Daily Journal 📓

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

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


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.


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


“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.


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.


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.


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!


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.


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!


“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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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


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 😅


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


I created the /management channel on Warpcast, goaded on by VGR.


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.

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


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.