Daily Journal 📓 January 2021

Short dated entries, links, and microblog-style notes.

Jan 202112:00am
  • I would apologize for some of the jargon in this, but in fact that is partially the point of this post.
  • I am writing up notes from a discussion with @Flancian. We have been “chatting” on Twitter and Mastodon about various topics, and ended up booking a time to speak in person last Wednesday, January 20th, 2021.
  • Very quickly on the call it was clear we were “pushing” context into each others brains so that we could get to deeper topics and explore shared areas of interest.
  • Querying things like “have you heard of X?” If not, quick context as well as key terms to note and search for later. If yes, then anchor that context and go deeper.
  • One of the specific areas we talked about and were exploring together is Digital Gardens, Second Brains, and, as @Flancian calls them, Agoras. His specific implementation is Anagora.
  • With Fission, we have interest from a number of different people and software apps that want to have user owned files and notes, as well as thinking about how to link them together between people.
  • @Flancian has written a Python server and is interested in connecting Agora at the level of a git repo filled with Markdown files.
  • I had mentioned to him that I was interested in experimenting with this site, but after all the recent tinkering I had done, I had kept the git repo private and closed. To prep for the call, it was a good excuse to bring the repo for this site public. It is available at https://github.com/bmann/bmcgarden. Actually connecting it into the Agora will be documented in the future.1
  • Will connecting second brains at the Markdown layer work?
    • My site is “a bunch of Markdown files in a git repo” as its “source code”, but it gets processed by Jekyll, and actually by the double bracket backlink and other features of the Simply Jekyll theme.
    • In fact, the completely normal Jekyll behaviour of specifying what the resulting web permalinks look like from source Markdown files is completely custom per site.
    • I already know that some of the syntax of Simply Jekyll is going to be problematic for portability. I like the side notes and margin notes features, but they are totally custom.
    • I have a note to move many of them to regular Markdown footnotes, and then add BigfootJS to have a nicer display. Knowing myself, I will want to switch around the theme and engine behind this site in the future, so using more standard “source code” is important.
    • I’ve said before a couple of times now that if the various note taking initiatives / engines / apps want to interlink, there are going to need to be some conventions or specifications or something.
    • I stopped using LogSeq in part because of their Markdown formatting.2 which isn’t compatible with regular posts in any other system.
    • How is the extended Note-verse going to come to some consensus? How do we layer backlinks or other supersets of Markdown for note-specific purposes together? And, to do this at a text-only layer, which in turn has to work with a build process and/or live hosting software, desktop software, and display layers across multiple different programming languages and software architectures.
    • At the very least, we need a protocol or standard at some layer, and a way for these disparate groups to form consensus.
    • Related: I wrote about a vNotes Format some time ago, but that is in fact at another “layer” — more of a wrapper or sync format.
  • Connecting over the Internet
    • We can, of course, also connect over the Internet. Mostly, I mean linking to other pages, but there are some other protocols and standards that may prove useful or be the base layer on which backlinks or extended references could be built.
    • The Web Annotation Standard and Webmention are two that I have in mind.
    • ActivityPub and having someone’s agora participate directly in the Fediverse is interesting.
    • We ended up talking about convention of being able to do double brackets anywhere one can put text, like on Twitter or Mastodon, which could then be processed and sucked back into an agora. No spec, no permission, just a convention that starts being used, which is exactly how @ChrisMessina invented the hashtag.
    • Somewhere in here is the concept I was introduced to by @agentofuser, which is.
    • Micropub is another standard that I see being adopted and working relatively well. When it makes it into mobile / desktop apps like iA Writer, that’s a good sign.
  • On Biases
    • Flancian is an SRE at Google. Many Google only tools from software stack to hosting.
    • What’s the simplest that will work without having to dive into more learning?
    • For me, I have a bias towards Heroku3 and 12 Factor App. Both as a way of architecting, but also on how to host to maximize user agency.
    • Making things explicit can help people and communities find connections as well as understanding.
    • Specifically, three things:
      • Goals
      • Values
      • Biases
  • On Social Networks and Community
    • I mentioned the Orbit Model of looking at community engagement.
    • Both of us have found the Loomio style community management / engagement in Social Coop to be hard to get started with / put time into.
    • Flancian sees the agora as an integration hub. For Fission, we’re using the label constellation provider. Some equivalencies?
    • Can a social network do more to connect people and have them learn from each other? Similar as the Viznut Eternal September post: social networks beyond consumption or entertainment.
    • If you take two people and most of their opinions are the same, can we dig down into the areas where they are different in a way to learn why they differ? Understanding and learning.
    • I mentioned chicken fingers vs. tentacles: you have to understand the preferences and biases of another person if you hope to give them useful recommendations, because your recommendations are based on YOUR preferences.
    • An agora is a tool for building context.
    • New wording. A Stoa is shared context with explicit overlap defined by its members.
    • A data structure and a social graph that is designed toward problem solving.
    • I introduced the concept of a Squad: a collection of people with a set of skills coming together to jointly work on some tasks or goals.
    • Lightbulb moment: we are in a Stoa together — we have overlapping interests and context. The next step is to form a Squad initially of the two of us, aimed at some tasks / goals.
  • Goals
    • What goals can we work on?
      • Cross post between social networks
        • Use Flancian’s agora as an integration hub, leaning into the server aspects. Like Social.Coop, form a Stoa around it to meet common goals.
        • Moa Party is what Flancian currently uses to sync between Twitter and Mastodon. It has an Instagram API, which currently isn’t working.
        • Create an Open Collective to see if we can pool funds to pay someone to enable the Instagram API again, so we can cross post our photos into that social network.
        • Make some blog posts, announce the idea, get in touch with moa.party maintainers, see who else is interested in joining this Squad.
      • Agora Interlinks from Social Posts
        • We’re already experimenting with Twitter / Mastodon double bracket linking.
        • Can we use the agora integration hub to do more of this?
        • What tools do we need to do to ingest these posts into agoras?
        • Also need to explore common patterns and conventions. How do we inter-work with e.g. hashtags?
      • Experiment with linked agoras
      • As mentioned above, Boris’ garden is now a public git repo.
      • What to do next? How do we connect?
      • Make a call for other git repo based agoras to link.
  • Other Ideas & Resources
    • I used to run my own Micropub server. IndieKit is the one I recommend.
    • Making it easier for other people to run their own agora should be a goal. I created a Simply Jekyll Template repo on Github, and hooked it up to Forestry and published it to Netlify.
    • Add agora features? Add instructions on how to link into Anagora, and make the template linked in “by default”, or at least following some simple steps.

Footnotes

  1. I’ve added a TODO to the Colophon, and Connecting to the Agora is where I will document the process. ↩

  2. LogSeq has bullet lists that visually look like Roam Research or other outline-primary systems. The text that is created uses hashtags (which are used for headings in regular Markdown) for each level of outliner, which just looks like a page full of headings when attempted to publish using a regular Markdown renderer. ↩

  3. See my extensive tagging of Deploy to Heroku ↩

Jan 202112:00am
  • I’ve been blogging a lot lately. Daily posts about doing a walk outside. Basically “Instagram-style” photo posts with a few words.
    • Having Mb with Gluon on my phone and it “just works” is nice. I can write something short, or just keep typing and it ends up as a blog post, all written and posted direct from my phone, like this post about @kemitchell’s StrictEq project. Yes, it’s being renamed, head over to the Artless Devices Forum for longer discussion.
    • Longer posts like this music one were done sitting at my desktop, composed and posted with Mars Edit. This is good for short posts, too, like documenting some tide / calendar research I did for my mom. A side effect of spending lots of time WFH — having default desktop app tools.
    • I’ve turned on cross posting to Mastodon and Twitter automatically. People seem to enjoy my more “social” posts on Twitter, which is great. And I definitely reach different people on Mastodon, in a nice way.
    • Using the StrictEq post as an example again, yeah, I hate the “title”:

      • “The code you depend on depends on you” @kemitchell’s commercial license sales for public software

    • But I have to craft it knowing that it will get cross-posted to Twitter and to Mastodon. I guess that’s another wishlist item for Micro.blog: for non-micro-blog posts that have a title, allow for a “cross posting excerpt”.
    • Otherwise, your only other option is to:
        1. turn off cross-posting for the initial publish of the blog post and then
        1. make a micro blog length post that links to your blog post.
    • Hmm. Now that I think about it, that’s actually not bad, but I’ve found toggling cross posting to be really confusing. I need to experiment with the Mb mobile app and run some experiments to see if I can figure it out, the UI is just not good for this.
  • With Trump being kicked off Twitter, the discussion about Parler being kicked off AWS, there’s lots of discussion about federated and censorship proof social networks.
    • RTd @QuinnyPig who has a good thread on AWS terms of service, and other cloud providers more broadly. Aimed at explaining even to non-technical people, a good one to share.
  • I got drawn into a long thread kicked off by Stefan George of Gnosis, who wanted to post a bounty to save/store Twitter stuff to IPFS. I pointed out that Twitter archives already exist.
  • From there I got into a whole back and forth, including people suggesting that Twitter data should be mass exfiltrated to setup an alt social network. Maybe at one point I would have reached for a purely technical solution like this, but here’s my final take:

  • Technical tricks to try extract Twitter data is probably orders of magnitude harder than …just doing the work in building out critical mass communities.

    The difference between the two approaches? One is technical challenges, the other is marketing and community building. @bmann

  • I am… somewhat distraught that a lot of decentral type people think about this issue as censorship, rather than the “let’s deplatform fascists issue” that it actually is. Twitter is in no way a public utility. Own your “distribution” — whether it’s direct mailing list subscriptions or your own community social network: run your own Discourse or Mastodon server. Twitter is today’s mass media: use it for distribution, but know that you’re there at the company’s sufferance.
  • And of course, when I see lots of crypto people happily using Medium and Substack, I’m not going to take the rest of their opinions seriously. Your words need to get backed up by actions, my dudes.
  • Jeff Henshaw popped back up on Mastodon — and he’s hosting his own Mastodon server. He was asking me why I’m on Mastodon, here’s my answer:

  • the concept of collective ownership / maintenance.

    Nothing wrong with “multi user” systems, but we have to clearly understand that it costs people time and some server resources to run things.

    I’m working on a model of awareness that people should pay for apps — that behind that app are real people, not just corporations.

    “Exit to community” is a related theme. Plus governance, etc etc @[email protected]

  • Yes, I’m posting my own content back to my own site. Which means it becomes part of my forever content, and also I can link to and include it in search.
  • I guess I should document my BMC/Twitter Archive, which lives at https://tweets.bmannconsulting.com/. In a week or so, when Fission has Github/Actions support, I can start publishing this to IPFS directly, instead of hosting it on Github Pages. Doing this direct from Google Sheets to Fission would be ideal, as a little one off Twitter Archive app.
  • It was really easy to setup. Michael Hawksey’s @mhawksey post explains it all: Keeping your Twitter Archive fresh and freely hosted on Github Pages.
  • I just emailed Michael to see if I can send him some thank you money, or donate to some project on his behalf.
  • Doing some work on the Marfa Theme for my Micro.blog site. Running Hugo locally is really fast! I still have about 200 orphaned posts that I’d like to import into Mb at some point, which I use for testing, and with Hugo it’s pretty instantaneous.
    • I’m stuck in the dark with Hugo a little bit, as I can’t prototype locally because how to structure this for Mb isn’t really documented. I guess I’ll file another issue in the help documentation, as the only public place you can kind of file this stuff. I really wish Manton Reece would just open source the whole thing or more properly make it non-commercial / source available.
Jan 202112:00am
  • And this is from 2 years ago