Search
1000 results for “r_data_table”
-
**Integrating Deye EV charger to Home Assistant**TL;DR
It works, somehow, via ha-solarman integration.
Charger type: Deye SUN-EVSE22K01-EU-AC
What works
I managed to integrate 2 entities for now:
- EV charger control power
- Max EV charging power
The process
I’ve started with David Rapan’s ha-solarman integration which works well with my Deye inverter (SUN-12K-SG04LP3-EU).
Then I edited config/custom_components/solarman/inverter_definitions/deye_p3.yaml and added:
#EV test - group: EV Charger items: - name: "EV Charge Control Power" l: 1 class: "power" state_class: "measurement" uom: "W" rule: 1 scale: 1 registers: [0x02C5] icon: "mdi:car-electric" - name: EV Max Charge power alt: EV Max Charge power platform: number class: "power" state_class: "measurement" uom: "W" scale: 1 rule: 1 registers: [0x0104] configurable: min: 0 max: 22000 range: min: 0 max: 22000Restarted HA and those 2 entities appeared in solarman device:
Both entities show the same data as Deye’s app. I can set EV Max Charging Power and it will reflect in the app and the inverter.
About “EV Charge Control Power” entity – Inverter tells the charger what is the max allowed charging power (for example, how much is the solar power excess).
Today it changed like this: (it was cloudy and I had ‘solar only’ enabled):
Don’t mind the initial spike, I wrongly set the scale factor (x10).
I call it partial success.
What doesn’t work (yet)
I still didn’t find modbus register for the most important entity: actual charging power. If exists at all. Maybe there is no mapping from EV charger to modbus registers. I’m communicating with Deye tech support, but I didn’t get the answer yet. Though, they sent me an updated modbus registers document.
I’m still working on EV charger configuration settings (Solar only, Grid off–>Charger Off, Free work, EV port Load/Grid). I found the register in Deye docs, but haven’t implemented yet (some bit manipulation needed):
AddrRegister meaningR/Wdata rangeunitnote259EV_charge_modeR/W[0x0，0xFFFF]
High 8 bits: Off grid SOC Low 8 bits: Bit0:solar energy only Bit1:free work Bit4:EV_charge device connet at Grid port Bit5:EV_charge device connect at LD portAnyone?
If anyone knows which register holds actual charging power value, consumption, charging schedules, please let me know.
https://blog.rozman.info/integrating-deye-ev-charger-to-home-assistant/ #deye #evcharger #homeassistant -
**Integrating Deye EV charger to Home Assistant**TL;DR
Integration of Deye EV charger to HA works (somehow) via ha-solarman integration (EV control power, Max. charging power) and parsing of EV charger local admin web page + Command line HA integration to get realtime charging power and energy.
Charger type: Deye SUN-EVSE22K01-EU-AC, connected to Deye’s inverter via LoRa and Wifi.
What works
I managed to integrate 2 entities via ha-solarman/modbus for now:
Via Solarman/modbus registers:
- EV charger control power
- Max EV charging power
And also (via scraping of EV charger admin web page + Command line HA integration):
- L1 Power
- L2 Power
- L3 Power
The process (reading modbus registers)
I’ve started with David Rapan’s ha-solarman integration which works well with my Deye inverter (SUN-12K-SG04LP3-EU).
Then I edited config/custom_components/solarman/inverter_definitions/deye_p3.yaml and added:
#EV test - group: EV Charger items: - name: "EV Charge Control Power" l: 1 class: "power" state_class: "measurement" uom: "W" rule: 1 scale: 1 registers: [0x02C5] icon: "mdi:car-electric" - name: EV Max Charge power alt: EV Max Charge power platform: number class: "power" state_class: "measurement" uom: "W" scale: 1 rule: 1 registers: [0x0104] configurable: min: 0 max: 22000 range: min: 0 max: 22000Restarted HA and those 2 entities appeared in solarman device:
Both entities show the same data as Deye’s app. I can set EV Max Charging Power and it will reflect in the app and the inverter.
About “EV Charge Control Power” entity – Inverter tells the charger what is the max allowed charging power (for example, how much is the solar power excess).
Today the control power swinged like this: (it was cloudy and I had ‘solar only’ enabled):
Don’t mind the initial spike, I wrongly set the scale factor (x10).
I call it partial success.
What doesn’t work (yet) via solarman/modbus
I still didn’t find modbus register for the most important entity: actual charging power. If exists at all. Maybe there is no mapping from EV charger to modbus registers. I’m communicating with Deye tech support, but I didn’t get the answer yet. Though, they sent me an updated modbus registers document.
I’m still working on EV charger configuration settings (Solar only, Grid off–>Charger Off, Free work, EV port Load/Grid). I found the register in Deye docs, but haven’t implemented yet (some bit manipulation needed):
AddrRegister meaningR/Wdata rangeunitnote259EV_charge_modeR/W[0x0，0xFFFF]
High 8 bits: Off grid SOC Low 8 bits: Bit0:solar energy only Bit1:free work Bit4:EV_charge device connet at Grid port Bit5:EV_charge device connect at LD portAnyone?
If anyone knows which modbus register holds actual charging power value, consumption, charging schedules, please let me know.
Workaround – getting data from EV charger via http / local web interface
Anyways, while waiting for Deye’s support to answer me which modbus registers contain actual charging power, I managed to get these numbers by parsing the EV charger’s web interface.
- I wrote a little curl script to get L1, L2 and L3 power from charger’s web interface. I found they’re hidden besides webdata_power1,2,3 variables:
get_EV_power.sh file:
#!/bin/sh DATA=$(curl -u user:pass -s http://EV_CHARGER_IP_ADDR/status.html) P1=$(echo "$DATA" | sed -n 's/.*webdata_power1[[:space:]]*=[[:space:]]*"\([0-9]\+\)".*/\1/p') P2=$(echo "$DATA" | sed -n 's/.*webdata_power2[[:space:]]*=[[:space:]]*"\([0-9]\+\)".*/\1/p') P3=$(echo "$DATA" | sed -n 's/.*webdata_power3[[:space:]]*=[[:space:]]*"\([0-9]\+\)".*/\1/p') echo "${P1:-0},${P2:-0},${P3:-0}"This script returns power of 3 phases in format X, Y, Z. The reason to put all three values together is to make only one http request instead of 3 (one for each phase).
2. Made it executable: chmod +x get_EV_power.sh
3. I put this script in Home Assistant’s directory /config/scripts/get_EV_power.sh
4. created new Command line sensor in my configuration yaml that executes the script above:
command_line: - sensor: name: EV Charger Raw command: "/config/scripts/get_EV_power2.sh" scan_interval: 10Then I added 3 sensors for each phase’s power and one combined sensor (summary charging power):
template: - sensor: - name: EV Power L1 state: "{{ states('sensor.ev_charger_raw').split(',')[0] | int }}" unit_of_measurement: "W" device_class: power state_class: measurement - name: EV Power L2 state: "{{ states('sensor.ev_charger_raw').split(',')[1] | int }}" unit_of_measurement: "W" device_class: power state_class: measurement - name: EV Power L3 state: "{{ states('sensor.ev_charger_raw').split(',')[2] | int }}" unit_of_measurement: "W" device_class: power state_class: measurement #summary charging power - name: EV Charger Power device_class: power state_class: measurement unit_of_measurement: "W" state: > {{ states('sensor.ev_power_l1') | int(0) + states('sensor.ev_power_l2') | int(0) + states('sensor.ev_power_l3') | int(0) }}5. Created a dashboard for tracking charging power:
6. Added my power sensor to Powercalc, to calculate the energy (using integration) needed for charging (kWh) and let it create some helpers: daily, weekly, monthly, yearly consumption.
7. Added power consumption to my power and energy dashboards:
Conclusion
Anyways, it works, now I can track the (almost realtime) power and consumption of the EV charger, which was the main goal.
The integration of Deye’s EV charger to HA could be easier, if Deye disclosed all inverter’s modbus registers OR provided a documented local API to the EV charger.
I wonder if companies that produce IoT aren’t aware that if they make the access to their devices easy for tinkerers like me, this is free marketing / recommendation for them. I would never recommend devices with closed local access to anyone.
Deye’s openness is so-so. It definitely could be improved. The local access is at least somehow possible, but not well documented and hacky.
https://blog.rozman.info/integrating-deye-ev-charger-to-home-assistant/ #deye #evcharger #homeassistant -
**Integrating Deye EV charger to Home Assistant**TL;DR
It works, somehow, via ha-solarman integration.
Charger type: Deye SUN-EVSE22K01-EU-AC
What works
I managed to integrate 2 entities for now:
- EV charger control power
- Max EV charging power
The process
I’ve started with David Rapan’s ha-solarman integration which works well with my Deye inverter (SUN-12K-SG04LP3-EU).
Then I edited config/custom_components/solarman/inverter_definitions/deye_p3.yaml and added:
#EV test - group: EV Charger items: - name: "EV Charge Control Power" l: 1 class: "power" state_class: "measurement" uom: "W" rule: 1 scale: 1 registers: [0x02C5] icon: "mdi:car-electric" - name: EV Max Charge power alt: EV Max Charge power platform: number class: "power" state_class: "measurement" uom: "W" scale: 1 rule: 1 registers: [0x0104] configurable: min: 0 max: 22000 range: min: 0 max: 22000Restarted HA and those 2 entities appeared in solarman device:
Both entities show the same data as Deye’s app. I can set EV Max Charging Power and it will reflect in the app and the inverter.
About “EV Charge Control Power” entity – Inverter tells the charger what is the max allowed charging power (for example, how much is the solar power excess).
Today it changed like this: (it was cloudy and I had ‘solar only’ enabled):
Don’t mind the initial spike, I wrongly set the scale factor (x10).
I call it partial success.
What doesn’t work (yet)
I still didn’t find modbus register for the most important entity: actual charging power. If exists at all. Maybe there is no mapping from EV charger to modbus registers. I’m communicating with Deye tech support, but I didn’t get the answer yet. Though, they sent me an updated modbus registers document.
I’m still working on EV charger configuration settings (Solar only, Grid off–>Charger Off, Free work, EV port Load/Grid). I found the register in Deye docs, but haven’t implemented yet (some bit manipulation needed):
AddrRegister meaningR/Wdata rangeunitnote259EV_charge_modeR/W[0x0，0xFFFF]
High 8 bits: Off grid SOC Low 8 bits: Bit0:solar energy only Bit1:free work Bit4:EV_charge device connet at Grid port Bit5:EV_charge device connect at LD portAnyone?
If anyone knows which register holds actual charging power value, consumption, charging schedules, please let me know.
https://blog.rozman.info/integrating-deye-ev-charger-to-home-assistant/ #deye #evcharger #homeassistant -
**Integrating Deye EV charger to Home Assistant**TL;DR
It works, somehow, via ha-solarman integration.
Charger type: Deye SUN-EVSE22K01-EU-AC
What works
I managed to integrate 2 entities for now:
- EV charger control power
- Max EV charging power
The process
I’ve started with David Rapan’s ha-solarman integration which works well with my Deye inverter (SUN-12K-SG04LP3-EU).
Then I edited config/custom_components/solarman/inverter_definitions/deye_p3.yaml and added:
#EV test - group: EV Charger items: - name: "EV Charge Control Power" l: 1 class: "power" state_class: "measurement" uom: "W" rule: 1 scale: 1 registers: [0x02C5] icon: "mdi:car-electric" - name: EV Max Charge power alt: EV Max Charge power platform: number class: "power" state_class: "measurement" uom: "W" scale: 1 rule: 1 registers: [0x0104] configurable: min: 0 max: 22000 range: min: 0 max: 22000Restarted HA and those 2 entities appeared in solarman device:
Both entities show the same data as Deye’s app. I can set EV Max Charging Power and it will reflect in the app and the inverter.
About “EV Charge Control Power” entity – Inverter tells the charger what is the max allowed charging power (for example, how much is the solar power excess).
Today it changed like this: (it was cloudy and I had ‘solar only’ enabled):
Don’t mind the initial spike, I wrongly set the scale factor (x10).
I call it partial success.
What doesn’t work (yet)
I still didn’t find modbus register for the most important entity: actual charging power. If exists at all. Maybe there is no mapping from EV charger to modbus registers. I’m communicating with Deye tech support, but I didn’t get the answer yet. Though, they sent me an updated modbus registers document.
I’m still working on EV charger configuration settings (Solar only, Grid off–>Charger Off, Free work, EV port Load/Grid). I found the register in Deye docs, but haven’t implemented yet (some bit manipulation needed):
AddrRegister meaningR/Wdata rangeunitnote259EV_charge_modeR/W[0x0，0xFFFF]
High 8 bits: Off grid SOC Low 8 bits: Bit0:solar energy only Bit1:free work Bit4:EV_charge device connet at Grid port Bit5:EV_charge device connect at LD portAnyone?
If anyone knows which register holds actual charging power value, consumption, charging schedules, please let me know.
https://blog.rozman.info/integrating-deye-ev-charger-to-home-assistant/ #deye #evcharger #homeassistant -
**Integrating Deye EV charger to Home Assistant**TL;DR
It works, somehow, via ha-solarman integration.
Charger type: Deye SUN-EVSE22K01-EU-AC
What works
I managed to integrate 2 entities for now:
- EV charger control power
- Max EV charging power
The process
I’ve started with David Rapan’s ha-solarman integration which works well with my Deye inverter (SUN-12K-SG04LP3-EU).
Then I edited config/custom_components/solarman/inverter_definitions/deye_p3.yaml and added:
#EV test - group: EV Charger items: - name: "EV Charge Control Power" l: 1 class: "power" state_class: "measurement" uom: "W" rule: 1 scale: 1 registers: [0x02C5] icon: "mdi:car-electric" - name: EV Max Charge power alt: EV Max Charge power platform: number class: "power" state_class: "measurement" uom: "W" scale: 1 rule: 1 registers: [0x0104] configurable: min: 0 max: 22000 range: min: 0 max: 22000Restarted HA and those 2 entities appeared in solarman device:
Both entities show the same data as Deye’s app. I can set EV Max Charging Power and it will reflect in the app and the inverter.
About “EV Charge Control Power” entity – Inverter tells the charger what is the max allowed charging power (for example, how much is the solar power excess).
Today it changed like this: (it was cloudy and I had ‘solar only’ enabled):
Don’t mind the initial spike, I wrongly set the scale factor (x10).
I call it partial success.
What doesn’t work (yet)
I still didn’t find modbus register for the most important entity: actual charging power. If exists at all. Maybe there is no mapping from EV charger to modbus registers. I’m communicating with Deye tech support, but I didn’t get the answer yet. Though, they sent me an updated modbus registers document.
I’m still working on EV charger configuration settings (Solar only, Grid off–>Charger Off, Free work, EV port Load/Grid). I found the register in Deye docs, but haven’t implemented yet (some bit manipulation needed):
AddrRegister meaningR/Wdata rangeunitnote259EV_charge_modeR/W[0x0，0xFFFF]
High 8 bits: Off grid SOC Low 8 bits: Bit0:solar energy only Bit1:free work Bit4:EV_charge device connet at Grid port Bit5:EV_charge device connect at LD portAnyone?
If anyone knows which register holds actual charging power value, consumption, charging schedules, please let me know.
https://blog.rozman.info/integrating-deye-ev-charger-to-home-assistant/ #deye #evcharger #homeassistant -
Two footmen dressed in white approach the vehicle as it arrives. One opens the rear door. #Guo #Ping, one of #Huawei's rotating chairmen, steps forward and extends a hand as the guest emerges.
After walking a red carpet, the two men enter the magnificent marble-floored building, ascend a stairway, and pass through French doors to a palatial ballroom.
Several hundred people arise from their chairs and clap wildly.The guest is welcomed by Huawei's founder, #Ren #Zhengfei, whose sky-blue blazer and white khakis signify that he has attained the power to wear whatever the hell he wants.
After some serious speechifying by a procession of dark-suited executives, Ren
—who is China's Bill Gates, Lee Iacocca, and Warren Buffett rolled into one
—comes to the podium.
Three young women dressed in white uniforms enter the room, swinging their arms military style as they march to the stage, then about-face in unison as one holds out a framed #gold #medal the size of a salad plate.
Embedded with a red Baccarat crystal, it depicts the Goddess of Victory and was manufactured by the Monnaie de Paris. Ren is almost glowing as he presents the medal to the visitor.
This #honored #guest is not a world leader, a billionaire magnate, nor a war hero. He is a relatively unknown Turkish academic named #Erdal #Arıkan.
Throughout the ceremony he has been sitting stiffly, frozen in his ill-fitting suit, as if he were an ordinary theatergoer suddenly thrust into the leading role on a Broadway stage.Arıkan isn't exactly ordinary.
Ten years earlier, he'd made a major discovery in the field of information theory.
Huawei then plucked his theoretical breakthrough from academic obscurity and, with large investments and top engineering talent, fashioned it into something of value in the realm of commerce.
The company then muscled and negotiated to get that innovation into something so big it could not be denied:
the basic #5G #technology now being rolled out all over the world.Huawei's rise over the past 30 years has been heralded in China as a triumph of smarts, sweat, and grit. Perhaps no company is more beloved at home
—and more vilified by the United States.
That's at least in part because Huawei's ascent also bears the fingerprints of China's nationalistic industrial policy and an alleged penchant for intellectual property theft;
the US Department of Justice has charged the company with a sweeping conspiracy of misappropriation, infringement, obstruction, and lies.As of press time, Ren Zhengfei's #daughter was under house arrest in Vancouver, fighting extradition to the US for allegedly violating a ban against trading with Iran.
The US government has banned Huawei's 5G products and has been lobbying other countries to do the same. Huawei denies the charges; Ren calls them political.Huawei is settling the score in its own way. One of the world's great technology powers, it nonetheless suffers from an inferiority complex.
Despite spending billions on research and science, it can't get the respect and recognition of its Western peers. Much like China itself.
So when Ren handed the solid-gold medal
—crafted by the French mint!
—to Erdal Arıkan, he was sticking his thumb in their eye.https://www.wired.com/story/huawei-5g-polar-codes-data-breakthrough/
-
Two footmen dressed in white approach the vehicle as it arrives. One opens the rear door. #Guo #Ping, one of #Huawei's rotating chairmen, steps forward and extends a hand as the guest emerges.
After walking a red carpet, the two men enter the magnificent marble-floored building, ascend a stairway, and pass through French doors to a palatial ballroom.
Several hundred people arise from their chairs and clap wildly.The guest is welcomed by Huawei's founder, #Ren #Zhengfei, whose sky-blue blazer and white khakis signify that he has attained the power to wear whatever the hell he wants.
After some serious speechifying by a procession of dark-suited executives, Ren
—who is China's Bill Gates, Lee Iacocca, and Warren Buffett rolled into one
—comes to the podium.
Three young women dressed in white uniforms enter the room, swinging their arms military style as they march to the stage, then about-face in unison as one holds out a framed #gold #medal the size of a salad plate.
Embedded with a red Baccarat crystal, it depicts the Goddess of Victory and was manufactured by the Monnaie de Paris. Ren is almost glowing as he presents the medal to the visitor.
This #honored #guest is not a world leader, a billionaire magnate, nor a war hero. He is a relatively unknown Turkish academic named #Erdal #Arıkan.
Throughout the ceremony he has been sitting stiffly, frozen in his ill-fitting suit, as if he were an ordinary theatergoer suddenly thrust into the leading role on a Broadway stage.Arıkan isn't exactly ordinary.
Ten years earlier, he'd made a major discovery in the field of information theory.
Huawei then plucked his theoretical breakthrough from academic obscurity and, with large investments and top engineering talent, fashioned it into something of value in the realm of commerce.
The company then muscled and negotiated to get that innovation into something so big it could not be denied:
the basic #5G #technology now being rolled out all over the world.Huawei's rise over the past 30 years has been heralded in China as a triumph of smarts, sweat, and grit. Perhaps no company is more beloved at home
—and more vilified by the United States.
That's at least in part because Huawei's ascent also bears the fingerprints of China's nationalistic industrial policy and an alleged penchant for intellectual property theft;
the US Department of Justice has charged the company with a sweeping conspiracy of misappropriation, infringement, obstruction, and lies.As of press time, Ren Zhengfei's #daughter was under house arrest in Vancouver, fighting extradition to the US for allegedly violating a ban against trading with Iran.
The US government has banned Huawei's 5G products and has been lobbying other countries to do the same. Huawei denies the charges; Ren calls them political.Huawei is settling the score in its own way. One of the world's great technology powers, it nonetheless suffers from an inferiority complex.
Despite spending billions on research and science, it can't get the respect and recognition of its Western peers. Much like China itself.
So when Ren handed the solid-gold medal
—crafted by the French mint!
—to Erdal Arıkan, he was sticking his thumb in their eye.https://www.wired.com/story/huawei-5g-polar-codes-data-breakthrough/
-
Two footmen dressed in white approach the vehicle as it arrives. One opens the rear door. #Guo #Ping, one of #Huawei's rotating chairmen, steps forward and extends a hand as the guest emerges.
After walking a red carpet, the two men enter the magnificent marble-floored building, ascend a stairway, and pass through French doors to a palatial ballroom.
Several hundred people arise from their chairs and clap wildly.The guest is welcomed by Huawei's founder, #Ren #Zhengfei, whose sky-blue blazer and white khakis signify that he has attained the power to wear whatever the hell he wants.
After some serious speechifying by a procession of dark-suited executives, Ren
—who is China's Bill Gates, Lee Iacocca, and Warren Buffett rolled into one
—comes to the podium.
Three young women dressed in white uniforms enter the room, swinging their arms military style as they march to the stage, then about-face in unison as one holds out a framed #gold #medal the size of a salad plate.
Embedded with a red Baccarat crystal, it depicts the Goddess of Victory and was manufactured by the Monnaie de Paris. Ren is almost glowing as he presents the medal to the visitor.
This #honored #guest is not a world leader, a billionaire magnate, nor a war hero. He is a relatively unknown Turkish academic named #Erdal #Arıkan.
Throughout the ceremony he has been sitting stiffly, frozen in his ill-fitting suit, as if he were an ordinary theatergoer suddenly thrust into the leading role on a Broadway stage.Arıkan isn't exactly ordinary.
Ten years earlier, he'd made a major discovery in the field of information theory.
Huawei then plucked his theoretical breakthrough from academic obscurity and, with large investments and top engineering talent, fashioned it into something of value in the realm of commerce.
The company then muscled and negotiated to get that innovation into something so big it could not be denied:
the basic #5G #technology now being rolled out all over the world.Huawei's rise over the past 30 years has been heralded in China as a triumph of smarts, sweat, and grit. Perhaps no company is more beloved at home
—and more vilified by the United States.
That's at least in part because Huawei's ascent also bears the fingerprints of China's nationalistic industrial policy and an alleged penchant for intellectual property theft;
the US Department of Justice has charged the company with a sweeping conspiracy of misappropriation, infringement, obstruction, and lies.As of press time, Ren Zhengfei's #daughter was under house arrest in Vancouver, fighting extradition to the US for allegedly violating a ban against trading with Iran.
The US government has banned Huawei's 5G products and has been lobbying other countries to do the same. Huawei denies the charges; Ren calls them political.Huawei is settling the score in its own way. One of the world's great technology powers, it nonetheless suffers from an inferiority complex.
Despite spending billions on research and science, it can't get the respect and recognition of its Western peers. Much like China itself.
So when Ren handed the solid-gold medal
—crafted by the French mint!
—to Erdal Arıkan, he was sticking his thumb in their eye.https://www.wired.com/story/huawei-5g-polar-codes-data-breakthrough/
-
Two footmen dressed in white approach the vehicle as it arrives. One opens the rear door. #Guo #Ping, one of #Huawei's rotating chairmen, steps forward and extends a hand as the guest emerges.
After walking a red carpet, the two men enter the magnificent marble-floored building, ascend a stairway, and pass through French doors to a palatial ballroom.
Several hundred people arise from their chairs and clap wildly.The guest is welcomed by Huawei's founder, #Ren #Zhengfei, whose sky-blue blazer and white khakis signify that he has attained the power to wear whatever the hell he wants.
After some serious speechifying by a procession of dark-suited executives, Ren
—who is China's Bill Gates, Lee Iacocca, and Warren Buffett rolled into one
—comes to the podium.
Three young women dressed in white uniforms enter the room, swinging their arms military style as they march to the stage, then about-face in unison as one holds out a framed #gold #medal the size of a salad plate.
Embedded with a red Baccarat crystal, it depicts the Goddess of Victory and was manufactured by the Monnaie de Paris. Ren is almost glowing as he presents the medal to the visitor.
This #honored #guest is not a world leader, a billionaire magnate, nor a war hero. He is a relatively unknown Turkish academic named #Erdal #Arıkan.
Throughout the ceremony he has been sitting stiffly, frozen in his ill-fitting suit, as if he were an ordinary theatergoer suddenly thrust into the leading role on a Broadway stage.Arıkan isn't exactly ordinary.
Ten years earlier, he'd made a major discovery in the field of information theory.
Huawei then plucked his theoretical breakthrough from academic obscurity and, with large investments and top engineering talent, fashioned it into something of value in the realm of commerce.
The company then muscled and negotiated to get that innovation into something so big it could not be denied:
the basic #5G #technology now being rolled out all over the world.Huawei's rise over the past 30 years has been heralded in China as a triumph of smarts, sweat, and grit. Perhaps no company is more beloved at home
—and more vilified by the United States.
That's at least in part because Huawei's ascent also bears the fingerprints of China's nationalistic industrial policy and an alleged penchant for intellectual property theft;
the US Department of Justice has charged the company with a sweeping conspiracy of misappropriation, infringement, obstruction, and lies.As of press time, Ren Zhengfei's #daughter was under house arrest in Vancouver, fighting extradition to the US for allegedly violating a ban against trading with Iran.
The US government has banned Huawei's 5G products and has been lobbying other countries to do the same. Huawei denies the charges; Ren calls them political.Huawei is settling the score in its own way. One of the world's great technology powers, it nonetheless suffers from an inferiority complex.
Despite spending billions on research and science, it can't get the respect and recognition of its Western peers. Much like China itself.
So when Ren handed the solid-gold medal
—crafted by the French mint!
—to Erdal Arıkan, he was sticking his thumb in their eye.https://www.wired.com/story/huawei-5g-polar-codes-data-breakthrough/
-
Two footmen dressed in white approach the vehicle as it arrives. One opens the rear door. #Guo #Ping, one of #Huawei's rotating chairmen, steps forward and extends a hand as the guest emerges.
After walking a red carpet, the two men enter the magnificent marble-floored building, ascend a stairway, and pass through French doors to a palatial ballroom.
Several hundred people arise from their chairs and clap wildly.The guest is welcomed by Huawei's founder, #Ren #Zhengfei, whose sky-blue blazer and white khakis signify that he has attained the power to wear whatever the hell he wants.
After some serious speechifying by a procession of dark-suited executives, Ren
—who is China's Bill Gates, Lee Iacocca, and Warren Buffett rolled into one
—comes to the podium.
Three young women dressed in white uniforms enter the room, swinging their arms military style as they march to the stage, then about-face in unison as one holds out a framed #gold #medal the size of a salad plate.
Embedded with a red Baccarat crystal, it depicts the Goddess of Victory and was manufactured by the Monnaie de Paris. Ren is almost glowing as he presents the medal to the visitor.
This #honored #guest is not a world leader, a billionaire magnate, nor a war hero. He is a relatively unknown Turkish academic named #Erdal #Arıkan.
Throughout the ceremony he has been sitting stiffly, frozen in his ill-fitting suit, as if he were an ordinary theatergoer suddenly thrust into the leading role on a Broadway stage.Arıkan isn't exactly ordinary.
Ten years earlier, he'd made a major discovery in the field of information theory.
Huawei then plucked his theoretical breakthrough from academic obscurity and, with large investments and top engineering talent, fashioned it into something of value in the realm of commerce.
The company then muscled and negotiated to get that innovation into something so big it could not be denied:
the basic #5G #technology now being rolled out all over the world.Huawei's rise over the past 30 years has been heralded in China as a triumph of smarts, sweat, and grit. Perhaps no company is more beloved at home
—and more vilified by the United States.
That's at least in part because Huawei's ascent also bears the fingerprints of China's nationalistic industrial policy and an alleged penchant for intellectual property theft;
the US Department of Justice has charged the company with a sweeping conspiracy of misappropriation, infringement, obstruction, and lies.As of press time, Ren Zhengfei's #daughter was under house arrest in Vancouver, fighting extradition to the US for allegedly violating a ban against trading with Iran.
The US government has banned Huawei's 5G products and has been lobbying other countries to do the same. Huawei denies the charges; Ren calls them political.Huawei is settling the score in its own way. One of the world's great technology powers, it nonetheless suffers from an inferiority complex.
Despite spending billions on research and science, it can't get the respect and recognition of its Western peers. Much like China itself.
So when Ren handed the solid-gold medal
—crafted by the French mint!
—to Erdal Arıkan, he was sticking his thumb in their eye.https://www.wired.com/story/huawei-5g-polar-codes-data-breakthrough/
-
Can Regulators Handle the Mastodons of the World? - FREE February 28, 2023. Join the Center for Data Innovation to discuss the challenges policymakers face in applying existing laws and regulations to decentralized online services.
Date and Time: February 28, 2023, 4:00 PM to 5:00 PM (CET) / 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM (ET)
#SocialMedia #Regulations #Laws #Policymakers #DataInnovation #Decentralized #OnlineServices https://www.eventbrite.com/e/how-can-better-federal-data-on-higher-education-outcome-reduce-student-debt-tickets-486867753557 -
It's that time of year again...
Between the festivities and the downtime, I'm tackling my annual #DigitalDeclutter. This year, I'm adding a new step: wiping my AI chat history. More details over at the blog post:
https://bradgrier.com/2025/12/26/winter-break-data-cleanup-and-setting-up-the-new-year/
-
Add this to uBlock Origin to hide all blue checks from your timeline.
#BlockTheBlueThis is nice because all you have to do is turn off uBlock temporarily to undo it if you want to see everything.
These are the lines. Copying and pasting may give errors.
twitter.com##article [data-testid="icon-verified"]:upward(article)
twitter.com##.css-1dbjc4n.r-1habvwh.r-18u37iz.r-1wtj0ep [data-testid="verified-badge"] -
In 2011, Arıkan started his own small company and took polar codes to Qualcomm and Seagate to see if they had interest in implementing the idea.
“I did prepare some slides and sent them, but none of the US companies were really interested in it,” he says.
He takes the blame for failing to ignite their interest. “I was an academic who did not know how to promote an idea. Perhaps I did not believe in the idea that strongly myself.”
Later, those companies did work on polar codes and got their own patents, but without the same vigor as Huawei.
“If it weren't for the persistent efforts of Huawei researchers,” Arıkan says, “polar codes would not be in 5G today.”
I asked him about the over-the-top Huawei ceremony immortalized in that YouTube video.
He told me that he'd received the invitation to visit in June 2018.
“I said, ‘What is the occasion?’
And they said, ‘Mr. Ren wants to give you an award,’” Arıkan recalls.“I figured that Huawei is very happy because the standard has been made, and polar coding is definitely in it.”
He thought he would show up and there would be a pleasant conversation with the founder and some engineers. He might leave with a plaque.
Arıkan arrived in Shenzhen and stayed at a guest house on campus.
He had tea with Ren and was toasted by executives, including Wen Tong.
But he sensed that something bigger was afoot.“They revealed the program to me one step at a time. I didn't know how big that room would be, what kind of building we would go into. They didn't tell me to dress nicely.” (He did anyway.)
An hour before the ceremony his hosts informed him that perhaps he should prepare a speech.
He hurriedly finished his remarks in the town car on the way to the ceremony.“I have spent the last 30 years at Bilkent University doing research on a variety of problems that culminated in polar codes,” he told the crowd in his halting English.
“Today our roads cross on a happy occasion.”
The spectacle didn't go to Arıkan's head. “They were not honoring me,” he told me as we sat in his office.
“Huawei was saying, ‘We didn't steal this idea from anybody, and here is the originator of the idea.’
There is no question that Huawei is the most technologically sophisticated company in China.
Maybe for the first time in a thousand years, China is showing they are competing head to head with the rest of the world in technology.
The US could live with intellectual property theft, but it is much harder to live with being in competition with an equal power.
“Polar codes itself is not what's important,” he continued. “It is a symbol.
5G is totally different than the internet. It's like a global nervous system.
Huawei is the leading company in 5G. They will be around in 10, 20, 50 years
—you cannot say that about the US tech companies.In the internet era, the US produced a few trillion-dollar companies.
Because of 5G, China will have 10 or more trillion-dollar companies.
Huawei and China now have the lead.”
US companies and the US government can no longer expect to beat China back with threats or indictments, even if they are sometimes warranted.
And it's not just telecom companies like Huawei.
For all the furor at the highest levels over whether the teen-oriented social app TikTok presented security issues, the real threat to American business was that its Chinese engineers had devised an AI-powered recommendation engine that Silicon Valley had not matched.
Arıkan says the experience has led him to respect Huawei
—and to provide a warning to the country where he learned information theory.“I owe a lot to the US,” he says.
“I give you friendly advice:
You have to accept this as the new reality and deal with it accordingly.”To paraphrase Shannon:
No one knows the future. But Huawei and China now have a hand in controlling it.-- excerpts from:
https://www.wired.com/story/huawei-5g-polar-codes-data-breakthrough/by Steven Levy, editor at large at Wired.
Steven has written seven books, including Hackers, Crypto, Artificial Life, Insanely Great (a history of the Macintosh), and, most recently, In the Plex, the definitive story of Google. He attended Temple University and has a master’s degree in literature from Penn State.
#ErdalArıkan #5G #polarcodes
#RenZhengfei #Huawei #ChineseGovernment #ZTE #DOJ #intellectualproperty #Cisco #Nortel
#stevenlevy #Wired -
Już wkrótce #Hollywood stanie przed nami otworem. Gra #Moviehouse, inspirowana słynnym #TheMovies, będzie mieć swoją premierę już 5 kwietnia 2023. Z tej okazji wpadł nowy trailer! 🎬
-
At @datawrapper we have this tradition to cycle trough all employees to do weekly charts. 📊
For my first one, I went on a deep dive of my goal to run 1000 km over a year. 🏃♂️
What areas of your live you’d wish for more insights on (sport or something else)? #datavis #infovis #applewatch #running -
In 2011, Arıkan started his own small company and took polar codes to Qualcomm and Seagate to see if they had interest in implementing the idea.
“I did prepare some slides and sent them, but none of the US companies were really interested in it,” he says.
He takes the blame for failing to ignite their interest. “I was an academic who did not know how to promote an idea. Perhaps I did not believe in the idea that strongly myself.”
Later, those companies did work on polar codes and got their own patents, but without the same vigor as Huawei.
“If it weren't for the persistent efforts of Huawei researchers,” Arıkan says, “polar codes would not be in 5G today.”
I asked him about the over-the-top Huawei ceremony immortalized in that YouTube video.
He told me that he'd received the invitation to visit in June 2018.
“I said, ‘What is the occasion?’
And they said, ‘Mr. Ren wants to give you an award,’” Arıkan recalls.“I figured that Huawei is very happy because the standard has been made, and polar coding is definitely in it.”
He thought he would show up and there would be a pleasant conversation with the founder and some engineers. He might leave with a plaque.
Arıkan arrived in Shenzhen and stayed at a guest house on campus.
He had tea with Ren and was toasted by executives, including Wen Tong.
But he sensed that something bigger was afoot.“They revealed the program to me one step at a time. I didn't know how big that room would be, what kind of building we would go into. They didn't tell me to dress nicely.” (He did anyway.)
An hour before the ceremony his hosts informed him that perhaps he should prepare a speech.
He hurriedly finished his remarks in the town car on the way to the ceremony.“I have spent the last 30 years at Bilkent University doing research on a variety of problems that culminated in polar codes,” he told the crowd in his halting English.
“Today our roads cross on a happy occasion.”
The spectacle didn't go to Arıkan's head. “They were not honoring me,” he told me as we sat in his office.
“Huawei was saying, ‘We didn't steal this idea from anybody, and here is the originator of the idea.’
There is no question that Huawei is the most technologically sophisticated company in China.
Maybe for the first time in a thousand years, China is showing they are competing head to head with the rest of the world in technology.
The US could live with intellectual property theft, but it is much harder to live with being in competition with an equal power.
“Polar codes itself is not what's important,” he continued. “It is a symbol.
5G is totally different than the internet. It's like a global nervous system.
Huawei is the leading company in 5G. They will be around in 10, 20, 50 years
—you cannot say that about the US tech companies.In the internet era, the US produced a few trillion-dollar companies.
Because of 5G, China will have 10 or more trillion-dollar companies.
Huawei and China now have the lead.”
US companies and the US government can no longer expect to beat China back with threats or indictments, even if they are sometimes warranted.
And it's not just telecom companies like Huawei.
For all the furor at the highest levels over whether the teen-oriented social app TikTok presented security issues, the real threat to American business was that its Chinese engineers had devised an AI-powered recommendation engine that Silicon Valley had not matched.
Arıkan says the experience has led him to respect Huawei
—and to provide a warning to the country where he learned information theory.“I owe a lot to the US,” he says.
“I give you friendly advice:
You have to accept this as the new reality and deal with it accordingly.”To paraphrase Shannon:
No one knows the future. But Huawei and China now have a hand in controlling it.-- excerpts from:
https://www.wired.com/story/huawei-5g-polar-codes-data-breakthrough/by Steven Levy, editor at large at Wired.
Steven has written seven books, including Hackers, Crypto, Artificial Life, Insanely Great (a history of the Macintosh), and, most recently, In the Plex, the definitive story of Google. He attended Temple University and has a master’s degree in literature from Penn State.
#ErdalArıkan #5G #polarcodes
#RenZhengfei #Huawei #ChineseGovernment #ZTE #DOJ #intellectualproperty #Cisco #Nortel
#stevenlevy #Wired -
In 2011, Arıkan started his own small company and took polar codes to Qualcomm and Seagate to see if they had interest in implementing the idea.
“I did prepare some slides and sent them, but none of the US companies were really interested in it,” he says.
He takes the blame for failing to ignite their interest. “I was an academic who did not know how to promote an idea. Perhaps I did not believe in the idea that strongly myself.”
Later, those companies did work on polar codes and got their own patents, but without the same vigor as Huawei.
“If it weren't for the persistent efforts of Huawei researchers,” Arıkan says, “polar codes would not be in 5G today.”
I asked him about the over-the-top Huawei ceremony immortalized in that YouTube video.
He told me that he'd received the invitation to visit in June 2018.
“I said, ‘What is the occasion?’
And they said, ‘Mr. Ren wants to give you an award,’” Arıkan recalls.“I figured that Huawei is very happy because the standard has been made, and polar coding is definitely in it.”
He thought he would show up and there would be a pleasant conversation with the founder and some engineers. He might leave with a plaque.
Arıkan arrived in Shenzhen and stayed at a guest house on campus.
He had tea with Ren and was toasted by executives, including Wen Tong.
But he sensed that something bigger was afoot.“They revealed the program to me one step at a time. I didn't know how big that room would be, what kind of building we would go into. They didn't tell me to dress nicely.” (He did anyway.)
An hour before the ceremony his hosts informed him that perhaps he should prepare a speech.
He hurriedly finished his remarks in the town car on the way to the ceremony.“I have spent the last 30 years at Bilkent University doing research on a variety of problems that culminated in polar codes,” he told the crowd in his halting English.
“Today our roads cross on a happy occasion.”
The spectacle didn't go to Arıkan's head. “They were not honoring me,” he told me as we sat in his office.
“Huawei was saying, ‘We didn't steal this idea from anybody, and here is the originator of the idea.’
There is no question that Huawei is the most technologically sophisticated company in China.
Maybe for the first time in a thousand years, China is showing they are competing head to head with the rest of the world in technology.
The US could live with intellectual property theft, but it is much harder to live with being in competition with an equal power.
“Polar codes itself is not what's important,” he continued. “It is a symbol.
5G is totally different than the internet. It's like a global nervous system.
Huawei is the leading company in 5G. They will be around in 10, 20, 50 years
—you cannot say that about the US tech companies.In the internet era, the US produced a few trillion-dollar companies.
Because of 5G, China will have 10 or more trillion-dollar companies.
Huawei and China now have the lead.”
US companies and the US government can no longer expect to beat China back with threats or indictments, even if they are sometimes warranted.
And it's not just telecom companies like Huawei.
For all the furor at the highest levels over whether the teen-oriented social app TikTok presented security issues, the real threat to American business was that its Chinese engineers had devised an AI-powered recommendation engine that Silicon Valley had not matched.
Arıkan says the experience has led him to respect Huawei
—and to provide a warning to the country where he learned information theory.“I owe a lot to the US,” he says.
“I give you friendly advice:
You have to accept this as the new reality and deal with it accordingly.”To paraphrase Shannon:
No one knows the future. But Huawei and China now have a hand in controlling it.-- excerpts from:
https://www.wired.com/story/huawei-5g-polar-codes-data-breakthrough/by Steven Levy, editor at large at Wired.
Steven has written seven books, including Hackers, Crypto, Artificial Life, Insanely Great (a history of the Macintosh), and, most recently, In the Plex, the definitive story of Google. He attended Temple University and has a master’s degree in literature from Penn State.
#ErdalArıkan #5G #polarcodes
#RenZhengfei #Huawei #ChineseGovernment #ZTE #DOJ #intellectualproperty #Cisco #Nortel
#stevenlevy #Wired -
In 2011, Arıkan started his own small company and took polar codes to Qualcomm and Seagate to see if they had interest in implementing the idea.
“I did prepare some slides and sent them, but none of the US companies were really interested in it,” he says.
He takes the blame for failing to ignite their interest. “I was an academic who did not know how to promote an idea. Perhaps I did not believe in the idea that strongly myself.”
Later, those companies did work on polar codes and got their own patents, but without the same vigor as Huawei.
“If it weren't for the persistent efforts of Huawei researchers,” Arıkan says, “polar codes would not be in 5G today.”
I asked him about the over-the-top Huawei ceremony immortalized in that YouTube video.
He told me that he'd received the invitation to visit in June 2018.
“I said, ‘What is the occasion?’
And they said, ‘Mr. Ren wants to give you an award,’” Arıkan recalls.“I figured that Huawei is very happy because the standard has been made, and polar coding is definitely in it.”
He thought he would show up and there would be a pleasant conversation with the founder and some engineers. He might leave with a plaque.
Arıkan arrived in Shenzhen and stayed at a guest house on campus.
He had tea with Ren and was toasted by executives, including Wen Tong.
But he sensed that something bigger was afoot.“They revealed the program to me one step at a time. I didn't know how big that room would be, what kind of building we would go into. They didn't tell me to dress nicely.” (He did anyway.)
An hour before the ceremony his hosts informed him that perhaps he should prepare a speech.
He hurriedly finished his remarks in the town car on the way to the ceremony.“I have spent the last 30 years at Bilkent University doing research on a variety of problems that culminated in polar codes,” he told the crowd in his halting English.
“Today our roads cross on a happy occasion.”
The spectacle didn't go to Arıkan's head. “They were not honoring me,” he told me as we sat in his office.
“Huawei was saying, ‘We didn't steal this idea from anybody, and here is the originator of the idea.’
There is no question that Huawei is the most technologically sophisticated company in China.
Maybe for the first time in a thousand years, China is showing they are competing head to head with the rest of the world in technology.
The US could live with intellectual property theft, but it is much harder to live with being in competition with an equal power.
“Polar codes itself is not what's important,” he continued. “It is a symbol.
5G is totally different than the internet. It's like a global nervous system.
Huawei is the leading company in 5G. They will be around in 10, 20, 50 years
—you cannot say that about the US tech companies.In the internet era, the US produced a few trillion-dollar companies.
Because of 5G, China will have 10 or more trillion-dollar companies.
Huawei and China now have the lead.”
US companies and the US government can no longer expect to beat China back with threats or indictments, even if they are sometimes warranted.
And it's not just telecom companies like Huawei.
For all the furor at the highest levels over whether the teen-oriented social app TikTok presented security issues, the real threat to American business was that its Chinese engineers had devised an AI-powered recommendation engine that Silicon Valley had not matched.
Arıkan says the experience has led him to respect Huawei
—and to provide a warning to the country where he learned information theory.“I owe a lot to the US,” he says.
“I give you friendly advice:
You have to accept this as the new reality and deal with it accordingly.”To paraphrase Shannon:
No one knows the future. But Huawei and China now have a hand in controlling it.-- excerpts from:
https://www.wired.com/story/huawei-5g-polar-codes-data-breakthrough/by Steven Levy, editor at large at Wired.
Steven has written seven books, including Hackers, Crypto, Artificial Life, Insanely Great (a history of the Macintosh), and, most recently, In the Plex, the definitive story of Google. He attended Temple University and has a master’s degree in literature from Penn State.
#ErdalArıkan #5G #polarcodes
#RenZhengfei #Huawei #ChineseGovernment #ZTE #DOJ #intellectualproperty #Cisco #Nortel
#stevenlevy #Wired -
In 2011, Arıkan started his own small company and took polar codes to Qualcomm and Seagate to see if they had interest in implementing the idea.
“I did prepare some slides and sent them, but none of the US companies were really interested in it,” he says.
He takes the blame for failing to ignite their interest. “I was an academic who did not know how to promote an idea. Perhaps I did not believe in the idea that strongly myself.”
Later, those companies did work on polar codes and got their own patents, but without the same vigor as Huawei.
“If it weren't for the persistent efforts of Huawei researchers,” Arıkan says, “polar codes would not be in 5G today.”
I asked him about the over-the-top Huawei ceremony immortalized in that YouTube video.
He told me that he'd received the invitation to visit in June 2018.
“I said, ‘What is the occasion?’
And they said, ‘Mr. Ren wants to give you an award,’” Arıkan recalls.“I figured that Huawei is very happy because the standard has been made, and polar coding is definitely in it.”
He thought he would show up and there would be a pleasant conversation with the founder and some engineers. He might leave with a plaque.
Arıkan arrived in Shenzhen and stayed at a guest house on campus.
He had tea with Ren and was toasted by executives, including Wen Tong.
But he sensed that something bigger was afoot.“They revealed the program to me one step at a time. I didn't know how big that room would be, what kind of building we would go into. They didn't tell me to dress nicely.” (He did anyway.)
An hour before the ceremony his hosts informed him that perhaps he should prepare a speech.
He hurriedly finished his remarks in the town car on the way to the ceremony.“I have spent the last 30 years at Bilkent University doing research on a variety of problems that culminated in polar codes,” he told the crowd in his halting English.
“Today our roads cross on a happy occasion.”
The spectacle didn't go to Arıkan's head. “They were not honoring me,” he told me as we sat in his office.
“Huawei was saying, ‘We didn't steal this idea from anybody, and here is the originator of the idea.’
There is no question that Huawei is the most technologically sophisticated company in China.
Maybe for the first time in a thousand years, China is showing they are competing head to head with the rest of the world in technology.
The US could live with intellectual property theft, but it is much harder to live with being in competition with an equal power.
“Polar codes itself is not what's important,” he continued. “It is a symbol.
5G is totally different than the internet. It's like a global nervous system.
Huawei is the leading company in 5G. They will be around in 10, 20, 50 years
—you cannot say that about the US tech companies.In the internet era, the US produced a few trillion-dollar companies.
Because of 5G, China will have 10 or more trillion-dollar companies.
Huawei and China now have the lead.”
US companies and the US government can no longer expect to beat China back with threats or indictments, even if they are sometimes warranted.
And it's not just telecom companies like Huawei.
For all the furor at the highest levels over whether the teen-oriented social app TikTok presented security issues, the real threat to American business was that its Chinese engineers had devised an AI-powered recommendation engine that Silicon Valley had not matched.
Arıkan says the experience has led him to respect Huawei
—and to provide a warning to the country where he learned information theory.“I owe a lot to the US,” he says.
“I give you friendly advice:
You have to accept this as the new reality and deal with it accordingly.”To paraphrase Shannon:
No one knows the future. But Huawei and China now have a hand in controlling it.-- excerpts from:
https://www.wired.com/story/huawei-5g-polar-codes-data-breakthrough/by Steven Levy, editor at large at Wired.
Steven has written seven books, including Hackers, Crypto, Artificial Life, Insanely Great (a history of the Macintosh), and, most recently, In the Plex, the definitive story of Google. He attended Temple University and has a master’s degree in literature from Penn State.
#ErdalArıkan #5G #polarcodes
#RenZhengfei #Huawei #ChineseGovernment #ZTE #DOJ #intellectualproperty #Cisco #Nortel
#stevenlevy #Wired -
Inkulinati, o jogo de estratégia baseado em tinta, chega ao mercado com batalhas medievais e humor peculiar. Prepare-se para duelos épicos!
#Inkulinati #Xbox #PC #Gamerscore
https://www.gamerscore.com.br/inkulinati-recebe-data-de-lancamento/ -
Connecting Decentralized Social Networks and Rethinking Interoperability
Open Channels FM Connecting Decentralized Social Networks and Rethinking Interoperability Play EpisodePause Episode Mute/Unmute EpisodeRewind 10 Seconds1xFast Forward 30 seconds 00:00/00:58:07 SubscribeShare Apple Podcasts CastBox Overcast PocketCasts RSS Spotify RSS Feed Share Link Embed https://openchannels.fm/connecting-decentralized-social-networks-and-rethinking-interoperability/embed/#?secret=4c5QcQgKHd<script> /*! This file is auto-generated */ !function(d,l){"use strict";l.querySelector&&d.addEventListener&&"undefined"!=typeof URL&&(d.wp=d.wp||{},d.wp.receiveEmbedMessage||(d.wp.receiveEmbedMessage=function(e){var t=e.data;if((t||t.secret||t.message||t.value)&&!/[^a-zA-Z0-9]/.test(t.secret)){for(var s,r,n,a=l.querySelectorAll('iframe[data-secret="'+t.secret+'"]'),o=l.querySelectorAll('blockquote[data-secret="'+t.secret+'"]'),c=new RegExp("^https?:$","i"),i=0;i<o.length;i++)o[i].style.display="none";for(i=0;i<a.length;i++)s=a[i],e.source===s.contentWindow&&(s.removeAttribute("style"),"height"===t.message?(1e3<(r=parseInt(t.value,10))?r=1e3:~~r<200&&(r=200),s.height=r):"link"===t.message&&(r=new URL(s.getAttribute("src")),n=new URL(t.value),c.test(n.protocol))&&n.host===r.host&&l.activeElement===s&&(d.top.location.href=t.value))}},d.addEventListener("message",d.wp.receiveEmbedMessage,!1),l.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded",function(){for(var e,t,s=l.querySelectorAll("iframe.wp-embedded-content"),r=0;r<s.length;r++)(t=(e=s[r]).getAttribute("data-secret"))||(t=Math.random().toString(36).substring(2,12),e.src+="#?secret="+t,e.setAttribute("data-secret",t)),e.contentWindow.postMessage({message:"ready",secret:t},"*")},!1)))}(window,document); //# sourceURL=https://openchannels.fm/wp-includes/js/wp-embed.min.js </script> ' title="Embed Code" class="input-embed input-embed-2551015" readonly/>Download file | Play in new window | Duration: 00:58:07
In this episode, host Matthias Pfefferle catches up with long-time friend and open web builder Ryan Barrett. If you’ve ever wondered who’s behind the scenes connecting all these wild and sprawling decentralized networks like the IndieWeb, the Fediverse, and now Bluesky, well, Ryan Barrett is your guy.
They share into the story of Bridgy and BridgyFed, tools Ryan Barrett built to help posts, conversations, and even likes travel effortlessly between platforms that, let’s be honest, don’t always want to talk to each other. It’s a real look at why we still need these kinds of bridges, the ups and downs of working in open source, and what it’s like turning a side project into something that lots of people rely on.
You’ll get a peek into the early days of blogging, the messy but fun world of protocol building, and some of the tough questions that come with running “critical infrastructure” without a big company behind you. Whether you love the nerdy details or just want to know why your favorite blog can show up in the social media feed of tomorrow, this conversation is all about keeping the web open and a bit of the chaos that comes with it.
Join Matthias and Ryan for a chat that proves building bridges, both tech and personal, is still as important (and fun) as ever.
Thanks to our sponsors…
The best time to migrate is before you’re under pressure. Omnisend moves everything essential for you now, so you’re fully ready when you plan for that large campaign. Use the code
OpenChannelsand get 30% off your first 3 months of any paid plan.If you build stores for clients, WooCommerce gives you the flexibility to create exactly what merchants need. Customize workflows, extend with thousands of integrations, and scale without switching platforms. Check it out at WooCommerce.com.
Takeaways
• Bridging Decentralized Networks: Ryan Barrett has spent years building tools (most notably Bridgy and BridgyFed) that connect different social networks like the IndieWeb, Fediverse, and Bluesky (Atmosphere). These act as cross-posters or bi-directional bridges, letting users interact across platforms more seamlessly.
• Funding and Organization: Initially, all this was a side project for Ryan Barrett, but it has evolved. They’ve started a nonprofit, received some grant and crowdfunding, and put basic governance in place; though it doesn’t currently provide a full salary, it does cover operational expenses.
• Why Bridges Are Needed: Despite the vision of decentralized networks, true interoperability doesn’t exist by default. Instead of expecting everyone to align on a single protocol, Ryan Barrett argues that we’re still learning and evolving, so bridges are necessary while experimentation continues.
• Not Just a Temporary Fix: Bridges aren’t just a stopgap; as protocols and ideas keep changing, the need for interoperability will persist. Ryan Barrett believes that even with established protocols like ActivityPub or AT Protocol, new experiments and networks are inevitable.
• Personal Motivation: The roots of these tools trace back to Ryan Barrett’s desire to maintain ownership of his content and the social interactions around his blog, especially as conversations moved onto walled garden platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
• Evolution of Open Web Tools: Early efforts included cross-posting content, but Ryan Barrett emphasized “backfeed” such as importing comments, likes, and reactions from social platforms back to his own website, so all engagement was aggregated in one place.
• Preference for Usable, Practical Solutions: Rather than inventing radically new standards, Ryan Barrett prefers building bridges and services that work with what’s already out there, favoring RSS, Webmention, and existing APIs, so end users don’t need to host their own solutions.
• Protocols: No Single Winner: Discussing IndieWeb, ActivityPub, AT Protocol, and others, Ryan Barrett sees good ideas in each but doesn’t believe there’s a “best” protocol yet. He values building blocks, modularity, and combining approaches, rather than betting on one framework.
• End-User and Publisher Focus: Most usage of BridgyFed comes from publishers and content creators (e.g., major media), but individuals also use bridges, especially those who want to maintain a single profile and reach across networks without friction.
• Invisible Interoperability: Often, users don’t even realize they’re talking across different networks using BridgyFed; they see and interact with others seamlessly, which is the ideal scenario for Ryan Barrett.
• Critical Infrastructure Concerns: With adoption rising, BridgyFed has become important infrastructure. To ensure long-term reliability, they’ve made it open source, started a nonprofit, and instituted governance. There are plans to make it more resilient and less dependent on a single operator.
• Looking Forward: Major focus areas for the future include supporting long-form content (via standards like standard.site), expanding migrations and account portability, and readying bridges for new protocols like Nostr and Farcaster.
• Philosophy of the IndieWeb: The IndieWeb is described as both a philosophy (“everyone should have a website and control their own profile”) and a protocol stack (Webmention, microformats, etc.), but it’s fundamentally about individual ownership and choice in the online experience.
• The Web Isn’t Going Away: There will always be vastly more websites than social network accounts. Even as trends shift more towards platform accounts, the open web remains a massive, foundational part of online life and bridges can help keep it connected to emerging networks.
Mentioned Links and Resources
- Bridgy & BridgyFed – A suite of tools for bridging between the IndieWeb, Fediverse, and Bluesky/Atmosphere. 🔗 https://brid.gy/
- ANEW Social – The nonprofit organization behind BridgyFed. 🔗 https://anew.social/
- Granary – A tool and service to convert between web formats like RSS and microformats. 🔗 https://granary.io/
- Standard.site – A common lexicon/format for long-form content on Bluesky and other AT Protocol platforms (mentioned as “standard.site” for composing and sharing articles). 🔗 https://standard.site/
- snarfed.org – Ryan Barrett’s website, personal blog, and IndieWeb hub. 🔗 https://snarfed.org/
- Fed.brid.gy – The main instance of BridgyFed bridging service. 🔗 https://fed.brid.gy/
- IndieWeb – Community, resources, and documentation about owning and controlling your content and identity online. 🔗 https://indieweb.org/
- Bounce – A tool to help you migrate from one network to another and keep all of your followers (powered by BridgyFed). 🔗 https://bounce.anew.social/
Timestamped Overview
- 00:00 Between Gigs Crowdfunding Nonprofit
- 05:14 Early Protocol Evolution Debate
- 10:11 Blogging Era and Social Media
- 12:11 Backfeeding Social Interactions
- 16:20 Early Web Standards Collaboration
- 19:26 Graph API and Decentralization Challenges
- 22:43 Struggling with Protocol Implementation
- 25:12 Engineering Formats as Lego Blocks
- 30:46 Usability and account recoverability
- 33:36 Decentralized Social Functional Separation
- 37:27 Decentralized Communication via Open Standards
- 39:34 Building for the Present Web
- 45:08 BridgyFed: Connecting Diverse Platforms
- 47:04 Transforming a Side Project
- 51:05 Custom Domains for Bridged Accounts
- 54:23 Network Migration and Bounce Tool
- 56:58 Indie Web Collaboration Reflections
Matthias Pfefferle:
So welcome, you’re listening to the Open Web and Fediverse series, part of the Open Web Conversations channel and Open Channels event production. And today’s guest is building infrastructure that bridges together what should be interoperable by default. He’s literally building bridges between the indie web, the Fediverse, and the atmosphere. I hope it’s called like that for almost 15 years now. Welcome to the podcast, Ryan Barrett.Ryan Barrett:
Thank you, Matthias. I’m glad to be here.Matthias Pfefferle:
I think my introduction was almost perfect, but Maybe you want to add something?Ryan Barrett:
Yeah, no, I, you and I go back so long. We’ve been doing indie web stuff together for at least 15 years. And so it’s, I’m excited to be here. It’s, it’s really fun to get to talk to you about kind of everything that led us to where we are now.Matthias Pfefferle:
Yeah, but maybe you say some words about what I teased a bit with. You are the bridge builder.Ryan Barrett:
Yes. Yeah. So who am I? Yes. So I’m, you know, a stereotypical Silicon Valley software engineer. It’s been my day job. But on the side for a long time, I have— I’ve done indie web stuff and somehow I ended up doing a lot of converters and bridges and translators. Going from one place to another. Uh, so yeah, the— what I’m known for and what I spend most of my time on today is, um, a suite of tools, uh, Bridgy and BridgyFed. We now, we now call them maybe BridgyClassic and BridgyFed. Um, these, uh, are kind of like cross-posters or bridges between different networks, uh, as you mentioned. So the web IndieWeb in particular, the Fediverse, and Bluesky, or the Atmosphere as you called it. And so BridgyFed is where I spend most of my time these days, and it is a full-featured bi-directional bridge. So if you are on Bluesky, you can see people who have bridged themselves on the Fediverse. You can see their profile, their timeline, you can follow them. If they post, you’ll see their posts on Bluesky. You can reply to them on Bluesky. The replies and likes and reposts will go back and forth. And so we try to make that as native and seamless as possible. And it takes a lot of work, but it’s fun.Matthias Pfefferle:
Yeah, because of a lot of work, you mentioned that you do that as a side hustle. Is that still a side hustle thing?Ryan Barrett:
Uh, right now I’m between gigs, so I’m mostly full-time on it. Uh, eventually I’ll go find a real job again, but, um, uh, right now I have more time for it. Uh, thanks in large part, uh, about a year and a half ago maybe I started working with Anuj Ahuja, who comes from working on similar stuff, and we have, um, I resisted kind of taking donations for a long time, but we now do crowdfunding and, uh, grant funding, and we, we started nonprofit. And so there is a bit more of kind of real organization and governance and some funding behind it. We don’t have enough funding to kind of pay ourselves salaries yet, but we can cover expenses and things like that.Matthias Pfefferle:
Is it a plan to do that as a main profession anytime soon?Ryan Barrett:
I don’t know. I’ve never been much for like a 5-year plan or a 10-year plan for myself. I just do what I’m doing while it works. And then when it’s time to do something else, I do something else. Um, I have never quite felt like this is my career. Um, so, but I’m doing it mostly full-time now. We’ll see how it goes. And I mean, even if I go get a different job and do something else,, you know, as a day job, like I wouldn’t shut this down. Um, it’s more a question of like, how much time am I spending building new parts of it and maintaining it as opposed to just kind of running it as is.Matthias Pfefferle:
I think that’s the main problem for everyone working in open source and decentralized platforms in general, I would say. Um, yeah, but As I said in the introduction, it’s kind of weird that you need something like a bridge to bridge decentralized networks together. So why all of that?Ryan Barrett:
Yeah, there is one way of thinking about this that is kind of like we want everyone, you know, all the different software projects to use the same protocol so that they can interoperate. Of course, I get that. Another way of thinking about it is we are still so early to all of this. It’s— yes, it’s been decades, but decades is not that long. I think if we said, okay, have we figured out all of the questions and we know the best way to do all of this, we’re doing it in maybe an activity pub. ActivityPub got everything right, no more questions to answer, like no more problems, so there’s no need to try anything new. Like ActivityPub is it, or, or Atmos protocol or anything else. That’s the final answer forever. Like, I don’t think anyone would believe that, right? Like, I think we are so early and there’s so much more to learn and figure out and, uh, kind of invent, we have to try a bunch of new things. ActivityPub is great. App Protocol is great. IndieWeb is great. I like Nostr. I like Farcaster. There are a bunch of good ideas, but we have like, yeah, there’s just so much more to figure out. And often like you can’t slowly evolve an existing network or protocol to try some big new idea. Uh, often if you have a big new idea that’s very different, it’s just too far away. And so you can’t like very gradually, inch by inch, move this one over there. You have to just try a new thing. And so I think trying new things is great. Uh, I think right now is the time to try lots of different ways to do decentralized social, right? But while we do that, we’ll have lots of different networks that don’t talk. Right. And so I like having things talk. And so I think bridges are useful.Matthias Pfefferle:
So is that still a temporary thing for you?Ryan Barrett:
Or, uh, probably not. I mean, so if the question is like, will we try things and then we’ll find the best way and everyone will use the one best way and then we’re done. No, I don’t think so. I think change is the only constant. I think we are always improving things. Um, Email is a great example. You could say, yeah, we tried a few different ways for people to kind of talk asynchronously online many, many decades ago. We settled on email. That’s great. But now if you think about how do you talk to your friends online, it’s mostly not on email, right? It’s on messaging or social or other things. And so we didn’t really have— even when we settled on email, like later, it’s not that SMS competed with email, but it was a new idea, right? And so I think there will always be new ideas, and that’s good.Matthias Pfefferle:
So you said, or you already mentioned, that it’s nearly since forever, um, you are working on that. I think it’s almost 15 years. So, um, What led to a bridge? What is the history about all of that? Why have you decided to, okay, there are so many, like the XKCD comic, there’s so many competing standards, let’s build a bridge?Ryan Barrett:
Right, right. Yeah, so the short answer is kind of the open source scratching my own itch. So way back in maybe 2000, I was in college. I had a website, a little— I didn’t— no one knew to call it a blog, but a website or a blog. Okay, good. When Facebook came out maybe a year or two later, at least very early in college for colleges, I signed up and tried it and I thought, oh, this is interesting. And I kind of immediately realize, oh, this is good and useful, but it’s not mine. I don’t control it. Like, I can, I can make my profile and post, but at the end of the day, if they want to change how things look or they don’t like me and want to, you know, ban my account or something, like, I— they can do that. I can’t control it. And so it’s okay. I mean, that’s like any service. But what I ended up doing was I would, when I posted, I would always just post on my website and then I would just copy and paste into Facebook. Then I knew at least anything I write there, like I’ll still have a copy of, I’ll still control. Okay. That is fine. Like as other services come out like Twitter or whatever, I would, I did the same thing. Gradually. So there was this era, you remember this, I mean, you and I have been doing indie web stuff together forever. The blogging era, this was the early to mid, maybe 2000s. There was an era where lots of people wrote blogs and would kind of respond to each other’s blog posts on their blogs and comment on those blog posts. And that’s great. Everyone had their own website and did that and it worked well. When social media kind of got bigger, one thing we would do is we would write blog posts and then post links to our posts on Facebook, Twitter, et cetera.Matthias Pfefferle:
The famous cross-posting.Ryan Barrett:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, sure. Gradually what we saw was that more and more people spent more time inside these social networks as opposed to reading kind of on the blogs. And so when I would post a link to a blog post I wrote, something I wrote, more and more people would comment kind of on Facebook or on Twitter or wherever instead of on my blog post on my website. Okay. The downside there is I don’t have— I’ve been like that conversation like about what I’m talking about. Is on Facebook or is on Twitter. Like, I don’t keep a copy of it, I don’t have a record of it, right? Um, you know, so that, that was a change that was disappointing. And so cross-posting was one thing. There were tons— there were always tons of tools to say, oh, post to Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and whatever. Like, that’s pretty easy. So lots of people did that, that’s useful. But what I wanted was the comments or the replies on Twitter. And then eventually the likes and the reposts and the quotes and everything, I wanted those to show up on my website too. And other people had thought of this, and you know, it was, it was a good idea, but it was much— it was more complicated to build, and so not many people did it. This is what we call in the indie web backfeed. And of course, the indie— at this time I had also kind of discovered the indie web, or was discovering at this time, and it was doing— had similar ideas kind of between websites themselves without worrying about social networks. But so what I eventually built was this tool to go use the Twitter API, use the Facebook API, etc., to find all of those replies and likes and reposts and figure out and kind of map from my original post there to the, my blog post and copy them all back to my blog post so they would show up there and other people would see them there.Matthias Pfefferle:
So the first version, the first bridge was to bridge your blog content to, let’s say, closed social network and get the reactions out of it.Ryan Barrett:
Yes. And especially, I mean, primarily the backfeed. So at the beginning, I didn’t do the cross-posting. I just I’m not— I’ve never been very online. I don’t post a ton. I post once every few days. Copy and paste is fine for me. But the back feed was the key part. And originally this was either 2000— I need to check the— maybe January 2012. The first version I did of this was WordPress specific. It was not Webmention. It was not kind of this open standard, this indie web standard. It was WordPress specific and it did, I think, Facebook and Twitter and that was it. And it was probably only replies or comments, but it was something, you know, and it kind of grew from there.Matthias Pfefferle:
But it was as a service, it was not directly baked into WordPress. So is there a specific or was there a specific decision to do it like that or is this something that made the most sense?Ryan Barrett:
So, I always knew this— all this should work as kind of open standards. Open standards. I wanted it to be interoperable. I didn’t want it to be specific— as much as I love WordPress, I didn’t want it to be specific to WordPress or anything else, right? And so, the standards I knew originally at that time were— the standard I knew for this was OStatus around then. And so my, my long-term idea was to build an OStatus bridge for all of, for the closed social networks. So that since, so the, I mean, the, the big idea here is they, they were closed, but they all had APIs. And so you can, like, there’s OStatus, there’s this open standard, and then there are these APIs. And the APIs were pretty full-featured. And so I figured like I have these two Lego blocks, I can just kind of use the API and translate the OStatus and back. And that should, that should work.Matthias Pfefferle:
So one of the earlier versions were even compatible between OStatus, the open, let’s say predecessor of the Fediverse activity pub. And Facebook and Twitter?Ryan Barrett:
So I never got— I never fully implemented OStatus for Facebook and Twitter. The first version of BridgyFed was OStatus. It was IndieWeb to and from OStatus. Before I did ActivityPub there. That was 2017. So BridgyFed was a different— a similar but different service, yes. But I did a number of these. So I did implement WebFinger for Facebook, Twitter, et cetera. I did portable contacts. POCO was a similar standard. Yeah, this is like us going back to 2010 era. What were the— and I did OpenID for Facebook and Twitter. So there were parts there, uh, and also, I mean, a lot of this was just around, it was in the air, and I happened to know a number of the people working on these standards, um, Evan, but also people like Brad Fitzpatrick, Brett Slatkin, uh, David Recordon. We all, you know, talked now and then. And so this was Chris, yeah, um, this was OStatus, but also kind of Buzz at Google and let’s see, Brad was doing things like the Social Graph Explorer API at Google and there were a lot of similar ideas. As a separate side project, I had written a little app that used— that did OpenID for Google accounts. Like any Gmail account, that kind of thing. There were a lot of these ideas. This was the, like, that blog era, 2000 to 2010, was also very much the Web 2.0 mashup era, Yahoo Pipes kind of thing. And also people at the same time thinking about Webfinger, OpenID, OStatus, these early, early decentralized social, decentralized services. And so there were lots of people and lots of ideas. Can I plug this into that? Like there are a bunch of parts. Let’s just plug them all together and see what works.Matthias Pfefferle:
Yeah. Ostatus itself felt very mesh-appy. So putting together a lot of open standards and all the decentralized protocol. So when you worked on all of that, have you had the hope that it might get implemented? In the social networks? Because back in the days, Facebook and Twitter were really part of the discussions, not around maybe old status specifically, but there were other projects like data portability, for example, where they were really involved into that discussion. Was that kind of the hope you had?Ryan Barrett:
No. Okay. Facebook very concretely for a while did a number of these things that had RSS. You know, it— I’m trying to remember if it did OpenID.Matthias Pfefferle:
They did. They did OpenID. They had XMPP as the foundation of their Facebook chat. So they used quite a lot of open standards. I think they even used microformats for their profiles. It was, they were quite open to that.Ryan Barrett:
And then also the things they created. So the graph API for a while, they very much positioned it as this kind of open generic thing that other people could use. And so this was the era of, again, David Recordon was there for a while and other people. I think the culture there. Was very much engineering driven and kind of just scrappy hackers, um, just throw a bunch of stuff together and engineers like standards. And so yeah, there was a while where they were very open to this stuff, which was great. Twitter, not so much. I think Twitter, you look at what Jack Dorsey was saying back then and recently, but, um, he had big, big ideas and vision for protocols and decentralization, but It never felt like that translated into anything concrete that they shipped. Facebook was very different. They shipped a ton of it. It didn’t last forever. But one thing when I think about the things I build, I very rarely like want to tackle an adoption problem. Like if you make a new protocol, like you can do it all right, you know, and make all the right choices or whatever, but you have to get everyone to use your new protocol or your new tool. That’s very slow and difficult. I would much rather, yeah, I’d much rather build something that people can use as is, especially developers, without having to, without a big adoption challenge. I think that’s another reason I tend to build these things as services. I want individual users to be able to use these things as easily as possible. I don’t want them to have to self-host anything. I don’t want them to have to get their Mastodon or Friendica or Pleroma or whatever to add a new feature. And so, yeah, I tend to avoid kind of adoption problems. I tend to build for what is here now and not for some hypothetical future.Matthias Pfefferle:
Okay. So it’s more you want to have a platform that proves that it works instead of building, in Germany, we would say, air castles. Yes. Something, yeah, as you said, hypothetical, we could do if anyone would implement that, we could do XY. Right. So that, but I think I kind of agree with that. I was always also the, I want to implement something because it’s, for me, it was kind of a similar socialization with all the web stuff. So I also started with a blog and wanted to keep that momentum. So it was not defining protocols or using protocols because it’s the right way to do that, or because I wanted to work on something like that. It was simply because I needed it and I wanted to see if it works. So I kind of agree with that. But on the other hand, I’m kind of the lazy guy and implementing protocols is really not an easy thing. So I always tend to choose something to work on. And I was always impressed by your work to kind of being the, how you say that in English, the jack of all trades and implement everything when I struggle with implementing only one protocol. So why? I understand that theoretically, but why all of that work? So because that is, that is insane.Ryan Barrett:
Yeah.Matthias Pfefferle:
Yeah.Ryan Barrett:
I mean, I, I wouldn’t, don’t sell yourself short. I mean, you, you did the WordPress Webmentions plugin. I think that for a long time, and maybe still, that was maybe the single most important indie web project. Yeah, period. And that was a full new protocol, like two of them. Like you had to do Webmention and microformats.Matthias Pfefferle:
Yeah. But I compared with AT Proto or Nostril or ActivityPub, I think Webmention is a very easy, straightforward thingy. There are parts that are tricky, but not because it’s, the spec is hard, but it’s hard to, for example, to get semantics out of HTML is not a fun thing, but it’s more because websites are crappy and not because a standard is implemented or a standard is complicated to implement. So I think that’s a bit of a different level of complexity?Ryan Barrett:
Uh, yes. Yeah, that’s fair. Um, yeah, scraping arbitrary HTML is no fun. Uh, if you say we require microformats, it’s much better. So, you know, like, takes work, but so yeah. So why have I done so many or worked on so many of these protocols and formats? Um, I think some of it is as engineers, the root of what we do is just put blocks together and build things out of smaller pieces. This is Lego, right? And regardless of what it is we’re building as engineers, protocols and formats are Lego blocks. There are these clear— they may be complicated, but there are these clear instructions for how to connect to it or how to like publish or consume a format, a data format, right? And so as an engineer, to me, when I see a few of them, a few formats, for example, I think, oh, it’s just like this, this field in this format goes to this field in this other format and this field goes here. And then for protocols, oh, this message goes here. This one sends X and this one receives Y. And so it’s, yeah, it’s very tempting and sometimes fun to just take a lot of Lego blocks and plug them together. And when you see that, like, they should be able to plug together and no one’s done it yet, sometimes, like, separate from the use case, the end user functionality, it’s fun to just go try and say, oh yeah, they plug together, or oh no, they don’t. This is WebSocket and this is HTTP, so then I need to bridge that and then I can plug them together or something similar. So one part of it is as an engineer, it’s fun to plug Lego blocks together. Another part is scratching my own itch.Matthias Pfefferle:
Okay. So I always wanted to have that discussion with you and it’s even better to have that in public. So you implemented a ton of different protocols. And if you have not implemented it, you even understand the spec or know what to do theoretically. From all of these different specs, maybe we can go through the three main things and afterwards we can maybe talk a bit about Nostr. I have not read about Farcaster at all, to be honest. But what of these three protocols would best not fit your needs, but the nearest to what you would see as this is how it should work?Ryan Barrett:
Yes.Matthias Pfefferle:
Is that even answerable?Ryan Barrett:
So I think it is. I would start with a metaphor or an analogy. If you study cryptography, like in academia, in college, there’s always been a saying like, don’t invent a cipher, you know, or you don’t make a good, a successful career as a cryptographer by inventing ciphers. You make it by breaking ciphers. I feel a bit like that here. I can look at a bunch of these different protocols and networks and say, oh, here are the pros and cons. Here are the good parts. Here are the bad parts of each one. I don’t feel qualified or ready to make my own, and I don’t know if I’m— if I would look at any of them and say, oh, this is the best one. Um, I think there are better and worse. Oh, Status was well-intentioned but not so great.Matthias Pfefferle:
Um, I think well-intentioned sums it up quite good.Ryan Barrett:
Yeah, you know, like we talked about earlier, it was so early we had so much more to learn. There were so many more new ideas we needed. It was maybe, it was one of the very early decentralized social protocols, like in the modern age, if you don’t count Gopher or Usenet, like the really old school stuff. Of course it wasn’t going to be great, right? But you had, we had to start somewhere. We had to try some things. So right now, what do I think is good? Yeah, maybe we’ll put a link in the show notes. I did a talk at the App Protocol conference last year. I think it was called All the Protocols Compared. So that’s the long version of this answer. But there are a number— I look at the modern protocols. So the big ones that we would think about, IndieWeb, ActivityPub, App Protocol, Nostr, Farcaster, Maybe DSNP. I don’t think that ever really hit and is definitely slowing down now. Um, yeah, so what are good ideas? Um, I think asymmetric key identity, so identity based on public keys, is a good idea. Um, and you see that in a number of these protocols. That is App Protocol, Nostr, Forecaster, DSMB, um, and blockchain. Uh, the key problem with public keys is, or key-based identity, is that it is recoverability. If we want to make something so usable that all of our family can use it, if we tell them, oh, never lose your password, if you lose your password, you’ve lost your account, that’s unacceptable, right? It’s just like not okay. So you need recoverability and there is, we’ve made progress there. There’s like complicated techie stuff, like multisig. Um, there’s very usable stuff like Bluesky where, um, custodial keys, like you had your identity as a key, but they manage the key for you. So those are, there are some good ideas there. Um, I think relays are another one. There was a movement for a while of like pure peer-to-peer, secure scuttlebutt, etc., where we wouldn’t even use— oh, we have the internet, every device is connected, each device should be able to talk to another device without servers. I think in a different world, in a different timeline, the internet may have evolved that way, but it didn’t in ours. We have NAT, we have CGNAT, um, tunneling, etc. It is a very client-server internet that we have grown. Um, and so realistically, you need parts of the network that are always online, and those will be servers. And so the shape of Nostr relays, Proto relays, um, Snapchain and Farcaster Even now you look at, uh, there are Fediverse relays. They are much smaller in scope, but this idea that there are servers and there are multiple and they can talk to each other and they’re, they’re somewhat dumb. Nostr relays are basically these like very limited databases. App Protocol relays are just kind of multiplexing and demultiplexing. They take multiple streams and combine them into one stream. And that’s it. When you look at kind of networking, computer networking coming out of the IETF, this is TCP/IP, Ethernet, et cetera. A lot of networking design ages ago followed this end-to-end principle where you put all of the logic, guaranteed delivery, only once delivery, congestion control, all the logic is in the endpoints on the computers that are the server or the client. The network is dumb. It’s just routing packets. I see some similar ideas in relays in these decentralized protocols. And I think that can make some sense. So yeah, those are two ideas I like. And then also kind of decomposing or separating a lot of the functionality. Some things we see, so in decentralized social, you need data storage. You’re going to have some admin, some moderation. You’re going to have feeds. There’s more of this kind of what I would call the product logic or business logic, like the social part, not the decentralized part. And newer networks are pulling those apart so that you can, you know, custom— like, you can run a custom feed in Blue Sky, in Atmosphere, and that’s totally separate from moderation, right? And literally different people, different organizations can run those and not talk to each other and not be in the same software project, and that’s good. So that’s maybe a third idea I like recently.Matthias Pfefferle:
Because you mentioned, uh, the, the indie web as a protocol, do you see that really as a protocol? Because I thought about the indie web more like an, uh, philosophical thing, an idea, um, that has some protocols, but it’s more how you use the internet or how you use the web?Ryan Barrett:
I think it’s both. Yes. Yeah. Like for power users or tech people who use all this stuff, like the, often the dream we have is I want one place or one master or one kind of main place where I control my profile online and where I post, and then that goes everywhere and talks to everything, all the other networks, and everything comes back. But I, I only do it from one centralized or one place for me, at least. Um, maybe it’s my Fediverse account, maybe it’s my Bluesky account, maybe it’s my website. For us in the indie web, often we think of it as our website. Um, and so you’re right, indie web Either first or like importantly is a philosophy. It’s like everyone should have a website. And ideally everyone should have a domain that they own for their website. And so there are some tech and protocols, but I think we would say in the indie web, if you have your website, your own website, especially if you have your own domain, you are part of the indie web. You don’t have to do webmention or microformats or anything else. So philosophically, yes, I agree. Also, there is this indie web protocol stack, Webmentions, microformats, MicroPub, MicroSub, others. And so those add a lot of functionality. But yeah, I think it’s both.Matthias Pfefferle:
Yeah, but in the end, it feels a lot like more in the Ostatus directory. So direction, not directory. So it’s more a These are parts you could use to have a kind of decentralized communication, but it’s not directly a full-flavored protocol for decentralized communication. And I mentioned that because I really like how you design your bridges, because oftentimes, or I thought, mainly about, okay, if you’re bridging the Fediverse to the Atmosphere, then I should join as an ActivityPub node. But in recent discussion, you always mention, um, when you have a blog, why not use way simpler mechanisms like, for example, RSS or other indie web standards like Webmention and things like that. And I really like that because in the end, implementing RSS or Webmentions or anything else that is in the IndieWeb stack is quite easy and straightforward. And using that to connect to a bridge that does all the heavyweight stuff, um, is kind of, you use open standards in, in, in every level of that bridge thing and even reuse paradigms that you mentioned, like the abstraction of, or the multi-layer thing. So you do not have to care about federation and about who can connect with your site. You implement some basic protocols like the next level of pingbacks, some RSS, maybe some web semantics. And I do all the heavy lifting stuff for you.Ryan Barrett:
A lot of this again is I think just me avoiding air castles and me not wanting to have to convince someone to install software anywhere. I don’t really know how to predict the future. And so I tend to live in what is, what exists now for any given network or anyone’s website. Like, what does it do now? And it probably does RSS. Most, many websites at least probably don’t do ActivityPub. So yeah, I kind of take that, like, where are people now and what can I build that they can And turn on, or not even, I mean, Granary, for example, like there’s a library and tool, a service I run called Granary that converts between formats. You can use Granary to convert someone’s website like RSS to microformats and they don’t even have to know, right? Like you can use it. Um, and that’s again very much the Web 2.0 mashup kind of permissionless web crawling mentality and era. You know, the era we kind of grow— you and I and other people kind of grew up in. And there are different ideas now and that’s great. But yeah, I think a lot of it is what can I— how can I make this work? How can I make something useful? Assuming nothing changes and assuming no one installs any new software anywhere.Matthias Pfefferle:
But from your experience, you’re running a bridge. What is— so is having your own website and connecting to that bridge still a thing, or is that still us two being old nostalgic guys wanting back the blogosphere?Ryan Barrett:
I mean, it’s still a thing because we do it. Yeah, some people do it. I, you know, my partner in this, Anuj, he wants that kind of techie power user dream of one place for his profile. And for him, it’s his Bluesky account. Or ideally might be eventually. For me, it’s my website. And so I think that choice is good. And there are more websites out there probably than accounts on any individual social network. So if Facebook, how many websites are there? Billions, at least tens of billions. There are probably more websites than Facebook accounts, right? And Facebook is the biggest social network. So I mean, If you count websites, and even if you say websites with their own domain, and so then does WordPress.com, does WordPress.com site without its own domain count? I don’t know. But yeah, I mean, there are more websites out there than any social network. So I don’t know.Matthias Pfefferle:
But do you see a tendency or is there, do you get some feedback like, okay, you allowed me to stay on my side, so I will do that? Or is there a trend?Ryan Barrett:
Yes, I understand the question. No, for the average, the average person these days is more likely to use social networks and have social media or have social network accounts and less likely to have their own website, especially with their own domain. I think, yes.Matthias Pfefferle:
So it’s mainly bridging Fediverse accounts to AD Proto accounts and having your own website as part of this new bridge decentralized social network is still the niche?Ryan Barrett:
Yeah, I think what we see often is the most— so for BridgyFed, for example, most of the websites on it are not personal websites. They are publishers, but they’re very popular. So I think Rolling Stone, for example, has almost is someone is bridged, um, and it has, I think, over 100,000 followers. It’s bridged, uh, accounts. Um, and so on the one hand, it’s probably mostly not personal websites, but there are, I don’t know, maybe 30,000 bridged websites on BridgyFed, and some of them are very popular, right? And so that’s useful.Matthias Pfefferle:
Okay. So it’s kind of the content creator, I wouldn’t say niche because they may be few in total numbers, but not in follower counts. So, okay. But is there a trend of people following or understanding what that means, bridging between different networks and actively using it, or is this more an I’ve found someone by accident and followed them and didn’t care where the profile is?Ryan Barrett:
Yeah. So the, I think we are at a bit over 130,000 total bridged accounts on BridgyFed right now, which is good. It’s still, you know, it’s still on the one hand, it’s big. On the other hand, it’s small. Um, yeah, I think lots of people do see and interact with bridged accounts. Like, lots of people are on Bluesky and see and interact with a Fediverse account, or vice versa, and don’t know it. Um, especially for Fediverse accounts, for example, that have set custom domain handles on their— on the Bluesky side. Uh, both Anuj and I, one of our favorite things is to see, to find like big, big conversations where some of the people in the conversation are on Bluesky, some are on the Fediverse, some are even are on like, maybe I’m participating and I’m on my website or you. Um, and as far as we can tell, the people either don’t know or don’t care. Which is great. I love it, right? Like, that’s the dream. Yeah, I don’t— I like that people know about the bridge, but the goal, like, I also love when it works and people don’t know about it and it works anyway.Matthias Pfefferle:
So maybe we’re coming to an end. Maybe a controversial question.Ryan Barrett:
Sure. Fun.Matthias Pfefferle:
So because you’re bridging quite some profiles and there is quite a discussion or discussions through all the networks, I would say you built quite a critical infrastructure. How to handle something like that for the long term?Ryan Barrett:
Yeah. Uh, yeah, it’s an important question. So it’s better now than it used to be. It used to be one random guy’s side project, um, with zero funding, uh, zero organization or governance. Um, and so that was true for a long time. Uh, and a couple of years ago, some people online started looking at it and saying, oh, this bridge is good. It’s Maybe more than good now, maybe it’s important, uh, was getting big enough, uh, and there were enough accounts on it that were— people cared about having access to. And they were saying like, this is important, it needs to be reliable infrastructure, it needs governance, like how will we make sure this lasts and is stable, etc. On the one hand, like it was flattering that people cared about it enough to say that, right? On the other hand, I didn’t have any of that. It was one random guy’s side project. And so I wrote a post and basically said, hey, like, thank you all so watch. This is one random guy’s side project. Like, there’s nothing to it. Um, it’s open source. Uh, but yeah, uh, if you all want more governance, more organization, great. I’m not gonna do that. That’s not what I’m in this for. Um, so if someone else wants to, great. I was hoping they would say, oh, okay, we get it, and go away. Instead, a number of people popped up and said, oh, Hey, I’ll be that person. I’ll add the organization of the governance. And then I said to myself, well, shit. But so then we did, you know, I ended up working with Anuj and he’s been great. And we have a nonprofit in the US. We have grant funding and crowdfunding. We have a board of directors who are great and independent. Really helpful. So that helps. And I think the other answer is it is open source and it’s public domain licensed. So there are— it’s like totally unencumbered. Anyone else can run their own instance, can take the code and go with it. And so the only— if it died tomorrow, the existing bridged accounts, like, so the domain and the keys that are in the bridge for those accounts, those are important. And so if BridgyFed died, those would go away. That’s not going to happen. I think it’s possible I’ll shut it down at some point, but I fully plan, if I do that, to do an orderly shutdown. Ideally find someone to take it over so that the domain and the keys survive. And if not, you know, like, we would make it work. But yeah, it’s open source. It’s got an org, it’s got some funding. We’re okay for now.Matthias Pfefferle:
Have you planned something like hosting it as a service for bigger sites or organizations?Ryan Barrett:
We have talked about it a lot. I think we still don’t know what problem that solves.Matthias Pfefferle:
I think from, from my perspective, it’s oftentimes the simply the domain thingy, because everything for now is kind of [email protected]. So it’s still very., yeah, very much promoting this single instance and maybe others want to have their own, maybe the Rolling Stone want to have @rollingstone.social or something like that. Is, was that even a question or is that something you think about?Ryan Barrett:
Yeah, definitely. So the default, you’re right, the handles, the addresses for bridged accounts have you know, something.brid.ui in them. But for a long time now, we’ve let you set a custom domain, um, on Bluesky, but also on the Fediverse. On the Fediverse, at least if you— for bridged websites. Um, okay. Yeah, and we could look into that. So I think the part that’s missing is if you’re on Bluesky and you bridge into the Fediverse. I need to go check. I don’t think we— I don’t think we let you set a custom kind of server part of your Fediverse address there, but we could. Um, but most of that— so we have the custom domains in Bluesky, we have them for websites into the Fediverse, so we’re mostly there. And people definitely use that, uh, especially the Bluesky part. But in general, yeah. So for example, my Fediverse address is [email protected]. It’s through BridgyFed. It doesn’t have grid.gy in it. Yeah.Matthias Pfefferle:
Okay. So, but, but is that really a thing end users care about? Or is that more as a business owner?Ryan Barrett:
I think both. I mean, I’m an end user and I did it. Lots of individual people bridging from Fediverse to the Blue Sky, to Blue Sky set custom domain handles. Um, so some people do.Matthias Pfefferle:
Okay.Ryan Barrett:
I think maybe more individual people than businesses. I think not nearly as many businesses know about the bridge and having more individual people. Yeah, we’re getting there, but it’s still early.Matthias Pfefferle:
Okay. So what is, what are you most curious about for the next few months?Ryan Barrett:
What is our big project? Yeah, there’s so much to do. So one thing we are working on, we’ve started to roll out, is, uh, long form.Matthias Pfefferle:
So, uh, you know, just like you all think about WordPress for the WordPress community.Ryan Barrett:
Yeah, yeah. So for a long time, we have bridged web, you know, posts on websites, articles on websites, into the Fediverse as the article Activity Streams 2 type. In Mastodon and other servers, this shows up okay but not great, just the title and the link. That’s something. Um, they’re working on that, I know. Um, Bluesky— Bluesky the app isn’t doing long form really, but other app protocol platforms are, uh, Leaflet, Offprint, uh, Pockets, um, Sequoia. And so some of them got together and made this common lexicon, basically a format called standard.site. And so we added support for that in the bridge. We maybe a week or two ago started publishing these standard site documents. We’re soon going to publish the publication or just kind of like site records, like who is this as opposed to what did they write. I know you all are looking at this too. You actually launched it, right?Matthias Pfefferle:
I’m still experimenting with that a lot. So yeah, AT Proto is a whole different thing for me.Ryan Barrett:
Yeah. But yeah, the, so that’s one thing that we’re excited about. Another is we’ve been looking, we’ve been working more on, we have another tool separate from the bridge called Bounce, which is, lets you migrate from one network to another and keep all of your followers. And it uses the bridge under the covers to make that work. Um, one thing we want to do is, uh, let you migrate. Basically, like, when you’re bridged, you have your native account, say, on the Fediverse, and your clone account, say, on Bluesky. Both sides, you know, both the Fediverse and Bluesky let you migrate in accounts. Bluesky’s migration is much more powerful, uh, and full-featured, but they both have that. And so we We want to let you take that existing clone account that you’ve had forever, um, and post it on and move it intact, like keeping its posts, its images, that kind of thing, to a new Bluesky PDS, a new Bluesky server, and then have that be in a real native account you can use. Um, so that’s one thing.Matthias Pfefferle:
Yeah.Ryan Barrett:
Um, and then we’re always looking at new networks. Uh, we have Nostr mostly complete in terms of the implementation. Just a few other things we’re still thinking about how to launch, but we’re talking with Rabble, uh, Evan Hendersplath, um, about Divine, which is a new kind of video platform on top of Nostr. And we, we want to make sure we can bridge that when it’s— when they launch that. We look at Forecaster. Forecaster has had a lot of drama in the last month or so, um, uh,, which is interesting. But, um, yeah, we look at that. And then there’s, yeah, there’s, there’s so much more out there to do, uh, lots of new ideas.Matthias Pfefferle:
So I would love to, um, talk about the standards thing when you launch that. Maybe you want to join me again together with Anoush, uh, talking a bit more about the, the new stuff, uh, later this year. Um, where can we follow all progress you are doing.Ryan Barrett:
Yeah. So our organization is called ANEW Social. So anew.social. BridgyFed is fed.brid.gy.Matthias Pfefferle:
And I am snarfed.org, S-N-A-R-F-E-D.org.Ryan Barrett:
Perfect.Matthias Pfefferle:
I think I will link all of that in the show notes.Ryan Barrett:
So I’ve had so much fun here, uh, and I’ve loved working with you again for at least 15 years on indie web stuff. We go back so far. And again, I mean, you’ve done a ton, uh, but yeah, early on, especially the WordPress Webmention plugin was I think the most important project in the indie web, um, you know, bar none. So, uh, yeah, thank you for all of everything you’ve done too.Matthias Pfefferle:
Thanks a lot. What should I say about that? Thank you a lot for all your work and for doing it as a general service so that everyone can use it. I hope I can and will link and find everything for the show notes. If not, let me know. I will put everything in there. And yeah, thanks a lot for joining. And I’m curious about the next few months.Ryan Barrett:
Me too. This was great. Thank you, Matthias. -
How to cite datasets in Wikipedia articles?
The DRI Labs team shares advice in this blog post on mapping descriptive information from Repository metadata records to Wikipedia templates. This would make a great classroom activity teaching #DataCitation!
https://dri.ie/news/how-to-cite-data-resources-in-wikipedia/
-
Już wkrótce #Hollywood stanie przed nami otworem. Gra #Moviehouse, inspirowana słynnym #TheMovies, będzie mieć swoją premierę już 5 kwietnia 2023. Z tej okazji wpadł nowy trailer! 🎬
-
Już wkrótce #Hollywood stanie przed nami otworem. Gra #Moviehouse, inspirowana słynnym #TheMovies, będzie mieć swoją premierę już 5 kwietnia 2023. Z tej okazji wpadł nowy trailer! 🎬
-
Latest Jetpack Social Updates and the Return of X Integration for WordPress Users
Open Channels FM Latest Jetpack Social Updates and the Return of X Integration for WordPress Users Play EpisodePause Episode Mute/Unmute EpisodeRewind 10 Seconds1xFast Forward 30 seconds 00:00/00:33:02 SubscribeShare Apple Podcasts CastBox Overcast PocketCasts RSS Spotify RSS Feed Share Link Embed https://openchannels.fm/latest-jetpack-social-updates-and-the-return-of-x-integration-for-wordpress-users/embed/#?secret=CAlGnDhIKl<script> /*! This file is auto-generated */ !function(d,l){"use strict";l.querySelector&&d.addEventListener&&"undefined"!=typeof URL&&(d.wp=d.wp||{},d.wp.receiveEmbedMessage||(d.wp.receiveEmbedMessage=function(e){var t=e.data;if((t||t.secret||t.message||t.value)&&!/[^a-zA-Z0-9]/.test(t.secret)){for(var s,r,n,a=l.querySelectorAll('iframe[data-secret="'+t.secret+'"]'),o=l.querySelectorAll('blockquote[data-secret="'+t.secret+'"]'),c=new RegExp("^https?:$","i"),i=0;i<o.length;i++)o[i].style.display="none";for(i=0;i<a.length;i++)s=a[i],e.source===s.contentWindow&&(s.removeAttribute("style"),"height"===t.message?(1e3<(r=parseInt(t.value,10))?r=1e3:~~r<200&&(r=200),s.height=r):"link"===t.message&&(r=new URL(s.getAttribute("src")),n=new URL(t.value),c.test(n.protocol))&&n.host===r.host&&l.activeElement===s&&(d.top.location.href=t.value))}},d.addEventListener("message",d.wp.receiveEmbedMessage,!1),l.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded",function(){for(var e,t,s=l.querySelectorAll("iframe.wp-embedded-content"),r=0;r<s.length;r++)(t=(e=s[r]).getAttribute("data-secret"))||(t=Math.random().toString(36).substring(2,12),e.src+="#?secret="+t,e.setAttribute("data-secret",t)),e.contentWindow.postMessage({message:"ready",secret:t},"*")},!1)))}(window,document); //# sourceURL=https://openchannels.fm/wp-includes/js/wp-embed.min.js </script> ' title="Embed Code" class="input-embed input-embed-2551633" readonly/>Download file | Play in new window | Duration: 00:33:02
In this episode host Derek Hanson looks at Jetpack Social with Devin Walker, product lead at Jetpack from Automattic. Devin shares updates to Jetpack Social including a redesigned user interface, enhanced account connectivity, and the anticipated return of X/Twitter integration following critical changes to their API pricing. They look into how Jetpack Social empowers collaborative posting for multi-author WordPress sites, improves customizability for cross-network sharing, and features like AI-powered image generation and Social Notes.
Derek and Devin also touch on the upcoming WordPress 7.0 release, Jetpack’s expanding AI capabilities, and what the future holds for mobile and agentic tools. If you’re passionate about the intersection of WordPress, social media, and automation, this episode has lots in store.
Note: you may want to watch the video for screenshares
Thanks to our sponsors…
The best time to migrate is before you’re under pressure. Omnisend moves everything essential for you now, so you’re fully ready when you plan for that large campaign. Use the code
OpenChannelsand get 30% off your first 3 months of any paid plan.If you build stores for clients, WooCommerce gives you the flexibility to create exactly what merchants need. Customize workflows, extend with thousands of integrations, and scale without switching platforms. Check it out at WooCommerce.com.
Takeaways
Jetpack Social Improvements: Jetpack Social has received significant updates, including a revamped user interface for account connection and management. The most popular network, X/Twitter, is set to return as a premium add-on now that the API pricing has changed, making it viable for Jetpack again, with free users getting a limited experience. The collaborative aspect allows multiple authors and shared accounts, making it ideal for teams and marketing departments (03:29).
Customizable Social Sharing and AI Integration: Users can preview and customize social posts for different networks before publishing, with the ability to tailor text and image per platform. AI-powered image generation is available, drawing from post content by default, and improvements are expected soon with more advanced models (07:03).
Social Notes Feature: Jetpack Social’s Social Notes feature allows users to schedule and share content independent of WordPress posts, acting more like a direct communication tool for quick updates. This feature is still in beta and is expected to evolve, potentially including a calendar view for scheduled posts (09:45).
Link Engagement Optimization: Jetpack Social supports adding links as attachments (e.g., as a comment) rather than directly in the post, a popular request to improve social media post engagement based on user feedback and social algorithm behavior (12:13).
UTM Tracking Capabilities: Jetpack Social appends UTM parameters to shared URLs by default, allowing users to track engagement and traffic from social posts in Jetpack Stats or Google Analytics, though performance data from social platforms still needs to be accessed directly (13:50).
Jetpack Experience Unification Initiative: Jetpack is working towards a unified dashboard experience where all features—from Social to Protect to Anti-Spam—use a consistent visual design and WordPress component system. Future updates will focus on making interfaces more visual and data-driven, better integrating stats and analytics (16:50).
WordPress 7.0 Collaboration Enhancements: With WordPress 7.0, Jetpack will power a websocket layer for real-time collaboration, providing a more seamless experience than core’s built-in HTTP polling. This allows higher scalability and performance, especially for teams needing more than three collaborators (21:48).
Jetpack and AI Roadmap: Jetpack will upgrade its AI foundation, adding more advanced agentic flows (such as communicating with your site via Telegram or WhatsApp), and improving automation and cross-linking capabilities. Legacy features like spell check may be deprecated. Users will retain control, including a simple switch to disable AI features entirely (24:18).
Mobile App and Content Flexibility: The Jetpack mobile app is being emphasized, with improvements planned for Reader and overall workflow. The vision includes enabling content management and site updates through chat interfaces, making it easier to post or update content remotely (28:31).
Jetpack at Upcoming WordCamps: Jetpack will be present at WordCamp Europe and WordCamp Asia, showcasing new features like unified experience, AI integrations, and possibly demonstrations of agentic workflows (e.g., texting your site updates). Pricing and product simplification are also underway, aimed at appealing to both new and returning users (30:15).
Mentioned Links and Resources
- Jetpack Social (WordPress Social Media Integration) – Jetpack Social allows you to connect multiple social channels to your WordPress site, automate posting, preview posts, and manage team collaborations from a unified interface. 🔗 https://jetpack.com/social/
- Jetpack GitHub Repository (Contribute & Submit Feedback) – Jetpack’s open codebase lets users contribute issues, feature requests, and code enhancements directly via GitHub. 🔗 https://github.com/Automattic/jetpack
- Devin Walker’s Website (Speaker & Jetpack Product Lead) – Find more about Speaker C’s work, talks, and writing at devendvin.org. 🔗 https://devin.org/
Timestamped Overview
- 00:00 Previewing Jetpack Social updates
- 05:34 Sharing posts with Jetpack
- 07:24 Generating images with AI
- 11:25 Posting links effectively on social media
- 16:22 Improving Jetpack’s design and functionality
- 17:36 Reviewing Boost’s performance interface
- 23:37 Updating Jetpack AI features
- 26:11 Future of human-generated content
- 30:05 Upcoming updates and Jetpack improvements
- 31:21 Jetpack updates and event news
Derek Hanson:
All right, well, welcome everybody to Open Makers, Open Channels FM Production. We’re back for another episode today. And today we’re joined by Devin Walker, the product lead at Jetpack from Automatic. And we’re going to talk about a few things today. Learning a little bit more about Jetpack Social and some recent updates that I know Devin has been sharing about on his social media personally that he’s pretty excited about. And I know I use Jetpack Social, so I’m really excited to see this in action for everybody. And we’ll dive into upcoming wordcamps and a little bit of WordPress 7.0 which is releasing. So, Devin, thanks for joining us today.Devin Walker:
Hey, thanks for having me. Appreciate it.Derek Hanson:
Absolutely. Well, let’s just dive right into Jetpack Social. I know you put out on, I mean, I’m mostly on LinkedIn and I know that’s where you shared a recent update. Why don’t you just talk us through what the latest release is for Jetpack Social.Devin Walker:
Yeah, so we did a lot of work on improving the user interface and experience and the way you connect accounts. Um, we’re also going to be bringing back X slash Twitter. I’m not sure if you saw, but recently the API just got a pricing change and we evaluated, you know, what it would look like to bring that back now that it’s not $50,000 a month.Derek Hanson:
Yeah, right. Yeah.Devin Walker:
And it, it’s definitely possible. So the team’s working on that right now. That was the, I think it was the most popular network being used. So unfortunately when that whole thing went down, we had to take it out of it. But when I saw that post a couple weeks ago that it was updated, I was like, okay, well, let’s, let’s start bringing it back. So that’s not in yet, but we do have significant improvements to just the way you interact and use the product. So I’m happy to show a little bit of that off. But if anybody wants to try it out, they’re more than welcome to download Jetpack themselves. But we can give them a little demo here too.Derek Hanson:
Yeah, let’s, let’s definitely take a look at it. So, yeah, share your screen. And for anybody, like, not super familiar, Jetpack Social allows you to automatically post from WordPress to your social media accounts. And like you said, I don’t know if that’s Breaking news yet or not, but bringing the connection to X back, I know it was definitely a friction point for a long time once those, you know, API costs went up, you know, super high. So that, that’ll be really exciting for it to come back.Devin Walker:
Yeah, we’re really excited to bring that back too. And luckily a lot of the plumbing’s already in place from previous integration with it, so it’s not exactly like just turning the lights back on, but we’ll give free users a little taste of what it’s like to use it. But it’s going to be like a premium paid add on for Jetpack Social because it is, it does incur a cost for us, but we’re, we’re not going to pass on a lot of that to the end user. So. Yeah, let me, let me share my screen. I’ll show you what Jetpack Social looks like. All right, so this is a current view of what Jetpack Social looks like in the release version. Keep in mind that in future updates we’re going to be consolidating a lot of these headers so they look very same between all the different products that we have here. But right when you get into Jetpack Social, here’s where you see your connected accounts. You can connect multiple accounts. You can select, select accounts as shared here. So for instance, Blue sky, you see how it says connect more because I already have my connection to my Bluesky account. But if you mark a connection as shared as well, it means like, you know, WordPress can have multiple admins, multiple users. When it’s a shared connection, that means multiple folks using your WordPress instance can, can share to that network. Makes it really easy for companies that have multiple marketing people working with WordPress to come in and all use that same one account.Derek Hanson:
Nice.Devin Walker:
So here’s the networks that we currently support, Instagram, business threads, all the really major ones next door. Even here’s Tumblr, that’s our own and Mastodon. And so yeah, most of them are covered. I don’t see TikTok on here. TikTok’s something that’s more video centric though, so it doesn’t really fit in this. But that would be interesting to think about how we could use TikTok more.Derek Hanson:
Yeah, and just for our, just real quick for our audio only audience, what’s really nice is that there was like a nice modal that popped up that just showed all your accounts and it looked like real easy, just like click connect. And I really, really love that this is like a collaborative aspect of it that you can have multiple authors, multiple accounts. I know maybe I probably would have thought this is just for a personal connection. So this, this will work with, with multiple authors on the site.Devin Walker:
Yeah, exactly. And then what you can also do is when for instance, if you connect LinkedIn, I’m a member, I’m admin of the Jetpack page because that’s something I’m responsible for, but also my personal account. So, so once you do connect, it’ll ask you, okay, do you want to share this? Which page? Or, or is this your personal too? So it makes it really easy. Some of the other social network plugins out there actually like don’t allow you or make you like set up your own apps for it because we use our WordPress.com services layer. I guess it’s kind of like a proxy where we have applications and so you don’t even need to worry about that complicated setup. It’s literally like just connect oauth in through your, your social network and boom, you’re, you’re ready to go. Cool. All right, let’s go into a post and this is just one I drafted with Jetpack AI really quick and let’s see how we would share this. So what there is, I’m not going to publish this, but there are pre flight checks. So like if you were click publish here. Once you do that, you’ll see another modal that pops up and it’ll say, okay, this is what you’re about to share. Double check. This is what you want to post to social media, right? But if you want to just look ahead of time, we have this preview and customize option here under this Jetpack panel. Click on that. This nice modal pops up here and you can customize the message per network, which is really nice because some networks have different formats, different links, different ways of talking to the audience. For instance, LinkedIn might not be the same as your Facebook post or your X feed. And so let’s just say, I don’t know, Arizona makes to the sweet 16. And which we can also do is generate a, an image here. Remove this one, you can select another one. You can generate one using AI and this is going to be improved as well moving forward. But this is, it’s not bad. Right now what we’re calling internally Image Studio is we’re going to bring that to Jetpack. It’s going to have a much more advanced like Nano Banana model to generate images with. I’ll just say basketball and see what it comes up with here.Derek Hanson:
And by default the image generation is going to draw from your content initially. Is that right?Devin Walker:
That’s correct, yes. Okay. Hopefully this gives us a good one. You know, it’s a demo, so we’ll see what, what it comes up with.Derek Hanson:
Yep.Devin Walker:
All right. You know, that’s okay. So we’ll just select that insert and here’s what that would look like on. This is actually Tumblr here. And then we can preview what it looks like on Blue Sky. And you see how it says same for all up here. Customize each. That’s where you would customize each social network. And here’s. You could customize the text and the length here. And then if you’re. You’re ready, you like it, how it goes, you can just close that one out. If, if I don’t want to share to one specific network for this post, I can do that as well on here. And here’s what a link preview is. So like, if you share this yourself, what is it going to look like on Google? On X, on Facebook threads requires an image to be set. Okay, well, I don’t have a featured image for this post, but I did. It would show on there. So that’s a nice preview there. And, and yeah, so that’s a little bit about what Jetpack Social looks like right there. And keep in mind that a lot of this is for free. And there’s as well, there is a Social Notes feature. So if you just wanted to share via your. Your site and schedule posts to social networks like. And it doesn’t have to do with any post. Exactly. Or content that you’re writing, you can do that. And it’s called Social Notes. This is a newer feature that is still in beta and we’re looking to improve this in the future. But it’s. It’s going to come after X. Like we got to do this in order. But it essentially creates a custom post type. You share content to that post type and then it’ll show. Share it out to social media, depending on your configurations there. So it’s pretty powerful. And, and then the social media image generator, like I said, the current version, pretty good. But all these layers that we’re putting on top of it, 15.7 is going to come out with those improvements. We’re going to continue improving Jetpack Social because it is one of the more popular products that Jetpack has.Derek Hanson:
Yeah, that’s really cool. You were showing the link preview bit. There’s a way to customize even those. Like how those are sent out. There’s like just the image option or you can overlay text on the images. Are there improvements coming to that or do you think that’s pretty set or is that going to kind of roll in with the Image Studio stuff?Devin Walker:
The image generation that’ll show behind the text that overlays whether you want it overlaid on the entire image. The bottom right, bottom left. Like you can customize where the text shows up and what the text says, of course, but the image itself behind it will be part of the improved AI generation that we’re coming up with. Like, I think it’s going to use the Nano Banana 3.5, but you can also select what model you want to use as well.Derek Hanson:
Nice. So you might not have an answer for this now, but I’m curious what from a product perspective of something like Jetpack Social that is automatically sending a link from your WordPress site to these other social networks. I know I have found from experience that typically if I just straight have a link in my social media post, it performs less than if I were to make a post and then add that link as a comment to the post. Is that something that is like ever you’re thinking about that ever? Is that, is there a way to kind of like circumvent that for, for creators?Devin Walker:
Yeah, there’s actually an option in Jetpack Social. I’m not sure I have it right in front of me, but it’s essentially add link as an attachment, which by attachment it’s like the first comment of your post. So that is a feature of, of Jetpack Social because you’re right, like if you just a lot of times they’ll perform less well if you have just that straight up link like right in the first post. Right. So that, that was a popular request prior to me coming on board. So the, the, my predecessors have implemented that already.Derek Hanson:
Nice. That’s awesome. Well, great. I, if, if you haven’t tried Jetpack Social, I, I use it on my blog, Social Notes. I’m glad you touched on that. That’s another one that I’ve not been as regular using, but I know I was, you know, an early adopter of that and I like that you can just like quickly, you know, just get something out. It’s much more, you know, streamlined. It’s not like the full blown post editor. It’s like just straight text. So it is much more like you’re just, you know, putting out a, a post on X or something.Devin Walker:
Yeah, I’d love it if we had like a calendar view for that where you could actually kind of see and schedule posts similar to a buffer experience. So that’s where we want to go with it.Derek Hanson:
Do you see any of this tying into Jetpack Stats at all where you might be able to see some of like engagement and traffic from the posts that go to different platforms and how that’s tying back to your site?Devin Walker:
Yeah, I believe there’s UTM configuration. Yeah. So what you can do is append UTM parameters to the URL here. I’ll just share this and having that tie back into, into your Jetpack stats or your Google Analytics that that’s how you would do that. So if you have this option enabled, which by default it is, then the link that anybody that comes back to your site from that will, what it won’t track is like the performance on the social network itself, which you’re gonna have to go to whatever social network to, to view that. I’m not sure how we could tie that in but that, that’d be really cool if we could actually pull in like performance of your posts.Derek Hanson:
Yeah.Devin Walker:
But as far as getting people back to your site, you know, if you’re a store and you’re sharing things like that’s some important data that you’d like to make sure performing well.Derek Hanson:
Yeah, the UTM creator is I think like a really like small quiet feature of Jetpack that is, that is really, really valuable.Devin Walker:
Yeah, I’m glad you highlighted that.Derek Hanson:
Well, so that’s where it’s at now and you sort of highlighted that like a, a dashboard refresh possibly coming soon. Do you want to touch on that briefly and like what, what’s some of the like feedback you’ve heard from Jetpack users and, and what we can expect here in the, in the coming weeks and months.Devin Walker:
Yeah, well, we’re definitely optimizing Jetpack with every release to making sure that, you know, the, it’s as fast as it can be, not only on the admin side, but on the front end of your site. But then what I’ve heard also is like, you know, Jetpack feels like more like a bundle of separate products rather than one cohesive product that works well and feels cohesive. So what we’re doing is ensuring that all the modules or features, right, Social, Protect, anti spam, they all follow similar design language. Right. And we’re going to be using a lot more of the WordPress component system to build out our interfaces. Each interface is going to become a lot more visual. For instance, if you’re looking at Jetpack Social, you saw, you saw basically all the connected networks, those were more like settings, right? It’s like, more like I need to connect my accounts rather than. Well, why don’t you show me like which some, which posts have been shared, Perhaps show me some of those clickbacks from the UTM data pulling from stats. Like give me more of a dashboard or a visual view of what the feature is doing and performing on my site. Boost is a good example of one that has an interface like that Here I’ll just show Boost real quick where it kind of has that visual of like what’s the performance of my, of my site, right. You can see my desktop score is pretty good. My mobile view is not so hot. I’ve got a lot of stuff on the front end. You can see here’s like more of that header that I’m talking about here where it’s got the little Jetpack logo boost and it doesn’t have like Social does where it’s got its own little logo and it’s over here. So we’re going to make these much more similar between the two. So you can see Boost and the. My Jetpack view has very similar header structure. So consolidating the headers, consolidating the footers, then making all our dashboard pages or our feature pages feel like more visual and telling what that feature is doing, giving you the data behind it.Derek Hanson:
That’s awesome. I think this excites me as a daily Jetpack user and I’m sure this will excite a lot of people that or using Jetpack and you know, possibly it could draw people back to, you know, if you’re, if you used it in the past and Some of these things were maybe either a hindrance or a blocker for you to really adopt it for yourself or for a client. This seems like a really, really solid direction.Devin Walker:
Gonna feel fast, feel like a single page application, more like it’s gonna feel a lot more like WordPress because we’re going to be using a lot of those WordPress component systems in here and, and earning that second look. The third look is really important. What I’ve learned from sharing a lot of these updates on LinkedIn on social media is that people are willing to give it another look if they see that it’s improved over time. Jetpack’s, you know, it’s a 14 year old product, right?Derek Hanson:
Yeah, it’s been around.Devin Walker:
Right. So I’m excited to have that impact. That’s why I’m here. I want to give Jetpack a really kind of my own touch and a new life.Derek Hanson:
And it’s still one of the most open code bases in the WordPress plugin ecosystem. Right. Anybody can go to the GitHub repo and submit issues, feature requests, I mean anything. It’s all there for you to look at.Devin Walker:
Absolutely.Derek Hanson:
So you hinted a little bit about using more WordPress components and I know I prefaced at the beginning. WordPress 7.0 is going to release here pretty soon and if you haven’t been following along, there’s a lot of significant updates with that. And I’m curious, among all the things that are going to be releasing in 7.0, where does jetpack fit in with that upcoming release? Are there specific features that we’re going to see, like rolled in to Jetpack or like modified or changed?Devin Walker:
Talk.Derek Hanson:
Talk through the upcoming release for us.Devin Walker:
Yeah. So right now, it’s an interesting time that we’re talking right now because real time collaboration is going in 7.0, but then I saw that potentially it could be bumped. I don’t want to talk about like I know where, whether I’m assuming it will be in 7.0. Right? Yeah, I just saw recent news that it might not, but so the way that real time collaboration works out of Core is with a technology or something called HTTP polling. It’s kind of hard to say that, but you know, it’s. It essentially will use the browser to say, okay, well is this person still here? Where are they at in the document? It’ll pull every five seconds or so and it works. It’s just not like sort of like a Google Doc experience like a lot of people are used to. Where Jetpack comes in is it’ll power a websocket layer. So when you enable real time collaboration via our automatic infrastructure WordPress.com services layer, then your site will use WebSockets and it’ll scale much, much better in the real time experience. Real time collaboration experience will be more akin to what you’re used to with other applications.Derek Hanson:
So we’re talking more so like a performance gain by much, much higher performance gain.Devin Walker:
Yeah. And then Core, I think will cap it at three collaborators. If you don’t have like your host isn’t enabling that for you on the host level, or you’re not going to if you’re not using Jetpack or perhaps there’s another plugin out there that facilitates the same functionality.Derek Hanson:
Great. So it sounds like. So of all the things coming up in the WordPress 7.0 or maybe future release, real time collaboration seems to be the thing that Jetpack is going to be like the best thing to like, you know, help enhance that experience.Devin Walker:
Exactly. Yeah. That’ll be. That’s kind of like the headliner for 7.0 and, and jetpack, in my opinion.Derek Hanson:
Yeah. What about anything. I know there’s a really, you know, huge pivot to bring in the AI connectors into the next release. I know Jetpack has had its own AI product for, I mean, a while now. I mean, you already showed us the image generator that, that has been around for, for quite a while and thereDevin Walker:
were 20, 23 y. Yeah, yeah.Derek Hanson:
So jetpack is not new to AI, but where do you, where do you see Jetpack and AI in this, you know, this like the next, you know, five to six months or even immediately. Where, where do you see it going there?Devin Walker:
That’s a really good question. I was just talking to Matt about that last week and there’s a lot of great discussion around where it’s going to go. Right now what we have to do is do a little bit of housekeeping on it because there’s been so much great work done with the AI team here at Automatic that they’ve created a much better foundation than what’s currently in Jetpack. So what’s happening right now is the developers are taking out the current plumbing, for lack of a better word, and putting new, a better foundational layer in there. From there, we’re going to evaluate some of the current AI capabilities and see if we want to keep them. One, one thing that is in the current Jetpack AI that I think is going to go away is the spell check and kind of like the language tools that are in there. I’m not sure they’re so valuable anymore and I’m not sure people are getting the best experience from that. So while that might be going away, other things, like more perhaps agentic flows, like you could have something within the omnibar at the top that you can always click on and rely on to collaborate with your website. You probably don’t even need to be logged into your website. Like, why couldn’t you just use Telegram or text message or WhatsApp to communicate with your website and say, hey, how many visitors did I get to this post last week? And what Jetpack will do is it’ll make connecting to your site via MCP like model context protocol really easy. Like one toggle button on boom connected to cursor connected to chat GPT and then from there you can have create, read, update and delete capabilities based on the permissions you set. Like the. There’ll be a lot of different controls that the admin can set, whether they even want folks to be able to delete or. Or to update posts. That. That’ll give you a whole lot of power to automate blog posting, spell checking, cross linking, SEO stuff really. That’ll open the door up quite a bit for you. And then of course we’ll have a kill switch too. So for anybody that doesn’t want to use AI, which there’s a lot of people out there. There are, yeah, we’ll have a one button, one switch. Boom. It’s when you turn it off, it’s off and it’s not. It won’t be there.Derek Hanson:
Yeah, everybody can start to develop their own like badge. Like this is like human only, you know, site human only content. I know that’s, you know, that’s something that started to surface through this like wave of agentic content creation for sure. And you know what, as you were talking about Jetpack Social notes earlier and this sort of future of being able to send a WhatsApp Telegram voice message, how cool is that to be? I could be out on a walk or at a kid’s sports game or an event or whatever and an idea pops into my head. You text that message and it’s going to my site. And then WordPress can continue to be that hub for all of your content for the Internet and Jetpack Social, really weaving it and getting it out into your other networks, which is really great. But then you still have ingrained that are control. I like that. You know, I am not hugely on social media like personally, but I definitely have, you know, I spend most of my time on LinkedIn. So if I’m cross, you know, posting anything, that’s where it’s going. But if I have stuff that I want to go other places, that. That freedom is really, really, really powerful for users.Devin Walker:
Absolutely. And I always, like, use my, my chef buddy as an example. Right. He has three restaurants, three different menus. They change all the time. His site’s on WordPress right now. He has to email this agency we use to update. It usually takes 24 to 48 hours. If I told him, hey, you can just text. You can text your website and. Yeah, and, and tell it, hey, update menu to have new pricing for this burger. Right. He will think it’s some sort of magic that’s happening and we’re almost there. I mean, we can potentially whip something up pretty quickly with that.Derek Hanson:
I like that. I like that we didn’t really plan this, but I’m curious, where does all this potentially fit with the Jetpack mobile app? Like, if we’re kind of like moving into this wave of agentic tools and communicating through text messaging people that are users of the Jetpack mobile app, where’s. Where does that fit into the picture in all of this?Devin Walker:
Yeah. So, you know, you can maintain one or multiple sites through Jetpack, the mobile app. And what you would do is just select the site that you want to get into and perhaps there’s a chat icon or chat bubble or something similar to what you’re used to with Telegram or beeper or what have you. You would be directly chatting with just that one. Maybe there’s a better way to do it where you wouldn’t even have to go into that one site. You can just have a chat for all of them and specifically say which one. But mobile is going to be a, a major emphasis of this. And, and the mo. The Jetpack mobile app. I’m glad you brought up. It’s so great too. Lots of good work going into that. A lot of. A lot of improvements are coming to Reader as well. And so you can get your content out there a lot better within, across the networks.Derek Hanson:
Nice.Devin Walker:
I love it.Derek Hanson:
Well, we talked about where you could join the Jetpack project if you’re curious to either contribute or offer feedback, like online or through GitHub. I think something that people are getting more and more excited about, like this past year and probably really going into the future is getting back together in person. And I know wordcamps are like the flagship events and it. It looks like Jetpack will be at WordCamp Europe coming up in June, what can folks expect to see or hear or do if they come meet Jetpack at WordCamp Europe?Devin Walker:
Yeah, we can. We’re also going to be at WordCamp Asia as well. I personally won’t be there, but there will be a lot of other people there in my stead. Um, but I will be in Europe and that’s early June, so by that time you can expect a lot of this, what I’m calling Experience Unification initiative. Essentially, when you’re clicking through Jetpack, it feels fast, it feels cohesive, it feels like you’re using one, one product that fits really well to WordPress and it’s not kind of like odd sections that are sort of upselling you or saying, you know, there’s some interesting things in Jetpack that were going to improve quite a bit. So a lot of that work will be out and released. 7.0 will be out and released and I hope to show some of the cool demos. Like what we were just talking about text messaging your site or DMing it. So I think that would be a super powerful one. We’re gonna have some Flash videos and we’re gonna be doing some nice work to the website, making sure that looks a lot nicer too, starting with the homepage and simplifying the pricing quite a bit as well.Derek Hanson:
Ooh, nice. That sounds like a little bit of a tease. That might get a lot of people really intrigued, like oversimplifying the product, simplifying the pricing. I can see that becoming very, very appealing too. Long time and future Jetpack users for sure. Okay, well, check out the jetpack booth and WordCamp Asia April 9th through 11th. You can meet Devin personally if you’re at WordCamp Europe, which is June 4th through 6. And yeah, we’re be really excited to see these next few months to look for all these changes across Jetpack. Where can folks follow your work and get connected with you? Devin?Devin Walker:
Yeah, you can check out my website, devendvin.org I’m also an ex at Interwebs. I N N E R W E B S and I also run the San Diego WordPress meetup too. And we meet monthly. So if you’re ever in Southern California, feel free to stop by that. It’s sponsored by Jetpack, so we always say something a little bit about it. Yeah, but other than that. Yeah, I usually go around to all, all sorts of Word camps and stuff like that. So. Yeah.Derek Hanson:
Nice. Awesome. Devin, thanks so much for joining and for everybody listening and watching. Look forward to seeing you in the next episode of Open Makers. Be sure to if you’re watching on YouTube, please like and subscribe and help us get the word out on WordPress. Thanks everyone. -
The UK's Online Safety Bill "... is not just about preventing children from accessing ... [adult] content.
It’s about mandating age verification for anything and everything, for every user, of every age, in front of access to all topics, all subjects, all sites, all service providers, all opinions, and all content. The whole public open web. Everything."
-- Heather Burns on the UK's plans for building a tech #dystopiahttps://webdevlaw.uk/2022/06/17/data-reform-bill-cookie-popups/
-
Introduction
Measures of central tendency like mean, median and mode might not give you the complete picture of the data. They do not give you the info about variability and dispersion of the data. Understanding data distribution is a crucial aspect of statistics, especially in medical research, where making sense of data is often the key to discovering new insights. One of the most informative and robust measures of dispersion is the Interquartile Range (IQR).
In this post, we’ll dive deep into what the IQR is, why it’s important, and how to calculate it using various tools like Google Sheets, Excel, and even manually. Whether you’re just starting out or brushing up on your statistical knowledge, this guide will help you master the IQR.
- Introduction
- What is the Interquartile Range?
- Understanding Quartiles
- Why is the Interquartile Range Important?
- Note Before you learn Calculating the Interquartile Range
- How do we calculate the percentiles?
- Conclusion
What is the Interquartile Range?
The Interquartile Range (IQR) is a measure of dispersion or variability that describes the range within which the middle 50% of your data lies.
- Unlike the range, which considers all data points, the IQR focuses on the central portion, making it less sensitive to outliers and more reflective of the data’s overall spread.
- Just like median is a robust measure of central tendency which is often used in skewed data, interquartile range is especially useful in skewed data to measure dispersion or variability of the data.
- Example of a graphical representation of the data set: 10, 15, 20, 35, 40, 50, 55, 70.
Understanding Quartiles
To grasp the IQR, you need to understand quartiles. Arrange the values in your dataset in ascending order and imagine dividing the entire data set into four equal parts. The first quartile or Q1
- Q1 (First Quartile): This is the median of the lower half of the data set. This lowest quartile or Q1 represents the 25th percentile of the dataset.
- Q2 (Second Quartile): This is simply the median of the data set, marking the 50th percentile.
- Q3 (Third Quartile): This is the median of the upper half of the data set, marking the 75th percentile.
The IQR is calculated as:
This formula subtracts the first quartile from the third quartile, giving you the range of the middle 50% of your data.
Why is the Interquartile Range Important?
- The IQR is a robust measure of variability and is particularly useful when dealing with skewed distributions or data with outliers.
- Since it focuses on the central portion of the data, it provides a better sense of the typical spread than the full range, which might be distorted by extreme values.
- Example: Imagine you’re analyzing the blood pressure readings of a group of patients. If a few patients have abnormally high or low blood pressure, the IQR will give you a better understanding of the “normal” range for most patients, rather than being skewed by the extremes.
Note Before you learn Calculating the Interquartile Range
- The smallest value that is greater than k percent of the values.
- The smallest value that is greater than or equal to k percent of values.
- An interpolated value between the two closest ranks
As you have learnt by now, the Interquartile range depends on the quartiles – Q1, Q2, Q3. These quartiles are nothing but percentiles in the dataset. However there is no consensus among statisticians about the exact formula or definition to calculate percentiles. The three calculation methods define the kth percentile in the following slightly different ways:
By using these methods, one can get slightly different values for the same percentile. So different methods and statistical software programs will find slightly different Q1 and Q3 values, which affects the interquartile range. These variations stem from alternate ways of finding percentiles.
How do we calculate the percentiles?
When you calculate quartiles using excel or google sheets or just any statistical software, you will come across terms like quartile inclusive and quartile exclusive Let me try to make this stuff simpler.
Consider the following dataset: 10, 15, 20, 35, 40, 50, 55, 70.
- In the above dataset, by following the definition of median, 40 is determined as median.
- In the exclusive method, the median is excluded from the calculation of Q1 and Q3. This method divides the data set into two halves, excluding the median (40 in the above example) and then calculates the quartiles from these halves.
- Q1 (25th percentile): The median of the lower half, excluding the median of the entire data set is 17.5
- Q3 (75th percentile): The median of the upper half, excluding the median of the entire data set is 52.5
- The excel or google sheets formula for exclusive quartiles is = QUARTILE.EXC (data range, quart).
- Eg, = QUARTILE.EXC (A1:A9, 1)
- The exclusive method also doesn’t consider the extreme value of each half. So by using this formula you simple cannot calculate Q0 or Q4. Both of them will result in an error.
The exclusive method is more common in inferential statistics and is preferred when working with larger data sets. It provides a more focused view of the data’s distribution by excluding the central value and emphasizing the spread of the data.
In the inclusive method, the quartiles are calculated by including the median in the calculation of both the lower and upper quartiles. This method treats the data set as a whole and ensures that all values, including the median, contribute to the calculation of Q1 (first quartile) and Q3 (third quartile).
- Q1 (25th percentile): Using the inclusive method, Q1 is the median of the lower half of the data set, including the median of the entire data set. 20 is the Q1 in above example
- Q3 (75th percentile): Q3 is the median of the upper half, again including the median of the entire data set. 50 is Q3 in above example
The inclusive method is often used in descriptive statistics and when dealing with smaller data sets, as it provides a more comprehensive view of the data distribution by including the central value in the calculation of quartiles.
Using Statistical Software (R, Python)
For those who work with large datasets or prefer programming, statistical software like R or Python offers powerful tools for calculating the IQR.
In R: #RStudiodata <- c(10, 15, 20, 35, 40, 45, 50, 55, 70)IQR(data)In Python (using pandas): #Python
import pandas as pddata = pd.Series([10, 15, 20, 35, 40, 45, 50, 55, 70])IQR = data.quantile(0.75) - data.quantile(0.25)print(IQR)Both methods will give you the IQR quickly, and they’re especially useful when handling large datasets where manual calculation is impractical.
Conclusion
The Interquartile Range is a vital tool in any statistician’s toolkit. It helps you understand the spread of your data, especially when outliers are present. Whether you’re calculating it manually, using spreadsheets, or employing software like R or Python, mastering the IQR will enhance your ability to analyze data effectively.
This comprehensive guide should arm you with everything you need to know about the IQR, making you well-prepared to tackle statistical challenges with confidence.https://geekysteth.com/master-statistics-101-interquartile-range-iqr/
-
Cannabis Study Sparks Fear Among the Uninformed
Filed Under: Panic Science
Every few years, the cycle repeats itself. A new cannabis study appears, a few statistics are pulled from the results, and within hours, headlines begin warning that marijuana is fueling a mental health crisis.
The latest panic comes from researchers at McMaster University, whose analysis was published in The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry. Media coverage quickly framed the research as evidence that cannabis use is driving anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts across Canada.
That is not what the study actually proves.
The researchers did not run a clinical experiment. They did not administer cannabis to participants or monitor psychological changes over time. Instead, they analyzed existing national survey data collected between 2012 and 2022 from the Canadian Community Health Survey, a large population dataset maintained by Statistics Canada.
The dataset included roughly 35,000 respondents. Participants answered questions about cannabis use and about their mental health. Researchers then compared those answers to identify statistical patterns across the population.
What they found was an association.
Individuals who reported cannabis use were more likely to report symptoms of anxiety, depression, or suicidal thinking. Heavy users, defined in the paper as individuals using cannabis at least twice per week, appeared more likely to report psychological distress than people who reported never using cannabis.
But association is not causation.
The survey does not show that cannabis caused mental health problems. It only shows that people who use cannabis also report those problems at higher rates. The direction of that relationship remains unknown.
People experiencing anxiety or depression may turn to cannabis as a coping mechanism. Individuals already struggling with mental health issues may be more likely to experiment with substances. Socioeconomic stress, trauma, and other factors can influence both substance use and psychological well-being.
Survey data cannot untangle those relationships.
HELP POT CULTURE MAGAZINE STAY ALIVE, AND INDEPENDENT
Support Pot Culture Magazine Independent cannabis journalism survives on reader support. If you can, chip in a few dollars and help keep this work going. Support PCMEven the researchers acknowledge this limitation. The analysis relies entirely on self-reported responses rather than medical diagnoses, laboratory testing, or controlled observation.
Self-reported survey data is valuable for spotting trends across large populations, but it cannot establish biological cause and effect.
That distinction often disappears once the findings leave the academic journal and enter the news cycle.
Headlines compress nuance into alarm. A statistical relationship becomes proof of danger. Words like “linked” or “associated” quietly disappear and are replaced by stronger claims that the research never made.
This pattern has followed cannabis research for decades.
Studies showing correlations between cannabis use and mental health outcomes frequently receive widespread attention. The more cautious conclusions written in the paper itself rarely make it into the headline.
None of this means cannabis is harmless. Like alcohol, prescription medication, or any psychoactive substance, it can affect individuals differently depending on genetics, mental health history, age, and frequency of use.
But good science requires precision.
The McMaster analysis examined survey responses.
It identified statistical relationships.
It did not demonstrate that cannabis use causes mental illness.
Those distinctions matter, especially when research findings are used to shape public policy, influence public perception, and guide medical conversations.
Without that context, studies designed to explore complex social patterns can easily become fuel for the next wave of cannabis panic.
And the cycle starts again.
©2026 Pot Culture Magazine. All rights reserved. This content is the exclusive property of Pot Culture Magazine and may not be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission from the publisher, except for brief quotations in critical reviews.
F O R T H E C U L T U R E B Y T H E C U L T U R E
Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s Virginia Sabotage
Virginia legalized possession, but Governor Abigail Spanberger sabotaged the retail market. By delaying sales until 2027 and gutting equity provisions, the Commonwealth institutionalized a half-legal trap. Consumers now navigate a system that treats possession as a right but supply as a crime, fueling an unchecked illicit market while abandoning promised reform. Spanberger’s public safety rhetoric…
by Pot Culture Magazine EditorsApril 21, 2026April 20, 20264/20 has been hollowed out by branding, corporate silence, and a culture that forgot its own history. While the industry sells holiday merch, Singapore executed a man for cannabis. The movement that once fought for autonomy now treats the plant like a commodity. This piece examines the cost of that betrayal and the culture left…
by Pot Culture Magazine EditorsApril 20, 2026April 21, 2026Ed Rosenthal and the Origins of High Times
Ed Rosenthal recounts how the magazine was born not from psychedelic myth but from hard numbers. Rolling paper import data, underground press experience, and market logic revealed a massive hidden cannabis audience. His account challenges the romantic origin story and offers a rare firsthand look at the early mechanics behind one of cannabis culture’s most…
by MW Roberts-Publisher/Executive EditorApril 16, 2026April 21, 2026 #Canada #CanadianCommunityHealthSurvey #CanadianJournalOfPsychiatry #cannabis #CannabisCommunity #CannabisCulture #CannabisNews #CannabisStigma #CannabisCommunity #correlationVsCausation #crossSectionalAnalysis #fearHeadlines #generalizedAnxietyDisorder #majorDepressiveEpisode #Marijuana #MarijuanaNews #McMasterUniversity #MediaWatch #MentalHealth #MentalHealthAndAccessToCareSurvey #observationalStudy #panicScience #PotCultureMagazine #publicHealthData #research #selfMedication #StatisticsCanada #suicidality #Weed -
Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow – No trackers, no ads. Black type, white background. Privacy policy: we don't collect or retain any data at all ever period. [Unofficial] @[email protected] ·Pluralistic: Trumpismo vs minilateralism (01 Apr 2026)
https://web.brid.gy/r/https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/01/minilateralism/