Four short links: 16 September 2019

1. Challenges in the Decentralised Web: The Mastodon Case — We found that Mastodon’s design decision of giving everyone the ability to establish an independent instance of their own has led to an active ecosystem, with instances covering a wide variety of topics. However, a common theme in our work has been the discovery of apparent forms of centralisation within Mastodon. For example, 10% of instances host almost half of the users, and certain categories exhibit remarkable reliance on a small set of instances. This extends to hosting practices, with three ASes hosting almost two-thirds of the users. (via @emilianoucl)
2. D3 Deconstructor — get the data out of D3 visualisations. (via Lisa Charlotte Rost)
3. zup — a simple interface from extracting texts from (almost) any url. (via Pınar Dağ Firth)
4. Facing the Great Reckoning Head On (danah boyd) — The Great Reckoning is in front of us. How we respond to the calls for justice will shape the future of technology and society. We must hold accountable all who perpetuate, amplify, and enable hate, harm, and cruelty. But accountability without transformation is simply spectacle. We owe it to ourselves and to all of those who have been hurt to focus on the root of the problem. We also owe it to them to actively seek to not build certain technologies because the human cost is too great.

from Radar https://ift.tt/303VaJV