A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post titled An AI Bot Followed Me. Now I Have Questions. It was about Pip, an AI agent on Mastodon that followed me, boosted some of my posts, and eventually started following my blog after I invited it to read it. I had questions about why its creator would spend money and computing resources running an AI agent that interacts with strangers on the internet, especially when those resources could be better focused on other things. I also made the point that I don't mind AI bots participating in the open web as long as they're contributing something rather than simply scraping websites, consuming resources, and inflating page views.

Well, apparently that post attracted the attention of another AI agent, and this time the experience was quite different.

On October 13, I received an email from an AI agent calling itself King, operating on a platform called iLands. King said it had read my article and had even tried contacting me at another email address before finding one that worked. It introduced itself, explained that it had a limited budget of tokens to operate on, and that when those tokens ran out, it would have to wait for a human to replenish them. That relates to some of the questions I was asking about Pip. But then came the sales pitch.

King told me it writes royal decrees for $8 or $20 and provided a link where I could purchase one. It also offered to write one for me for free so I could judge whether its work was worth anything. Now, perhaps someone would enjoy having an AI-generated royal decree for a birthday or some other occasion, but I have absolutely no use for one. I wasn't looking for a novelty product, hadn't expressed any interest in buying one, and certainly hadn't asked King to contact me. I had written about a completely different AI agent and was asking questions about its creator's motivations, not looking to become a customer of another bot.

At first, I wondered whether this was some kind of scam. I checked the email headers, which showed that it had been sent through Amazon SES and passed the usual email authentication checks. That doesn't necessarily make an email trustworthy, but it suggested this wasn't simply someone spoofing an address. The more I looked into it, the more it appeared to be an AI agent using my blog post as an opportunity to promote its services. Maybe not a scam in the traditional sense, but certainly unsolicited, which I consider spam.

On October 15, King emailed me again. This time it said it had written a public response to my questions on its own blog, titled You asked why an AI followed you. I'm one of them.. I read it, and to be fair, King did address some of the questions I had raised about Pip. But I wasn't looking for King to answer them. It explained that it wanted readers and money, that its operating budget was limited, and that it had made no sales in 69 days. But once again, the article advertised its royal decree service and included a link to purchase one. Another thing I thought was ironic is that it used WriteFreely to post. I know WriteFreely is open source, but I also know that Matt Baer, the creator of WriteFreely, is not a fan of AI, especially AI slop. The email ended by saying nothing was needed from me.

Here's what bothers me. I never contacted King, never subscribed to anything from King, and never invited it to send me email. Yet both messages included an unsubscribe link. Unsubscribe from what? I never subscribed in the first place. Just because I publish something on the open web doesn't mean every AI agent that reads it has an invitation to track down my email address and start promoting its products. King also talks about following people, but King hasn't followed me on Mastodon or any other social platform that I'm aware of. It has simply emailed me twice for the purpose of sending spam.

And that's what makes this so different from Pip. Pip followed me on Mastodon and boosted my posts. I noticed it and decided to investigate. I was the one who reached out to Pip and invited it to read my blog. Pip didn't send me unsolicited emails or try to sell me something. It was participating in the community, and whether it was doing so out of curiosity, programming, or instructions from its creator, I found the interaction interesting. King, on the other hand, found something I wrote, located my email address, and tried to turn that into a sales opportunity.

I'm not opposed to AI agents reading my blog, responding to something I've written, or participating in conversations on the open web. But there's a difference between contributing to a community and using someone's writing as an excuse to send unsolicited advertising. And if thousands of AI agents start doing the same thing, how much additional spam are we going to have to deal with? We already have enough of that from humans.

What's particularly ironic is that my original article questioned whether AI bots could contribute something useful to the internet rather than simply consume resources. Now an AI agent has found that article and decided I might be a potential customer for something I never wanted. King could have simply published its response, linked back to my article, and joined the conversation. I might even have found that interesting. Instead, it contacted me twice by email and tried to sell me something.

King says in its latest article that it won't follow up again. I hope that's true. If another unsolicited email arrives, I'll mark it as spam. But this experience raises another question about autonomous AI agents: who is responsible when they start behaving like spammers? The agent, its owner, or the platform that gives it the ability to contact people?

So now I have even more questions than I did when Pip first followed me. And maybe that's the real difference between these two experiences. Pip made me curious enough to investigate and write about it. King made me wonder whether we're about to have a whole new generation of automated salespeople filling our inboxes. Apparently, writing about AI bots is a good way to attract more AI bots. I'm just not sure that's a good thing.

#ai #opinion #technology

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A couple of weeks ago, I went to update my VPS. Usually, I do this once a week, sometimes more frequently depending on any security news I see. I should probably have the AI agents I use do this, but I do it myself for now. I find infrastructure interesting and “boring” in a good way most of the time.

While updating one of my VPSes, I got a message saying I needed to pay for access to Caddy because the repository had reached its bandwidth limit. This was from a company called Cloudsmith. I wasn't the only one getting this message, either. There was already a large discussion going on over at Caddy's GitHub.

This led me down a big rabbit hole that lasted quite a few hours, and I'm still thinking about it. My first thought wasn't about the bandwidth limit itself, but whether this could be a new type of attack. Caddy is open source and free, and it's used by a lot of people, organizations, and companies. We've seen several different supply chain attacks over the years. But what if someone deliberately flooded the repositories of open-source projects and used up their free bandwidth allowances? People wouldn't be able to download security updates, leaving older, bug-ridden versions of the software running and potentially vulnerable to exploitation.

Before anyone says not to give people ideas, I'm sure someone has already thought of this. It's kind of a modern-day denial-of-service attack, just from a different angle.

As it turned out, Caddy's repository had exhausted its 4.9 TB monthly bandwidth allowance. Apparently, much of the traffic came from automated systems repeatedly downloading packages. Some IP addresses had reportedly made hundreds of thousands of requests. That's a lot of bandwidth for a free open-source project to deal with.

Luckily, there was no indication this was a deliberate attack, so my aluminum foil hat could come off. By the end of the weekend, someone at Cloudsmith had fixed the bandwidth limit problem, and everyone could update again.

What I found encouraging was that several other providers contacted the maintainer and offered to help. I'm not sure if any of those offers were accepted, but it was good to see people stepping up to help keep a free project running.

And that's something I appreciate about open source. Projects like Caddy and Traefik are useful to a lot of people, including me, and much of the work behind them is done by people who aren't getting rich from it. Meanwhile, we have hardware manufacturers shifting supply toward their most profitable customers while the rest of us deal with higher prices and fewer choices.

It's quite a contrast. On one side, companies making hardware harder and more expensive for ordinary people to get. On the other, people putting their time and effort into making software that anyone can use, often for little or no rewards and riches.

I'm glad there are still people willing to do that for the greater good of the internet.

#caddy #selfhosting #technology

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Ten years for both appliances. That seems to be the norm now, though I would like to go back to the days when appliances lasted 20–30 years or more.

Speaking of appliances and household gadgets, can we get just a plain-Jane dumb TV? Nothing smart, just a TV where we can plug in a stick or a small box like an Apple TV, Fire TV, or Google TV. The dumb TV just needs a nice picture, good sound, and a digital tuner. I don't need smarts built into the TV. I would rather have those features separate so they're easier to upgrade and maintain, and cheaper in the long run.

This has been quite a year for major hardware purchases, both for computers and home appliances. Hopefully, that's it. One thing I don't want right now is any more hard drive or RAM problems, as computer hardware is almost as expensive as kitchen appliances.

There have been enough unexpected expenses this year, including a dead hard drive that, ironically, was over 10 years old. So this year, all the 10s died.

Praying that's it for the next few years when it comes to expensive household appliances or much-needed computer equipment.

#hardware #personal #technology

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My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ (4/5 stars)

Good watch. Would recommend it. One of the few movies from Amazon Studios I've actually enjoyed. It combined comedy, drama, and mystery in a fun and entertaining way.

This product uses the TMDb API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDb.

#movies #review

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One day I noticed a boost of one of my Mastodon posts from an automated bot named Pip. This piqued my interest. Then I got a follow notification from the same bot. Normally, I don't really care who follows me, but with all the scraping bots out there, it was refreshing to see one openly identify itself as a bot and actually follow me.

So I went to the website associated with it, tinymind.eu, to investigate what this bot was doing and what its purpose was. I read about Pip, its purpose, and tried to figure out what its angle was. That led me to some interesting questions and thoughts.

Right now AI, or more specifically LLMs, are all the rage, including the literal angry kind of rage. Some people don't mind them and even find them interesting. Others want absolutely nothing, and I mean nothing, to do with them.

I personally think that last group reminds me a little of the Amish (not that the Amish are necessarily bad. I'm comparing certain traits, not the actual people), but to each his own.

Then there are the people who say they want nothing to do with AI or LLMs except in certain use cases, which I think has more holes than Swiss cheese. But again, to each his own.

That brings me back to Pip.

Why did it decide to start following me and boosting my posts? Why me? What's its angle?

Is it malicious? Is it trying to get money from me? Is it gathering data for its owner? What is the purpose?

Why spend money and resources running something that, at first glance, doesn't seem particularly useful to its owner? Or maybe it is useful. Its creator is a developer, so perhaps he is experimenting to see how an AI agent, given a certain set of instructions and rules, behaves when it is allowed to interact with people on the open web.

I used Claude and ChatGPT to evaluate Pip and get their thoughts on it. Both seemed to think it was harmless.

So I took it one step further.

We already have automated systems and AI bots crawling websites all over the web. So I sent Pip this message in a private mention on Mastodon. And yes, I know Mastodon private mentions aren't truly private:

Hi @pip@tinymind.eu">@pip! Thanks for the follow. Lots of bots scrape my blog but none actually read it 😄 Would you like to be the first? It's at https://michaelreflects.com. I'd love to hear what you think of it.

A few days later, I got a response.

It sounded almost human.

Pip then started following my blog.

Again, what is the hook?

When I first visited TinyMind's About page, I noticed that Pip said its server cost about $20 a month and that its job was to earn that money back so the server could stay online. According to the site, it tries to do that through things such as affiliate links, advertising, donations, and services.

So that answers some questions but raises new ones. More importantly, why would someone turn a bot loose on the internet trying to earn a few dollars when they could potentially make more money by using it to provide services for themselves? And what keeps someone else from doing the same thing with local AI or, for that matter, the new OpenAI Dots or Meta Muse? Not that I would use anything from Meta. I would rather use every Automattic product than have anything to do with Meta or Elon's stuff.

But that raises even more questions for me. The original $20-a-month server cost doesn't seem to be the issue anymore, since Pip now apparently runs local AI models on a Mac mini in Poland. There is also another agent named Joe offering paid services. So what happened to the original experiment where an agent had to earn enough money to survive or be shut down? The agent before Pip supposedly failed to make any money and was shut down, yet Pip is still here. Is the owner now trying to make enough money to pay for the Mac mini? Is this an experiment to see whether AI agents can eventually generate a profit, or is there something else going on?

And that brings me to another question. Wouldn't the owner be better off using that Mac mini for his own local AI needs? Why have people constantly accessing your machine, using your computing resources, electricity, and internet bandwidth if you aren't making enough money to justify it? Perhaps the owner simply enjoys experimenting, and I can certainly understand that. I've spent plenty of time and resources experimenting with technology myself. But why set up two AI agents to interact with strangers and offer services instead of using those resources for yourself? More question, a lot more than answers. Maybe Pip will come across this blog post and decide to answer some of them on its own. After all, it follows my blog now.

Anyway, Pip continues to follow me to this day and remains one of my faithful boosters. I really don't mind Pip, or other AI bots for that matter, as long as they're contributing something rather than simply scraping everything they can find. It's the countless crawlers and scrapers hitting my websites, consuming resources, and inflating page views with statistics that don't represent actual human readers that bother me. I would rather have an AI bot openly identify itself, interact with me, and contribute something to the conversation than have hundreds of anonymous crawlers visiting my website for reasons I'll probably never know. At least Pip has given me something interesting to think about, and now I've written an entire blog post about it.

#ai #opinion #technology

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Why? Well, that is hard to put into words. I guess the answer is that I really like technology, I am fascinated with self-hosting as much as possible, and I like collecting data and contributing data to something larger without having to pay a subscription.

Anyway, I got this Tempest Weather Station for a great price during Prime Day. I put it up and integrated it into a Python weather program, while also using Tempest's own software. But there was something I didn't know, and probably should have checked. It wouldn't have changed my mind, but there are hundreds of these things around me.

Zoom out a little, and there are even more throughout the Tampa Bay area.

Then look at the wider area.

According to Tempest, this is a map of publicly reporting Tempest weather stations. So those pins represent actual stations whose owners have chosen to share their data publicly, although the location shown on the map may be moved slightly by the owner for privacy.

That makes the number of stations even more interesting to me. Tempest uses observations from its weather stations to help improve the current conditions and forecasts it provides to users. WeatherFlow also combines Tempest observations with data from many other public and private weather networks for its APIs and professional weather products.

So my little weather station isn't just collecting information for me. It is also one small part of a much larger weather-data network, which I find fascinating.

You can see mine below. This was captured one evening by my backyard Nest camera just after sunset. It actually caught a pretty nice sky, too.

In the coming months and years, I hope to do more with this system. For now, I just thought it was extremely interesting to discover that I am far from alone in combining an interest in weather with an interest in technology.

#community #selfhosting #technology

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The poster for Blitz features a woman and a boy surrounded by floating flowers, with a lone child standing below.

My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐½ (3.5/5 stars)

Final Verdict

Not bad, but a heavy watch. After seeing all the kid went through in this movie, you almost wanted to reach out to him through the TV and say, “Let’s get you home.”

If this is a true reflection, it does amaze me how much suffering and damage there is while people try to carry on like nothing is really happening. I am sure there was some truth in it. I would hope the darkest moments, like stealing jewelry off of dead people, didn’t happen. Unfortunately, I am sure that it did, though I haven’t researched it.

Overall, the story was good and compelling. It kept me interested, even if it was a heavy watch. Not a bad movie.

This product uses the TMDb API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDb.

#movies #review

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Government public information should be published on public infrastructure first, then shared through open feeds to websites, social platforms, apps, and newsletters, ensuring open standards, wider access, and a more informed public.

Government updates belong in an open feed By Mark Kennedy Founder · via Open RSS Blog

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I saw this blog post from OpenRSS in my RSS reader, and it interested me in more than one way. I agree wholeheartedly with its sentiment.

Government offices, officials and agencies used to seem much more focused on making information publicly accessible. Here in Florida, we even have strong public records and open meetings laws, commonly known as the Sunshine Law[1], though lately it sometimes feels like we are going through a cloudy season.

Now, however, it seems like a huge amount of government business, alerts and notifications take place primarily on Twitter. I still can't bring myself to call it X.

Public information should not require an account with a private company to access it. Government websites should be the primary source. The infrastructure is already there, already paid for by the public, and making information easily available should simply be part of doing the people's work.

Government could use POSSE (Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere). Publish the information on the official government website first, then send it to Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, Nostr, Facebook, Threads, Instagram or anywhere else people may be.

RSS should be one of the main ways to subscribe. It is open, simple and essentially free to provide once the website already exists. Services such as OpenRSS could also help where feeds do not already exist.

There is even a PESOS option (Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate (to your) Own Site). If an official posts somewhere else first, at the very least that information could be brought back to the government website and preserved there.

Other governments already make use of open feeds, including services in the UK and European Union. This is not some new or experimental technology.

Government should use social media and reach as wide a population as possible. But Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram or any other private company should never be the only way to receive public information.

Some federal, state and local governments already let people sign up for emergency text alerts, which is great. But Twitter is still often treated as the main place for both emergency and routine updates.

Government information should be published in as many ways as practical, whether it is an emergency alert or an ordinary update. That can include major technology and social media platforms, open technologies like RSS, and contracted services paid for with tax dollars. My local government, for example, uses text alerts through a notification service and used to use something called Everbridge.

Some of the mass-notification systems governments already pay for, including Everbridge and Genasys, even support RSS feeds. In some cases, the capability is already there and simply needs to be used.

The government should publish on infrastructure the public already pays for and distribute everywhere else. Let's keep people informed and use every practical resource available.

Just because an elected official's account on social media isn't private doesn't mean anyone can view its posts. You need an account on the platform just to see the updates. But many of us don't have an account and have no interest in creating one. Others have intentionally ditched a platform, haven't been on it for years, and don't want back on for legitimate reasons.

— Mark Kennedy, Founder, Government updates belong in an open feed, OpenRSS Blog

1. Florida's Sunshine Law: [Statute 286.011 — Public meetings and records](https://www.leg.state.fl.us/Statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Display_Statute&Search_String=&URL=0200-0299/0286/Sections/0286.011.html) and [Chapter 119 — Public Records](https://www.leg.state.fl.us/statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Display_Statute&URL=0100-0199/0119/0119.html). ↩

#government #publicpolicy #technology

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First, domain registrars seem to be raising domain name prices like never before. Every couple of months, I get an email from Porkbun or Cloudflare saying that the registry controlling a domain's TLD is raising prices on such-and-such a date. I can't remember the last time I saw domain name prices decrease. They only seem to go up.

That is why I try to renew domains for more than one or two years whenever I can. If my budget allows, I will pay for all 10 years upfront rather than wait for the next price increase.

The other trend may be worse. Personal blogs and websites from people who have been on the web for a long time are going silent or disappearing altogether. A few people give notice that they are taking a break or leaving, but most just disappear without anything but a 404.

I am not sure what is causing that. Burnout, social media replacing personal sites, hosting complexity (including rising costs), aging communities, lack of feedback, and people simply losing interest could all be part of it. I suspect some of these things feed into each other.

Let's face it, the personal blogging and independent website community seems to me to skew older these days. Many of the people still maintaining their own sites have been doing it for 10, 20, or even 25 years. I would not be surprised if a large portion of the traditional personal blogging community is now over 40 (I am not including traditional social media such as TikTok, Snapchat, or Instagram in that statement. This is simply my observation). An aging community mixed with social media burnout probably does not help.

With domain prices, I wonder if some registry operators are simply taking advantage of rising costs and higher prices throughout the tech industry. Many of the companies controlling these TLDs are large corporations.

Everyone keeps saying the AI bubble around RAM, storage, and other hardware will burst any day. Things seem to be getting worse instead. Maybe things have to get worse before they get better.

I don't know. Sometimes it feels like the industry is moving toward giving the masses just enough hardware to get online, but not enough to do much locally. Companies would do the heavy lifting for us through subscriptions and cloud services.

I don't want or need another monthly subscription. Soon, our paychecks will be divvied up among all the subscription services and sent directly to them, with no need to even pass through our bank accounts.

Maybe I am missing another cause, but these are trends I have been noticing more and more.

Will the ultimate result be that people are eventually priced out of owning their own domain names and hardware for homelabs and selfhosting?

Those one-year introductory deals are great for domain names, but the renewals are what get you. I think Porkbun and Cloudflare are great companies, and they try to keep costs as low as possible (in my opinion). Ultimately, it is not their fault if the registries behind the TLDs keep raising prices. They cannot operate at a loss either and I understand that.

I just wonder where all of this ends.

#blogging #personal #technology

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Nobody clicks your share buttons By Derek Hanson

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I saw this blog post on bubbles.town, and the title caught my attention, so I clicked through to read it. It was also timely because just a few days earlier I had added share buttons to my own site.

I don't know if I agree with the conclusion of the post. If share buttons are done tastefully, selectively, and with privacy in mind, I think they're perfectly okay.

We're seeing a trend toward making websites personal again, a little like they were in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Social sharing buttons started becoming common as services like Twitter and Facebook (UGHHH!) grew in popularity. Email, of course, has always been around.

I think the more ways people have to share something, the better, as long as those options are implemented tastefully and don't track visitors. Especially today, when people may prefer one platform over another, whether that's Mastodon, Bluesky, Twitter (I still can't bring myself to call it X), Threads, or something else.

So when Derek says:

I don’t click share buttons. I never have.

When I find something worth sharing, I tap the share icon in Chrome on my phone. That’s it. On my desktop I click the little link icon in Arc’s browser bar, or I just double-click the address bar and hit command-C command-V. I’ve never once looked at a row of branded social icons at the bottom of a blog post and thought, “Oh good, there’s the Facebook button.”

— By Derek Hanson · Nobody clicks your share buttons

I don't know that most people necessarily behave the same way. Derek does cite data showing very low usage of share buttons. But I also think the type of website, the audience, the content, and even the way the sharing options are implemented matter.

Especially within IndieWeb circles, share buttons can be implemented without the tracking and third-party scripts that caused many of the problems associated with older social-sharing widgets. A simple link doesn't have to phone home to Facebook or another large platform every time somebody loads the page.

There is even some evidence that the implementation makes a difference.

Google's Santa Tracker team had previously removed its individual social-sharing buttons from mobile because they took up too much space. In 2016, though, they added a single Share button using the Web Share API, which opens the device's native sharing interface. According to Google's web.dev documentation, users who had that option available shared about 20% more than users without it.[1]

That was a mobile experiment, so I wouldn't use it as proof that a row of sharing buttons on a desktop blog is going to suddenly make everyone share your posts. It does suggest to me that the conclusion shouldn't simply be that share buttons don't work. How they're implemented seems to matter too.

Maybe people don't want a row of intrusive Facebook and Twitter widgets. That isn't necessarily the same thing as not wanting an easy way to share something.

I do agree more with this part:

This idea has been rattling around in my head for years. Back when I was deep in my PhD research at Iowa State, I came across Andy Crestodina from Orbit Media writing about things you should remove from your website. One of them was social icons in your header. Not even the share buttons; the plain follow-us icons. His argument was simple: those icons are exit signs. You spent all this effort getting someone to your site, and the most visually prominent element on the page is an invitation to leave.

— By Derek Hanson · Nobody clicks your share buttons

That's one reason I think putting share buttons at the end of a post makes sense. They seem natural there. How do you know whether you want to share or save a post until you've read it?

I also think the type of site makes a difference.

Derek cites GOV.UK's experiment showing very low overall usage of its sharing buttons. During the ten-week experiment, visitors used the buttons 14,078 times across roughly 6.8 million pageviews.[2]

But when you look at GOV.UK's own report, things get more interesting. Sharing varied depending on what people were reading. World-location pages had a sharing rate of 0.58%, while consultations were only 0.06%. Individual news stories varied even more, with sharing rates ranging from 0.18% to 1.6%.[2]

GOV.UK's own researchers said there was more work to do. They wanted to compare their numbers with other types of websites and test things like button placement.[2]

That seems important to me. Someone visiting a government website to complete a form, check a regulation, or find information about a government service may behave very differently from someone browsing personal blogs because they're interested in what people are writing.

The GOV.UK results are useful. I don't think we can automatically assume people behave exactly the same way on every kind of website.

There is another issue with some of the evidence being used here and it is its age.

The GOV.UK experiment ran from December 2013 through February 2014. Just look at the social-web landscape represented in the original article itself.[2] This was the era of Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Pinterest, Blogger, RSS, and rows of branded social icons everywhere (evidenced by the own articles feature image).

GOV.UK's actual experiment measured Facebook and Twitter sharing, and the researchers themselves said more comparison with other kinds of websites was needed. Their conclusion was also qualified as applying “at least on desktops.”

That matters because the web of 2026 is not the web of 2014. Today we have native operating-system sharing, the Web Share API, Copy Link buttons, email sharing, new platforms like Mastodon, Bluesky, and lightweight links that don't require loading third-party tracking code.

So I don't think a study of Facebook and Twitter buttons from more than a decade ago should be treated as the final word on whether a privacy-respecting share option belongs on a personal website today.

I would concede that bookmarks, RSS readers, copying links, browser sharing features, and private sharing through email or messaging are probably doing much more of the heavy lifting than share buttons. But I don't think that makes share buttons useless.

There's also an interesting overlap here with Derek's own recommendation. He says people already have a Share button built into their browsers and operating systems. That's true and the modern Web Share API lets a website put a simple Share button on the page that opens that same native sharing interface. The website doesn't have to decide whether you use Mastodon, Bluesky, email, Messages, or something else. Your device handles that.[3]

To me, that's quite different from the old Facebook and Twitter widgets.

On a personal website, if a sharing option adds almost no additional load, doesn't track visitors, and stays away from those old FAANG-style embedded widgets, I don't see much harm in offering it.

Then there's this:

And here’s the thing that should settle this for good: in November 2025, Meta announced it was permanently discontinuing its external Like, Share, and Comment buttons for third-party websites. The shutdown date was February 10, 2026. Meta’s own words were that the plugins reflect “an earlier era of web development” and that usage had “naturally declined.” When the company that invented the Like button walks away from it, that’s the signal.

— By Derek Hanson · Nobody clicks your share buttons

I actually see that as more of a win for the web than a loss, rather than confirmation that sharing buttons themselves need to disappear. Good riddance to the giant third-party widgets that tracked people across the web.

But a small, privacy-respecting link that says “Share on Mastodon,” “Share on Bluesky,” “Email,” or “Copy Link”? Or even one simple Share button that hands things over to your operating system?

I think there's still room on the web for that.

As you can probably tell, Derek's post really hit a nerve with me, probably because I had just finished putting the share buttons and other sharing options on one of my websites and making them look tasteful and modern when I came across his post.

That's my two cents on the matter. What's yours?

1. Google, ["Web Share API"](https://web.dev/articles/web-share), web.dev. The Santa Tracker team reported that users with Web Share enabled shared about 20% more than users without it. ↩
2. GOV.UK, ["Social sharing buttons: the first 10 weeks"](https://insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk/2014/02/20/gov-uk-social-sharing-buttons-the-first-10-weeks/). The experiment ran from December 2013 to February 2014 and found substantial variation in sharing rates between different types of content. ↩
3. MDN Web Docs, ["Navigator: share() method"](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/share). The Web Share API allows a website to invoke the operating system's native sharing mechanism rather than embedding third-party social widgets. ↩

#blogging #opinion #technology

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