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Own Your Identity

marco.org

41–50 of 57 posts

Re: Own Your Identity

#41

As he mentions in the post, this is from one of the creators of Tumblr, who's elevator pitch at this point is "a social network that gives users control of their identity". It is one of the easiest ways for someone to practice what he's preaching. Still, the people who are converting everything over to Google+ aren't crazy (well, they are a little bit, no search and no RSS is kinda a big deal). The design of G+, part…

Also worth noting, he's no longer using Tumblr for Marco.org: http://www.marco.org/secondcrack

Funny. "30 reasons you'll love Tumblr" says:

"Custom domains

Use your own domain name.

Turn marco.tumblr.com into www.marco.org"

Re: Own Your Identity

#42
post #25
post #24

'owning it' doesn't mean your own domain. you are only leasing that domain name until you either no longer pay for it or the government in control feels you no longer deserve access to it.

While you hit on a genuine problem, there are far fewer legal barriers to Google, Facebook, Twitter or Microsoft terminating your account than for US ICE to seize your .com and .org; ICE needs a warrant for seizure and more to retain indefinitely. Further, you can always get a non U.S. domain, e.g. .ch (Swiss) as used by Wikileaks.

That's unless you live in a country where it's becoming commonplace to filter out DNS. I'm honestly hesitant to have my online identity be obliterated at a whim by some reckless government of mine (France); they won't seize my dotsomething, but they will legally be able to block it out of existence, nationwide, without even the order from a judge. In that case, there are actually more legal barriers to Google terminating my gmail account on my government behalf than being blacklisted.

Re: Own Your Identity

#45
post #44

However, tumblr does not provide an easy way to export your content. This makes it not viable as a blogging platform for me.

How about using the Tumblr2Wordpress tool by WooThemes? Granted, it's not the best thing but it would keep your data and you'd be able to migrate to a solution that's easily self-hosted.

Re: Own Your Identity

#46
post #28
post #4

Going on a tangent, but hotmail is really good nowadays. My non-serious-mail-from-friends account is on hotmail, and it's as good as gmail, a bit better in some stuff and a bit worse in others.

Going on a tangent, but hotmail is really good nowadays. I hope you're joking. Live Mail (which subsumed Hotmail) is atrocious, the interface sucks. Live Mail also doesn't do a good job of catching spam. The only thing worse I've used interface-wise is Yahoo! Mail.

WHile part of Live mail the hotmail addresses are still valid. The interface while still not to my liking has improved to a usable level in the past year.

To give credit where it's due, the spam filtering has improved dramatically. I've used my hotmail account as a utility email account for at least ten years. I get several hundred spams a week. They are close to 100% in filtering accuracy for me but YMMV. The only problems I've had is that spammy things I've signed up for can be filtered the first time in.

Re: Own Your Identity

#47
post #44

However, tumblr does not provide an easy way to export your content. This makes it not viable as a blogging platform for me.

your content is in html, how is it not easy to export?

Re: Own Your Identity

#48
post #26
post #24

'owning it' doesn't mean your own domain. you are only leasing that domain name until you either no longer pay for it or the government in control feels you no longer deserve access to it.

That's a little sensationalist, don't you think? What are the chances "the government" takes away your domain name? It's happened to an incredibly small percentage of domain-owners, I would guess.

It's not the point that the chance is low. The point is that there is any chance at all. No government should be allowed to seize domains. Ever.

Re: Own Your Identity

#49
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a little sensationalist, don't you think? What are the chances "the government" takes away your domain name? It's happened to an incredibly small percentage of domain-owners, I would guess.

It's not the point that the chance is low. The point is that there is any chance at all. No government should be allowed to seize domains. Ever.

That's just as sensationalist.

Most people agree that there is a balance between the rights of individuals to do what they want, and the rights of the government to stop them if society benefits. For example, almost everyone agrees that the police shouldn't have unlimited power to search anyone they want. But almost no one argues that they should have no power to search people - just that a balance needs to be struck.

Re: Own Your Identity

#50
post #47
post #44

However, tumblr does not provide an easy way to export your content. This makes it not viable as a blogging platform for me.

your content is in html, how is it not easy to export?

Come on.

It would require non-trivial work to scrape the pages to get the html, set up parsing to handle different types of content, get into a format that could be imported into something else, etc. Not something I'm willing to spend my time setting up, and what about all the people who might want to export their tumblr content but can't program.

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