'm thinking of web standards in terms of backwards compatibility. Should all gracefully fall back to HTML if we're doing it right?
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We don't have a lot of perspective to judge. For example pages depending cdn, script maybe affected by changes. HTML5 is not HTML4, ES6 is not ES2015. Although non breaking, it breaks liberty people took when coding without knowing what future standard are done with