Daily Journal 📓

Mar 2024 8:09am

Old blog post by Moxie on the Signal blog on how open-ended protocols stall.

Surfaced by Gordon Brander, “innovation by definition is not standardizable” — ecosystems move too quickly as they first emerge.


Mar 2024 1:40pm

New note for Universal Blue: using containers as the basis for a desktop OS. "That's nerdspeak for the ultimate Linux client: the reliability of a Chromebook, but with the flexibility and power of a traditional Linux desktop"


Mar 2024 1:13pm

Bazzite is a Linux distro for gaming with Steam support out of the box.


Mar 2024 11:13am

Web Recorder actually records websites so they are replayable rather than just a static archive.


Mar 2024 8:28am

ParadeDB “a modern ElasticSearch alternative built on Postgres and Tantivy, in Rust”


Mar 2024 4:53pm

Radicle has reached v1.0. It's a "distributed code collaboration stack" – local first nodes that connect p2p and stores everything in git, identities are DID-based Ed25519 keys.


Mar 2024 7:00am

Uncut.wtf is "a free typeface catalogue, focusing on somewhat contemporary type. There are currently 152 typefaces featured"

via @depatchedmode, we're using Overused Grotesk at Fission.


Mar 2024 9:28am

Marker is “an open-source, user-friendly UI for writing & editing markdown files”. For MacOS desktop, built with Tauri.


Mar 2024 11:41pm

Doing Weeknotes, by Giles Turnbull: “Weeknotes are a format for regular communication about work in progress.”

via Ben Werdmuller


Mar 2024 10:30pm

I kind of hate this Fast Company review of the 2024 MacBook Air called “Dawn of the AI laptop” — but it’s the label that’s selling laptops today. Without “touchscreen capability, fancy rotating hinges, folding screens, or other features” that PC manufacturers are attempting.


Mar 2024 2:28pm

I took some downtime this weekend and played many hours of Caves of Qud, an RPG / roguelike that has a vast world and many commands and abilities.

Found myself searching a lot of basics, like "How do I fill a waterskin with liquid?", and deciding how many arms and legs I wanted my mutant character to have.


Mar 2024 9:18pm

Fedify:

…is a Deno/TypeScript library for building federated server apps powered by ActivityPub and other standards

Still in early development. Also using Deno’s new JSR packaging format.


Mar 2024 12:14pm

It's been 20 years, and I brought Zoe up in conversation again: a local IMAP server on your Mac that gave you an interface for exploring, searching, and working with your email. I've added a notes page for it.


Mar 2024 10:18am

I recently installed Telegram desktop to my Mac. The disk image has this really cute illustration in it.


Mar 2024 11:07pm

Supernote is an e-ink tablet that is currently Android 11 powered but will have a customizable & open Linux release. $299USD per-order, plus you’ll need a $~70 pen.


Mar 2024 3:40pm

Gitlab has a backlog item for enabling ActivityPub support. There isn't a lot of consistency in this stuff yet, don't know if they'll confirm to what ForgeFed is designing, or just aim for "can subscribe in Mastodon" (really, they should be supporting both).


Mar 2024 3:22pm

Talking about Ente, it turns out people are interested in solutions for Photo Sharing, so I wrote up a notes page about some apps that I know of, and what I currently use.


Mar 2024 2:20pm

ForgeFed is a project to work on federation for software forges, built on top of ActivityPub:

“imagine you could host your Git repos anywhere you want…but still be able to open issues and submit pull requests against repos hosted elsewhere”


Mar 2024 1:30pm

Puter is an SPA that looks like a virtual desktop OS in the browser “Internet OS and Desktop Environment”

Reminds me of PhotoPea, but the front end is AGPL licensed. I’m still digging into how coupled the back end is.

Sign up with my referral link for +1GB


Mar 2024 1:18pm

Threads is rolling out a beta of user accounts opting in to enabling federation. Evan Prodromou announces he is part of the beta @evanprodromou@threads.net


Mar 2024 11:02am

Added a notes page for Stewart Brand's Pace Layering concept. "The fast layers innovate; the slow layers stabilize. The whole combines with learning continuity"

Pace Layering, from fast to slow - Fashion, Commerce, Infrastructure, Governance, Culture, Nature


Mar 2024 7:43am

Ente just announced open sourcing their full backend.

It’s an end-to-end encrypted “alternative to Google or Apple photos”, licensed as AGPL.

Their client code had always been open source, this completes making the entire service available.


Mar 2024 11:28am

Apple released a game porting toolkit that has been improved by Whisky:

app that wraps both Wine, the tool that translates Windows API calls to their Unix-like equivalents, and Apple’s game porting toolkit into one very friendly interface. That removes pretty much all of the work out of the process, to the point where all I had to do was download Whisky and drag it into my Applications folder.

Dan Moren writes at Six Colors that maybe Apple should make running PC games on MacOS great with this method.


Mar 2024 8:46am

@alex@social.alexschroeder.ch made a theme for his site that makes it look like chat threads. It’s powered by his very interesting Oddmu wiki / memex.


Mar 2024 8:20am

Ben Werdmuller is adding asides posts which are pretty similar to how how I think about my journal post types.


Mar 2024 9:09am

This is the longest time I haven't posted journal updates in a while! Still at EthDenver until Sunday, maybe I'll put some notes on that EthDenver page. I've got lots of tabs open from the people and projects I've met.

And lots of progress in inviting people to Causal Islands


Feb 2024 12:46pm

Landed in Denver. I’m here for the week attending EthDenver and the many community side events happening. Talking to people about Fission’s Everywhere Computer.


Feb 2024 12:45pm

I think the word bridge is now at the level of trigger word for people.

What if I call Misskey a bridge to Mastodon?

It means something socially and technically to some group of people which is disconnected from how it works.

Networked communications are absolutely social discussions — not just tech.

But if you disregard how the tech actually works, you’re not going to get very far with social discussions either.


Feb 2024 8:30pm

Steve Klabnik writes up his own take on How does Bluesky work

I think the separation of concerns between atproto and BlueSky are very meaningful, as having a “killer app” for the network gives a reason to use it. It also is a form of dogfooding, making sure that atproto is good enough to be able to build real applications on.


Feb 2024 9:13am

Rui Carmo writes up his experiences with LLMs etc in Living with our machine sidekicks. Here’s his comment on trying to import his 20 year old digital garden:

In my experience, summaries for personal notes either miss the point or are hilariously off, suggestions for related pages prioritise matching fluff over tags (yes, it’s that bad from a knowledge management perspective), and “chatting with my documents” is, in a word, stupid.


Feb 2024 11:45am

Congrats to the Bluesky team on opening up federation yesterday! Read the blog post announcement

I almost got a PDS up and running yesterday for my birthday.

I’ve been talking to Nathan Schneider and Robin Berjon about running a co-op PDS, Sky Coop.


Feb 2024 11:38am

Manton from Micro.blog intends to enable the service as an ATProtocol PDS:

The long-term plan for Micro.blog is to fully support AT’s PDS — Personal Data Servers. Any blog hosted on Micro.blog would plug into Bluesky seamlessly, with data portable to other AT Protocol hosting providers.

Micro.blog already functions as an ActivityPub server, and currently supports cross-posting to Bluesky.


Feb 2024 10:30pm

Following on Paying people to work on open source is good actually, Chad Whitacre proposes Software Commons as the big tent definition of open source in his post Towards Software Commons.

From the Wikipedia definition:

The software commons consists of all computer software which is available at little or no cost and which can be reused with few restrictions. It includes open source software which can be modified with few restrictions. However the commons also includes software outside of these categories

I like it!


Feb 2024 3:09pm

Blog tinkering on my birthday ✅

The aliases field in notes are now used to generate the lines of the IPFS _redirects file. View source on Github


Feb 2024 8:48am

There are 14 JavaScript runtimes, via @wesbos.

This was a glitch post that I didn't end up publishing, but the link made it through my RSS pipes and got posted. So I'm retconning the link that got posted.

Let's make a JavaScript Runtimes notes page for this info to live.


Feb 2024 6:37am

Rosano writes an encryption rant as he attempts to backup and transfer data from a handful of apps:

there's no feigning moral superiority in using 'alternative tech' until it includes a real foundation to stand on for people without this domain expertise.


Feb 2024 5:13pm

Bryan Cantrill, CTO of Oxide Computer, Moore's Scofflaws:

software costs can potentially absorb the entire gain from a next-generation CPU…software vendors never would have been allowed to get away with charging by the gigahertz; we should not allow them to feel so emboldened to charge by core count now!


Feb 2024 1:09pm

Signal is adding usernames to protect visibility of phone numbers. Usernames are effectively a privacy work around, not a social feature:

Signal usernames are not logins or handles that you’ll be known by on the app – they’re simply a quick way to connect without sharing a phone number.

They also go on to describe that they’re easily changeable/disposable to share with different groups over time.

The Signal Wiki documents the generation of nicknames and UUID-based links (links don’t publicly display your username)


Feb 2024 10:01am

“We have lost the ability to do RAD (Rapid Application Development) due to the prevalence of web applications” says Rui Carmo.

He has a page collecting his research on Native Development


Feb 2024 9:54pm

Apple detects Mastodon with a link tag — but then still uses OpenGraph to load the preview for iMessage. Any app that has a Mastodon shaped link tag can thus get rich previews.


Feb 2024 10:36pm

Deltachat blog post about updated webxdc docs and sample apps

Like Farcaster#Frames|Farcaster Frames, webxdc “messenger apps” are interesting to me as it combines distribution with new app functionality.


Feb 2024 8:55pm

Tom Critchlow writes up notes on his Remarkable Tablet. I have a reMarkable tablet myself and think Tom’s suggestions are pretty great.

I’d also love a more formal diary / daily entry system. Kind of like Obsidian’s daily notes. Some kind of date-based notebook inside the Remarkable would be rad

Notes, daily entry, and sync as core primitives are very powerful.

I pre-ordered a stealth tablet a couple of years back and then wrote a post about Kickstarting an app ecosystem which suggested similar things.

Apparently reMarkable is only getting more tied to mandatory, single source subscription services, which is not a great way to build an ecosystem around a device.


Feb 2024 8:42pm

The Polkadot ecosystem has defined salaries and grades for fellowships. Via Dietrich, who put together background context on Parity/Polkadot decentralization.

Fits my open source as a job thinking, and is roughly what I suggested when I was working in the Ethereum core ecosystem: $10KUSD per month is a decent engineer salary.


Feb 2024 8:15pm

I spent way too much time this past week being annoyed and disappointed at the hate thrown at Bridgy Fed developer Ryan Barrett, connecting ActivityPub to Bluesky’s ATProtocol.

Sean Tilley has a great opinion piece on We Distribute that does a good job of summarizing.


Feb 2024 8:02pm

OWA on Apple killing web apps in the EU

This feels … complicated. There are new browser engines allowed in the EU.

You can still have a Home Screen “bookmark” & it will open in the browser of your choice.

Any of the new browsers — including Chrome or Firefox — could be a great host for PWAs on iOS now, decoupled from Safari versions.


Feb 2024 5:50pm

Jacob Kaplan-Moss writes Paying people to work on open source is good actually which very much matches my thoughts so I’m clipping it to my local notes.

I’ll share a handful of quotes:

“Yelling at maintainers who’ve found a way to make a living is wrong.”

“Open source is good for humanity…I want people who want to work on open source to be able to do so, and should be able to live comfortable lives, with their basic needs met.

I’ll even use the terms “open source” and “free software” interchangeably just to hammer home how, in this context, the precise definitions of these terms don’t matter to me

One of the core things that I’m ready to fight for alongside Jacob is that “lower case” open source should be a bigger tent than OSI-approved Open Source™️ licenses, and it’s what I mean when I use the term.

if my sloppy use of these terms bothers you in the context of talking about how people make their living, it implies that you care more about terminology and definitions than about the people, and I’d like you to sit in that discomfort for a while

Read the whole thing.


Feb 2024 5:45pm

Great read about the recent Mastodon CVE (which could allow taking over and forging content for remote accounts).

I’m quoting a bit here about open source:

how people seem to only care for the 'gratis' of free software, and seldom the 'libre', and millions of users leaning on the work of primarily a couple developers, assuming they have the attentiveness to catch every mistake themselves alone

There aren’t enough funded people - both teams and individuals - working on Fediverse software, and both the users and the admins seem averse to paying for it.


Feb 2024 8:48am

Ink & Switch lab notebook for new Patchwork project. First post, Universal Version Control:

“We believe that simple, powerful, universal version control tools could help all kinds of creators produce better work. Perhaps this is even built into the storage layer of your OS! That’s the vision for this Ink & Switch research project, codenamed Patchwork.”


Feb 2024 11:13pm

Oh look at this! Just found out that Ton Zijlstra is involved in PKM Summit 2024 (aka Personal Knowledge Management, aka Digital Garden / Second Brain).

Late March in Utrecht, NL, around the same time I’m planning Causal Islands LA.


Feb 2024 8:22am

Dare Obasanjo says paid subscriptions to websites creates a global divide vs ad supported:

“Online advertising is a progressive form of taxation as the rich, mostly US-based consumers who buy goods & services from ads subsidized the internet for everyone else.”

@carnage4life@mas.to


Feb 2024 10:20pm

90.63% of pages get no organic search traffic from Google, via ahrefs 59 blogging statistics for 2023

ahrefs chart


Feb 2024 11:37am

I’ve been reading lots of Apple Vision Pro reviews and chatter.

I spent several years working in AR/VR/XR and tinkered with hand input + interfaces. We knew that mobile OS powered headset was coming from Apple.

Then I watched Apple evolve their UI on Mac and iOS for years, that pointed without a doubt to not being bounded by a screen.

“I say this carefully, because I don’t wish to offend. But if you haven’t used Vision Pro, you probably shouldn’t be writing about it.” – Joe Cieplinski

I’ll get one when they’re available in Canada. Or, uh, maybe on my next trip to the US 😅


Feb 2024 10:29am

I added Networked Orgs and Tooling as my first retroactive blog post. It didn't feel enough like a note, so I formatted and integrated a few things and published it as a blog post.


Feb 2024 8:38pm

Stract, an open source search engine:

”where the user has the ability to see exactly what is going on and customize almost everything about their search results. It's a search engine made for hackers and tinkerers just like ourselves.”

404 Media, This Guy Has Built an Open Source Search Engine as an Alternative to Google in His Spare Time


Feb 2024 8:03pm

Collective Governance Directory:

A collection of links to publicly available governance documents, published by the collectives that use them.

Launched by Doug, who is looking for other collectives to contribute their docs.


Feb 2024 8:01pm

Bluesky handles directory lists a breakdown of custom domain names used as account names on Bluesky.


Feb 2024 7:49pm

“Just enough leadership injected, when it is needed, where it is needed.”

vgr writes a post on a Management trend he’s seeing, that he calls BDFx-ing.

BDFL (Benevolent Dictator For Life) is a common governance model for many open source projects.


Feb 2024 2:29pm

I have a Twitter archive powered by Tweetback. There are apparently 68 Tweetback Canonical archives registered, which will link to the “canonical” URLs of each others archives.

I think Mastodon or Bluesky import is a more likely path for people who really want their archive online.

Bluesky, which will support running your own PDS, seems like a good architecture for this.


Feb 2024 1:44am

Peter Kaminski, Books and NeoBooks

The idea of NeoBooks was never to be about one particular kind of object. It’s about how to use the techniques that we have, social techniques and informational techniques, to help people publish.


Feb 2024 11:34pm

I’m getting all nostalgic reading my own blog posts from 20 years ago.

(1) because it was the beginning of being part of the growing Vancouver tech scene; and,

(2) I have 20 year old blog posts still online!

Here’s the IPFS index of my posts from 2004, which probably means they’ll stick around for another 20!


Feb 2024 4:56pm

20 years of Flickr. And I just happened to tell the story today of the tech meetup I organized in Vancouver 20 years ago. 6 people came, including Roland Tanglao, who got us all early access to Flickr.

I still have the blog post from the Vancouver Geek Dinner. And some notes on that early full screen Flash-powered version of Flickr. And some sort of Flickr Buddy Icons that still works 20 years later.


Feb 2024 12:47pm

Just heard of another Canadian founder switching to EQ Bank because of their direct partnership with Wise.

Never mind International business, transfers in Canada of more than $10K are way too hard with the big banks!


Feb 2024 11:53pm

“Wherever you get your podcasts” is a radical statement, Anil Dash:

“being able to say, "wherever you get your podcasts" is a radical statement. Because what it represents is the triumph of exactly the kind of technology that's supposed to be impossible: open, empowering tech that's not owned by any one company, that can't be controlled by any one company, and that allows people to have ownership over their work and their relationship with their audience.”

I’m looking for more radical statements.


Feb 2024 11:35pm

Next in the tiny hardware series: I bought an ASUS MiniPC PL63. It was on sale, and I wanted a machine that sits at my desk with modern ports.


Feb 2024 9:28pm

Brett Cannon, Python core dev:

“When you say or ask for something regarding open source, add "for me" to the end of the sentence. If that makes it sound rude, then consider rephrasing.


Feb 2024 9:25pm

Had a great morning at DWebYVR coworking.

We ended up on the top floor of the VPL Central Library and had a bunch of interesting discussions that you can find on the notes page.


Feb 2024 7:21am

The developer of the Graysky client for Bluesky has written up how to embed replies from Bluesky as comments on your blog.

Like I said for Mastodon comments, not going to enable this on my site.


Feb 2024 9:52pm

Craig Mod writes "Oh God, It's Raining Newsletters" (2019), which is a delightful piece of writing with many links that you should read in full, but I will quote a few snippets:

"I fear we’re entering an era of newsletter fatigue…" "the state of newsletters and email, in 2019: Things are unexpectedly amazing" "there’s something about the framing of email — the inbox, that weird neither-here-nor-there networked space" "These newsletters are the most backed up pieces of writing in history, copies in millions of inboxes, on millions of hard drives and servers, far more than any blog post." "They’re everywhere but privately so, hidden, piggybacking on the most accessible, oldest networked publishing platform in the world."

via nicoth


Feb 2024 8:29pm

Changed the Fedica settings to crosspost to my main Bluesky account @bmann.ca rather than the @bmannconsulting.com account I made. I think I liked the concept of mapping my domain to it's own username (and the FoodWiki has an account too), but it really just is "me". The three Mastodon accounts are also a bit much 😅


Feb 2024 11:44am

The late majority needs nothing to change. Early adopters move on to systems where the “new stuff” is available.


Feb 2024 9:49am
Feb 2024 9:37am

Right now, I pay for two open social protocols. For ActivityPub, I pay for my own servers (hosting) and clients (Ivory). For Farcaster, I pay for invites and channels.

ATProtocol, I need Bluesky to get off your butts and launch federation to enable various people to start charging for things.


Feb 2024 11:18am

As of iOS 17.4, iPhone users in the EU can choose a default browser, details from MacRumors:

Apple said iPhone users in the EU will be presented with a list of the 12 most popular web browsers from their country's local App Store at the time

Take away: a lot of browsers will be competing for App Store installs.


Feb 2024 12:13am

DREAM - Distribution Rules Everything Around Me

Distribution is the product of next gen social protocols, and why app devs are building in support as search and platform social crumbles.


Feb 2024 11:30pm

Three quotes from “The Internets Meaning Crisis”, by Kneeling Bus:

The average human living today sees more things they don’t care about in one week than a medieval peasant did in their entire lifetime.

Parasocial media as antidote to AI content:

As AI normalizes the idea of human-free content creation, parasocial media merits appreciation: We gravitate toward work that foregrounds its creator because that person is often the ultimate reason we’re interested in the work, directly or indirectly

Increasingly baroque personal info filter systems:

It’s increasingly urgent to develop an effective personal system for keeping the digital entropy at bay, even if it’s as simple as “haphazardly ignore most of what comes through.”


Feb 2024 11:21pm

We’re in the middle of a perfect storm for rollback of the ‘open web’ and burgeoning online surveillance” — that’s just the title of Alec Muffet’s post. He details a long list of issues, with everything from politics to lack of digital literacy by both activists and regulators.

We are in for a rough few years. There will be losses. The “app” ecosystem will likely take a big — possibly majority — chunk out of the “open web” as users demand features which are more easily built without the abstraction of traditional web/web-like services.

Finishing with:

The users will suffer in the middle of this Godzilla battle, but nobody cares about them.

And actual privacy and anonymity will be on the back foot for a decade or more.

Oof. I’m feeling this but don’t want to believe it.


Feb 2024 11:17pm

I post about Garage, and then sbc64 follows the links and comes back with wgautomesh, a tool by the same team:

“A simple utility to help connect wireguard nodes together in a full mesh topology”

Excellent! May be useful for some work at Fission.


Feb 2024 11:12pm

This FOSDEM talk on Domain: a modular Rust DNS toolkit looks interesting:

The "domain" crate is a Rust library that aims to provide a wide range of building blocks that are necessary or useful when building specialised DNS applications.

In this talk we will look at the history, current state, and future of the crate and how it differs from other offerings in the Rust ecosystem. We will explore how the crate aims to leverage Rust’s type system to make it easier to model the complexities of the DNS in a straightforward way that helps make it easier to build correct and efficient applications.

On GitHub NLnetLabs/domain


Feb 2024 11:05pm

Chad Kohalyk writes about fun:

Basically, the most important thing for peak performance is energy. And the way to generate energy is to make sure there is enough FUN in your life. Then you will have the fuel to lean into whatever the problem of the moment is.

Chad works with me at Fission. I’ve been thinking about this a lot in all areas of my life, from work, to community, to family, to individual.

For me personally, I need to have high alignment between what I’m interested in and what I do for work. So I’ve often created my own work to ensure that alignment.

The downside of blurring of lines between stuff that is being done for work, and stuff to tinker with for personal enjoyment.


Feb 2024 5:35pm

The Tangara Music Player campaign opened on Crowd Supply today. Yep, I ordered.


Feb 2024 12:15pm

I care more about apps, protocols, and files than operating systems.

But plumbing and sewers are important.


Jan 2024 11:01pm

Got Coolify installed by first installing UTM on my MacBook Air, and then installing Debian.

I needed to turn on bridged networking so that the VM could have its own IP address. And curl wasn’t installed, but after that the Coolify install just worked.


Jan 2024 5:53pm

It’s the first anniversary of CoSocial.

This is the first co-op I’ve been part of, although I’ve been involved in a number of other non-profits, foundations, and other structures.

I’m gathering, learning, and sharing more info on my co-op notes.


Jan 2024 3:15pm

Matthew Ingram writes a post mortem on The Messenger news startup:

The saddest part of this whole saga, as Simon Owens noted, is that the $50 million Finkelstein and his team chewed through could have funded a hundred local news startups that people might actually want or need.

I’m a big fan of the “fund a bunch of smaller attempts”. Knowing when to favour that vs fund the larger impactful thing is hard.


Jan 2024 9:19am

Oxide Computer has released Helios, a distribution of illumos that powers their Oxide Rack computer.


Jan 2024 8:42am

Garage “An open-source distributed object storage service tailored for self-hosting”. S3-compatible API, single Rust binary that is installable everywhere.


Jan 2024 10:16am

Steven Sinofsky writes about Apple and the DMA in “Building Under Regulation”:

As I read the over 60 pages of the DMA when it was passed…my heart sank over the complexity of a regulation so poorly constructed yet so clearly aimed at specific (American) companies and products.

It’s a long post and Sinofsky has a lot of relevant personal experience here. I’ll likely clip the article and look for some more quotes and take aways.


Jan 2024 10:11am

The Open Web Advocacy group has posted a statement on how Apple is complying with the DMA “Apple’s plan to allow browser competition dubbed unworkable”

Bruce Lawson makes a personal post on “malicious compliance”.


Jan 2024 10:03am

This article “The Negative Impact of Mobile-First Web Design on Desktop” feels like the reverse of what we would have seen 10 years ago, complaining about designs that don’t work on mobile.

The article states that 55% of web traffic comes from mobile. I bet if we measured “human time spent reading content” that mobile would be even higher.

This fits into my death of the professional desktop operating system theme. I think we should consider desktop design to be a luxury, for art and experiences.


Jan 2024 7:53am

We need more tiny knowledge projects

“I used to think of “knowledge projects” as involving a big mission, a big community, and a complex piece of software: the stuff of Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, or Genius (where I worked for several years). But the web is just as good for collaborations in the small.”


Jan 2024 10:04am

Law of VC writes about Simplifying the SAFE (posted in 2021), with his suggestion being “Remove the Valuation Cap and Discount. Replace it with a Conversion Percentage”.


Jan 2024 9:53am

Will Crichton proposes a portable EPUB format to replace PDFs.

If you click through the link, you’ll see that the article is a portable EPUB.


Jan 2024 9:20am

PieFed written in Python and Flask, AGPL-licensed, first class moderation tools. Project goal:

To build a federated discussion and link aggregation platform, similar to Reddit, Lemmy, Mbin.


Jan 2024 12:09am

Delta Chat blogged about their release of chatmail services – email services optimized for powering end-to-end encrypted chat like DeltaChat.

With some knowledge of DNS, SSH and a spare VPS (get the cheapest you can find), you can setup and offer chatmail services yourself pretty quickly. A friend easily recently set it up on a Raspberry Pi for his housing project. Chatmail servers are designed to run with minimal hardware requirements and to be easy to tweak even from novice sysadmins or programmers. No permission is needed from our side to run a chatmail server. We might not even know you are doing it because Delta Chat has no tracking or counting.

Visit the deltachat/chatmail repo for instructions on install and setup.


Jan 2024 11:56pm

webxdc is a specification for embedding apps in chat created by Delta Chat. Shared with me by @fabrice@fosstodon.org.


Jan 2024 11:55pm

Awesome to see Farcaster continuing to experiment with the launch of Frames.

Matches my thoughts on mobile form and social as distribution / discovery.

Farcaster has less usage than my other two protocol recommendations — ATProtocol and ActivityPub — but ability to align login / growth directly with app devs is huge.


Jan 2024 9:39pm

Thanks @christina@social.coop for finding and sharing the term Knowmad, similar to Wildcard. Read Moravec's article and definition "Who are knowmads?".


Jan 2024 12:33pm

Antikythera is "a think tank reorienting planetary computation as a technological, philosophical, and geopolitical force". They have a new working group starting up on Futures of Multipolar Computation. Multidisciplinary researchers are invited to apply.


Jan 2024 9:40am

Brought to my attention by @django@cosocial.ca's post linking to Michael Geist's article on Bill S-210, and that it may apply to the fediverse as well:

the unlimited scope of the Canadian law to sites such as Twitter, Snap, Instagram, Twitch and many others is no accident. If the lead lobby group behind the legislation gets its way, it is the stated goal of Bill S-210 to require all Canadians to undergo an age verification system in order to access content on general purpose sites with the threat of penalties and site blocking awaiting those sites that refuse to comply.


Jan 2024 7:30am

Ton Zijlstra blogs about Europe’s AI act being ready and points out that a lot of new acts got passed:

In 2020 there was no Digital Markets Act, Digital Services Act, AI Regulation, Data Governance Act, Data Act, nor an Open Data Directive/High Value Data implementing regulation.


Jan 2024 10:10pm

Aaron Boodman @aboodman has a thread on fenced communities which I very much agree with and replied to him with a link.

Fenced community is my own term, from Open Source Licensing: restrict access to the scarce resources aka Common Goods of support, maintenance, discussion etc, but keep the code open.


Jan 2024 10:05pm

Luis Villa is writing [Open(~ish) Machine Learning News]https://www.openml.fyi/2024-01-24/) and gives an update on what he’s going to cover:

less news, a turn more for the personal and the polemical: what should I do? What should our organizations and movements do?

I am also going to be watching open / licensing / AI, and work on running my own.


Jan 2024 9:14pm

Great write up by Paul Frazee of “Why isn’t Bluesky a peer-to-peer network?”, going back to his own roots and the “2014 generation of p2p”.1

Bluesky is a sort-of-federated model. Here’s a succinct description:

It might be even more accurate to call this a Cryptographic Data Web. Every user's data repository is, in essence, a website. The aggregating applications are, in essence, search spiders. The Web never quite mastered structured data for a variety of reasons; the AT Protocol embraces it fundamentally. Rather than fetching views from sites, you fetch records from users. Our aggregators produce data indexes rather than search pages.

  1. That’s 10 years ago and I think we’re still in the early days of distributed systems theory and cryptography being more widely known. The third innovation — seeing Bitcoin arise as a novel protocol — is shunned by many. 


Jan 2024 8:39pm

An excellent long read by Rudolf Winestock, “The Eternal Mainframe”. It describes the cloud as a return to shared mainframes, the death of standalone “offline” personal computers.

True standalone personal computers may return to their roots: toys for hobbyists.

Fits my death of the professional desktop operating system hypothesis.


Jan 2024 8:32pm

Tom Szilagyi writes “Ditching GitHub” — moving to self host his git repos, and welcoming email based git patches. This is not the last of these articles we’re going to read.


Jan 2024 8:07pm

Ben Follington on the Subconscious team blogs on his personal site about “using Subconscious to design Subconscious”

So, how do you design feeling-first?

Yes. How does both user and maker take the digital tool into their hands.

A great read while also being highly personal about what Ben is aiming to do and be: “Metacognitive Design”.


Jan 2024 8:14am

The Perplexity AI summary of 'what is OpenStreetMap?' is pretty good. Cites sources and summarizes and synthesizes. I didn't add this to my notes entry for OpenStreetMap directly, but did link the source web pages and quote text from the sources.


Jan 2024 7:58am

Capturing a link to Obsidian Map View Plugin, since it came up in discussion. Open source, uses OpenStreetMap and open map tiles for search and display.

My exploration on Boris Map is mostly for FoodWiki purposes. I use basic tagging for notes pages if I want to capture e.g. that a person entry is in Vancouver.


Jan 2024 4:15pm

The rebooting of social networks, blogs, and newsletters continues.

Spyglass is a link blog, a column, and a newsletter, all written by me, M.G. Siegler.


Jan 2024 2:47pm

Brian Wisti @randomgeek@hackers.town documents using Obsidian + Hugo and a few other things in “Rebuilding My Public Brain”

We’ve been hanging out reading each others’ stuff on the blogosphere for a long time, nice to see what the neighbours are up to.


Jan 2024 8:35pm

Beluga is an iOS app that lets you post microblogs. What’s unique is that it posts to S3-compatible storage, using your own credentials. Bring your own storage!


Jan 2024 9:28am

The Fediverse Report, created and maintained by Laurens Hof @laurenshof@indieweb.social, is doing a great job of sharing news, and also explainers like “How Bluesky works — the network components”.


Jan 2024 9:18am

Viverse, HTC’s metaverse open worlds platform, is going to be ActivityPub-enabled.

Their blog post “The Fediverse Explained: Social Media’s Next Form” is a good overview of fediverse history and apps.


Jan 2024 8:55am

Flaming Hydra is a collective of writers and artists. I’ve just subscribed to support them for the year.

a collective of 60 celebrated writers and artists joining to bring you an ingenious brief cooperatively-owned newsletter with short articles, essays, comics, commentary, and happenings


Jan 2024 8:03am

obsidian-export , “a CLI program and a Rust library to export an Obsidian vault to regular Markdown”

via @randomgeek@hackers.town


Jan 2024 1:06pm

The Lenovo M900 Tiny arrived. It came in a big, long box, which turned out to also contain a full keyboard and mouse, plus lots of packaging around the machine, which is metal, sturdy, and heavy. But very small!

One annoying thing right away is that the specs are different than what I ordered: 8GB RAM instead of 16GB (less), a 1TB drive instead of 500GB (more), and a slightly different CPU.

I’m making notes as I update Windows and then put Ubuntu on it Lenovo m900 Tiny Setup


Jan 2024 3:45pm

Gibberish is now on testflight:

Gibberish is a blogging app that looks and feels like a messaging app. It’s a bit weird, but that’s the point. This UI tricks my brain into writing mode, just like when I write long messages to my friends. Here’s what it looks like:

This is very similar to my thoughts on a Threadstorm Builder


Jan 2024 3:09pm

Just got a $200 credit for Perplexity.ai as an early buyer of Rabbit Tech R1.


Jan 2024 9:18am

From Stack Overflow 2023 Developer Survey, “Matrix is the #1 chat tool by current users' satisfaction”

This is of course a popularity contest, but it’s still useful.

Matches my expectations, eg lots of awareness of Microsoft Teams, people that use it hate it. Discord is desired and loved.

As you go down the list, it’s mostly that people haven’t heard of these tools. Zulip is an outlier — those people I know who use it really love it, and that shows up here.

This section is called “Synchronous tools” and this was the prompt:

Which communication tools did you use regularly over the past year, and which do you want to work with over the next year? Select all that apply

Ok, I guess I’ll need to go dig into the Asynchronous tools next. Everything is asynchronous when you’re a multi time zone community or organization.


Jan 2024 9:29pm

What's IPFS and how it compares to BitTorrent is an article by Daniel Norman correcting and explaining many of the details about IPFS as a response to a blog comparing the two.

It’s really well written. I should quote pieces of it on my IPFS notes page.


Jan 2024 9:26pm

localfirst.fm is a new podcast about local first software development. LoFi as we like to call it.


Jan 2024 9:19pm

Individual initiative, corporate inertia and good bad advice

I did my job with love and belief. This was always obviously risky. I had no illusions that the love was returned, or that it is even possible for a public corporation of non-trivial scale to behave in human ways at all.

I’m quoting the first paragraph. I could post any sentence and it would make you think. It’s a long read about working at Spotify, and being fired, and many other things.


Jan 2024 9:09pm

New Public made a directory of “digital social platforms”:

The Directory is a list of spaces that have taken at least some notable steps to build a public-spirited user experience, embody at least one of New_Public’s Civic Signals, and/or implement creative new design patterns.

I love the words on the directory landing page. Seriously, go read the intro, it’s great.

I am annoyed that the directory listing is a bare listing of Airtable records.

The Landscape maps made in Figma are much more engaging.


Jan 2024 9:04pm

Paul Frazee from the Bluesky team writing on his personal blog about the design of RichText facets that are used to include mentions and links in posts.

And, other custom things that can be defined and read by different clients and servers.


Jan 2024 8:56pm

Will the new judicial ruling in the Vizio lawsuit strengthen the GPL?

The TLDR; is treating the GPL as an issue of contract law rather than copyright, and because of contract law, a third party can sue instead of just the author.

Vizio makes smart TVs that use GPL code and they haven’t shared the source.

In October of 2021 the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) decided to launch what is believed to be the first significant open source lawsuit based in contract rather than in copyright. Critically, the SFC’s case argued that anyone who benefits from the General Public License (GPL), not just the authors of the software, should be able to bring a lawsuit to enforce the terms of the GPL.

Open source and AI related copyright, licensing, and contract arguments all in one year!


Jan 2024 9:16am

I get a lot of unsolicited business emails as the founder of a company. Yes, this is spam, but it’s the sort of cold outreach where it’s just a “regular” email wanting to sell me consulting or some SaaS service.

There are some that get sent from unbranded Gmail accounts (why???). I’m considering an email filter that ignores Gmail accounts unless they’re in my contacts.

Other ideas on reducing the volume of these types of emails?


Jan 2024 8:23am

HatTip, a set of JavaScript packages for building HTTP server applications. The cheeky tagline is “like Express.js, but for the future”.

From the README, “Server code that can be deployed anywhere: AWS, Cloudflare Workers, Fastly, Vercel, VPS”


Jan 2024 11:28pm

I came across a thread by @vkc about doing an experiment of not using big search engines.

She in turn linked to Neil’s blog A week of not using a search engine.

There’s a general rebirth of curated directory sites, and I’m personally interested in community or commons search. I’d much rather get a search result that is in essence a recommendation or at least experience of someone I know.


Jan 2024 11:18pm

Flohmarkt, which means “flea market” in German, is a “federated decentral classified ad software using activitypub” aka Facebook Marketplace clone.

Had this pointed out to me via @blaine, as we were chatting about serving real local / regional needs with Fediverse tools.

Many area have Buy Local and other Facebook Groups and Marketplace where a huge amount of community work gets done.

This isn’t the answer as just a piece of tech, but really looking at what is being used and will need to have similar functionality to really be adopted.


Jan 2024 11:13pm

Bluesky posted their 2023 moderation report. Their moderation system is codenamed Ozone and they plan to open source it, as well as make the moderation backend self hostable.


Jan 2024 3:36pm

Do I want to add Mastodon powered comments to my site? I don't think so. I cross-post to have discussions over on those other systems.


Jan 2024 8:29am

Orbstack for MacOS:

a fast, light, and simple way to run containers and Linux machines on macOS. It's a supercharged alternative to Docker Desktop and WSL, all in one easy-to-use app.

Free for non-commercial usage, $96/year per business user.


Jan 2024 8:24am

The Future is not Docker

The future is not Docker, but containers are.

We started building Depot back in January 2022 to solve our own pain of living with slow Docker image builds in generic CI providers like GitHub Actions, Circle, etc. We were annoyed by having to save/load layer cache over slow networks, the lack of larger managed runners, and having to rely on slow emulation for multi-platform or Arm image builds.


Jan 2024 10:27pm

Fedica has an updated page describing how they handle cross posting RSS feed items. With many more networks at play, teams like Fedica are going to be updating how cross-posting and other aspects work. It's hard to normalize across all these systems!


Jan 2024 8:05am

the web starts to feel a bit like one giant website, that’s so fast it’s just…​ part of your computer.

@duncanlock@cosocial.ca talking about the Dillo Plus browser with user stylesheets.


Jan 2024 10:14pm

Polar.sh is like a Patreon optimized for software creators that use GitHub. Newsletters, subscriptions, and issue-based funding. The platform itself is open source. Business model is 5% of funds transacted.


Jan 2024 9:44am

CasaOS is a home lab management app. Storing & syncing between commercial data clouds — GDrive, Dropbox, etc — is the starting point, also installs apps via Docker containers.


Jan 2024 8:57am

depp, a static page generator for git repositories.

via @aw@merveilles.town, who has an instance running from a home lab.


Jan 2024 2:52pm

Write up by Molly White of her migration from Substack to self-hosted Ghost. She moved to a Digital Ocean droplet and spent the most time configuring DNS and email / Mailgun settings.

I added some notes to my Ghost note.


Jan 2024 7:56am

Check my Facilmap for storing bookmarked places.

I'm taking notes on building Boris Map using Facilmap: a privacy-friendly, open-source versatile online map that combines different services based on #OpenStreetMap

You can self host it. This feels like another good option for Cloudron.


Jan 2024 9:54am

Go read Kharis O'Connell's article, The Glimmer

All this Spatial Computing hype about to start (again!)…I can feel the frenzied frothing-at-the-mouth-need-for-a-gold-rush building in the tech industry. It's probably a good time to repost my Spatial Computing article from last June

#SpatialComputing


Jan 2024 9:23am

Just saw that Meetup was acquired by Bending Spoons. This is the same company that acquired Evernote.

For me, Meetup is the epitome of platform capture. I won't use it for anything I organize. Luma is what I use, but just for RSVP / attendance, and I can export email as needed.


Jan 2024 9:32am

Stats from Appfigures show Flutter as #2 SDK on Android / Google Play, and #4 on Apple App Store.


Jan 2024 9:42pm

Welcome to the year of tiny hardware experiments. Just bought a refurb Lenovo M900 Tiny for $179CAD.

Lenovo ThinkCentre M900 Tiny Desktop with a Pencil in front


Jan 2024 2:39pm

Rally is open source, self-hostable "pick a date or time to meet" software.

I've created a note page for it locally with some more details, like their suggested social obligation to pay the equivalent of one year managed hosting if you host it yourself.

#CloudronApp #selfhosting #CommonsFunding #AGPL


Jan 2024 1:59pm

Just launched at CES, the Rabbit Tech r1, "your pocket companion". A $199USD hardware device with screen, camera, analog scroll, push-to-talk mic, usb-c, sim card.

Rabbit.Tech r1 pocket companion

I pre-ordered and put together a Rabbit Tech notes page.


Jan 2024 8:05am

I'd like to see web hosting look much more like installing an app on an iPhone.

This is at the end of Ben Werdmuller’s response to Giles Turnbull’s Let’s make the IndieWeb easier.

I couldn’t agree more. This is part of the deep dive I’ve been doing on Cloudron and similar Bring Your Own Server management systems.

More generally, I’ve been concerned with the practices of open source software builders. There is very little Design for Deployment that makes it easier for less technical users to self host.

I think open app stack packaging formats like Buildpacks is a good direction.


Jan 2024 9:54pm

tally is a funky looking modern commercial SaaS form builder.

I’ve been experimenting with NocoDB, an open source Airtable alternative that supports forms, and is installable on Cloudron.


Jan 2024 9:48pm

Papermark is an open source Docsend alternative. Hadn’t realized Docsend is now part of Dropbox. GitHub optimized for deploying on Vercel is here https://github.com/mfts/papermark


Jan 2024 2:41pm

Linear App: Settings are not a design failure

thinking goes that as designers, our goal is to create product experiences that don’t require any adjustments by the user. Consequently, offering customization options is interpreted as a failure to make firm product decisions. … First of all, remind yourself that users love settings.


Jan 2024 10:19am

I have continued my Jekyll Liquid crimes by using replace to make all the images and notes full links. Journal RSS feed code on Github


Jan 2024 7:53am

Andy Wingo, Missing the point of WebAssembly and offers his own starting point:

WebAssembly is a new fundamental abstraction boundary. WebAssembly is a new way of dividing computing systems into pieces and of composing systems from parts.

Wingo is a compiler engineer working at Igalia, on Mastodon at @wingo@mastodon.social.


Jan 2024 10:06pm

BackYourStack is a project started by Open Collective which can scan your code dependencies and show which of them have Open Collective accounts.

All of the code of both projects are open source.


Jan 2024 10:29am

Coolify is another self-hosting server management system (via @depatchedmode).

They offer cloud hosting of the admin panel starting at $5/month, which then manages your other servers for deployment to.


Jan 2024 10:18am

Linux Desktop on your Android Device at Android Authority covers Debian NoRoot and UserLAnd (Ubuntu and other distros possible).


Jan 2024 9:59am

The average estimated date for when AI could beat humans at every possible task shifted dramatically, moving from 2060 to 2047—a decrease of 13 years—in just the past year alone!

Ethan Mollick, Signs and Portents


Jan 2024 9:37am

As I think about what subscribing / following / integrating other people’s notes looks like, I found this example from Rui Carmo’s Tao of Mac.

It says “This wiki page is a stub”. It’s also integrated into his main feed.

Tao of Mac Screenshot wiki stub


Jan 2024 9:01am

I use Littlefoot to make inline footnotes1. Turns out NetNewsWire includes similar functionality.

  1. Footnote demo 


Jan 2024 11:44pm

ZEISS is launching smart glass at CES and talks about holographic displays and switches. And apparently a transparent camera aka “holocam”


Jan 2024 1:22pm

With so many different networks and accounts and crossposting, I find myself thinking about rebooting Moa Party. I’d actively run it as a collective of some kind.


Jan 2024 8:42am

I’m going to be talking more about Noosphere, so I better get its note page here setup.

I’m an early beta user of the Subconscious iOS app that uses Noosphere as its backend.


Jan 2024 9:17pm

Your online persona federated Have your domain name be followable by anyone on the Fediverse, be it Mastodon, Firefish, Akkoma, or any other federated social media platform.

Get Federated is new thing by Sal Rahman @manlycoffee@techhub.social - sign up to get notified!


Jan 2024 9:14pm

There are no ushers on Mastodon. There's no one paid to show you to your seat, no one whose job it is to ease you into comfort and remove friction.

There are no ushers on Mastodon by Les Orchard from back in November 2022.


Jan 2024 8:39pm

I’ve been recommending UniFi routers for a while. Turns out there’s a new UniFi Dream Router that’s $266CAD and is the replacement for the $400CAD UniFi Dream Machine . Recommended!


Jan 2024 4:21pm

Everyone loves a notes graph! Shout out to the Digital Garden Jekyll Template once more.

It turns out that I had previously done an experimental import of LogSeq into this site template. I probably even have some notes somewhere.

Screenshot of all my LogSeq notes in the Digital Garden Jekyll Template


Jan 2024 2:32pm

TLDraw has changed its license to non-commercial. The founder Steve Ruizok dropped a note in the Cloudron forums saying that Cloudron may not be in compliance. I left a comment, as there are a number of apps with different licenses, and e.g. me running TLDraw on Commons Computer is not running it commercially.


Jan 2024 7:40am

Jake Lazaroff argues that “website vs. web app dichotomy doesn’t exist”. It’s a good article, develops a framework for thinking about different types of web properties. Mentions LoFi, CRDT.

But to me, it does show a clear split of document web vs app web.


Jan 2024 12:42am

OK, one more quick hack to the Journal feed.

Relative paths for images are a problem. Maybe they actually aren't for many modern feed readers. But they ARE if I want Micro.blog to crosspost correctly.

Found this hack to use the Liquid replace filter to look for src tags and then add in the full path to your site.

I'll test it tomorrow by posting an image. Time for bed!


Jan 2024 11:01pm

Added the journal feed in the link header of all pages so it can be auto-discovered.

Pleasantly surprised to be digging into the IPFS _redirects spec. I guess I can just point to my old archive! /archive/* https://2023.bmannconsulting.com/archive/* 301

Made a BMC page where some TO DO stuff will live.

How many times have I ended up using this JSON Feed#Jekyll JSON Feed Templates? Many times! The special treatment for link front matter has me thinking.

Decided to not mess with feed format right now. It's working, let's use it for a bit, and see how various things look once they cross-post through Micro.blog to Mastodon. Where it's actually putting content on my under-used @boris@toolsforthought.social account.

Added a Journal layout template.

  • Removed LogSeq note site links
  • Added tag display from blog posts layout, which links to /notes/tag (but can't tell if it exists or not, so might 404)
  • Added via link to the sidebar
  • Used Link as the title if it exists

And I guess this will be a test of what large journal cross-posts do!

Update

Got Redirects working correctly! So https://bmannconsulting.com/blog/2021/02/13/drop-in-audio/ should redirect to https://2023.bmannconsulting.com/blog/2021/02/13/drop-in-audio/ (same theme, so won't even look that different).

And cross posting of large posts works just fine, with a link back to the post. Nice!


Jan 2024 1:27pm

Building SLCs - Simple, Lovable, Complete - features, rather than MVPs. Pronounced “Slick”.

Your customers hate MVPs. Make a SLC instead


Jan 2024 12:57pm

Trimming NetNewsWire RSS subscriptions and ironically found RSS Parrot - “Turn Mastodon into your feed reader”.

Reminds me of Darius’ RSS to ActivityPub Converter, which I want to look into deploying as a CoSocial service.


Jan 2024 10:40pm

One more journal post! Micro.blog lets you add multiple feeds, and you can set custom cross posting for each feed.

This means I have connected the Journal feed up to my @boris@toolsforthought.social account.

Screenshot of Feed + Crossposting in Micro.blog


Jan 2024 6:59pm

Ok, final post of the day now that I’ve learned about Obsidian nuances with Daily notes vs Unique note creator.

I do want to open up a Daily note when I open. But, I want to just use the same format as the Unique note creator so all the files have the same format.

As it turns out, because I made unique page names with a timestamp, the daily journal button effectively becomes a new unique note creator!

The Liquid template for the Journal page then loops through and groups all the posts by day, so you can read them all together, but with permalinks for each one. You can see it in action on the Journal page.

I think it looks pretty good! Maybe even interesting enough to put on the home page?


Jan 2024 5:09pm

Hosting capacity as a measure of agency

Hosting capacity as a measure of agency

I drew this diagram to illustrate a lot of related insights about agency, hosting, community-building, collaborative leadership & social change

you can use this map to self-evaluate your level of agency: where are you currently? what group experiences do you feel comfortable to host? what feels very doable? what would feel like a tolerable stretch? what would be overwhelming even to attempt?

via Richard D. Bartlett @RichDecibels


Jan 2024 2:51pm

Oh right. Obsidian uses moment.js formatting, and Liquid's date filter' uses strftime. And strftime isn't going to give me pretty 1st days as far as I can see.


Jan 2024 2:41pm

Co-op Cloud came up in discussion at CoSocial today. I'm porting in their Co-op Cloud Alternatives too.


Jan 2024 2:20pm

I set up Working Copy so I can use Obsidian on my phone with git syncing / publishing. I always forget the order of steps.

  1. Make Obsidian vault on mobile
  2. In Working Copy, clone the git repo
  3. Looking at the repo in Working Copy, click on Repository / Status and Configuration
  4. Click on the disclosure arrow for the repo title, select Link Repository to and select Directory

This "day" should have two other entries, with YYYY-MM-DD_HHmm titles.


Jan 2024 6:35am

I seem to keep having trouble finding Boris Anthony’s libra.re web eBook project. Now I have it.


Jan 2024 6:34am

I point people at Robert Merki’s Wildcard definition often enough I should have an entry here.


Dec 2023 3:11am

Using Obsidian to edit my Jekyll-based site. I want to add journals back in, and maybe move to Eleventy, and maybe add IndieKit.

What are the latest Micropub Client apps?