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.
Daily Journal 📓
Short dated entries, links, and microblog-style notes.
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.”
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.
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.
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
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.
The Tangara Music Player campaign opened on Crowd Supply today. Yep, I ordered.
I care more about apps, protocols, and files than operating systems.
But plumbing and sewers are important.
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.
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.
Oxide Computer has released Helios, a distribution of illumos that powers their Oxide Rack computer.
Garage “An open-source distributed object storage service tailored for self-hosting”. S3-compatible API, single Rust binary that is installable everywhere.
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.
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”.
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.
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.”
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”.
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.
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.