Daily Journal 📓

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.

webxdc is a specification for embedding apps in chat created by Delta Chat. Shared with me by @[email protected].

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 — atproto and ActivityPub — but ability to align login / growth directly with app devs is huge.

Thanks @[email protected] for finding and sharing the term Knowmad, similar to Wildcard. Read Moravec’s article and definition “Who are knowmads?”.

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.

Brought to my attention by @[email protected]’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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Footnotes

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. ↩

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.

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.

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”.

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.

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.

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.

Brian Wisti @[email protected] 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.

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!

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

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.