Feature request: capitalist social media have deliberately done everything they could to degrade hyperlinks in favor of their built-in sharing mechanisms, and I think it's very important to provide affordances not only to link to things that were written after the 80s but also to insert academic references, which may be, for example, written during the antiquity (I'm thinking about Lahire's references to Aristotle's "L'éthique de Nicomaque" in "L'homme pluriel").

More to the point, I think that in order to build as anti-authoritarian a social network as possible, it's important to foster cultural diversity and for example on Twitter the ratio of your followings in their unique followings (ratio of your 1st-degree relationships in your 2nd-degree relationships) could be an interesting indicator; any sociology book represents a network of citations that's more cultural diverse by a magnitude (actually I think that academic citations are, like the internet, a thermonuclear war-resilient network of networks, and that any book published to an institutional editor like Gallimard or the PUF is more resilient than a personal website). It also says a lot about cultural diversity when bourgeois channels have a playlist of about a dozen of classics spanning on several decades, and it may also indicate why some people online look for a sort of underground middle with FUBAR encryption norms like OpenPGP, cli-based mpd clients and window managers, etc., because if all of your 2nd-degree relationships think the same thing about e.g. your gender, it will be hard to think otherwise (which is why so many transgender people take time to come out of the closet).

Such affordances (that aren't even part of Markdown, but that are part of Org-mode, which the Hugo static sites generator supports natively) could be hooked to a collaborative, private tracker-style citations database with similar a curation and trumping model, except that trumping a reference would imply providing a link or a proof of some sort, and that it would be perfectly legal. You could draw inspiration from the way Emacs does it; I think honestly that the lack of such affordances in most libre software is a battle we've lost against enclosures. Kristoffer Balintona wrote an excellent introduction to Org-cite and thus to the CSL, which is the universal, website-friendly equivalent to Biblatex (the author recommends configuring Emacs to use Biblatex with LaTeX and the CSL for anything else).

#feature_request #bonfire_feedback