Daily Journal 📓

• Got the pop up on requesting to run it

As usual, we aren’t thinking weird enough—both about what’s possible, and about what might go wrong.

• We worry about someone using AI to write a book, rather than whether we’ll still read books.
• We worry about AI writing term papers, rather than whether schools will become obsolete.

Riffing on the Primer from Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age

• Talking about search on Mastodon and having flashbacks to when I was the designer for Technorati. There was a beautiful moment there where blogs weren’t indexed by Google and we were building a truly community-centric product, with tag pages and a blog directory and plans for way more. And it all got eaten when Google started indexing blogs. Another moment the fediverse should probably learn from.

  https://xoxo.zone/@fraying/109592997166940512

• The production model of Mastodon also has consequences for its governance. GitHub statistics show that @Gargron has single-handedly produced and committed at least 80% of Mastodon’s code. But more importantly, as the lead maintainer of the code, Rochko makes all the decisions.

• Better participatory governance is therefore the big challenge ahead of Mastodon, and the Fediverse space more generally. Web3 is usually detested by open source developers, and this negative vibe is also strong on Mastodon. Yet it is in the progressive margins of the Web3 space that debates on governance models take place. Successful governance experiments, conducted for example around the Gitcoin protocol, or the theoretical work of the Metagov project, should be examined and applied to the Fediverse.

• The challenge with governance is that it requires collective action – unlike coding, which can successfully be done, on behalf of millions, by a single coder.

• Launch a participatory project
  • to define a shared mission for building the digital public space on the basis of the Fediverse.
• Secure greater involvement of public institutions
  • Dan Hon proposed for organizations to set up their own Mastodon instances and serve as verified, public interest driven, trusted nodes in the network.
• Build a stronger social and institutional layer

• {{embed Hometown/Character Limit}}

• {{embed ((63ae8744-1f74-4d63-a45f-d5c6caedf43f))}}
• This is a block embed…describing Page Embeds

• It is, sadly, a child of the W3C era, and thus relies entirely too much on lobbing chunks of JSON to and fro via HTTP to various endpoints you discover along the way instead of (say) using persistent connections, binary payloads and a topic structure (but I’m biased here).

• The most promising alternative server for me is Takahē, which I’ve already written about and intend to contribute to. Its core design avoids most of the problems with scaling ActivityPub], it has a solid foundation and (although it depends too much on PostgreSQL) it feels like the logical choice for easy to maintain, small-to-mid instances.

• Points at Pleroma fork Rebased for solid server to run
• Soapbox as a separate front end
  • Announcement of Soapbox 3.0 Release has lots of details

• nothing for #mobile
• #Dat Protocol #Hypercore sites didn’t work in regular browsers
• Couldn’t sync state between multiple devices

I always knew were were trying to steer the Web as outsiders, but what I didn’t expect was how fundamentally hard it is to tweak how the Web works.

The entrepreneurs reading this may recognize a common failure pattern here: we got to a really great demo fast, and then hit a cliff that we couldn’t surmount. Rather than taking the L and re-evaluating, I slammed my head into the cliff hoping I could break through via force of will, but the tech just wasn’t there, and the product wasn’t either.

As decentralizers we may be pursuing a mission, but our work only wins in the market, and to win in the market we need to think like entrepreneurs. Ultimately, my lesson learned is that mission needs PMF.

Don’t get too precious about the Web. It’s a wonderful open platform, but it’s settled into its purpose. Look for opportunities to create new open platforms that fit the moment.

• Not really! But it was fun to see that the site still exists and is all the way up to CSS3 tutorials

“no maintainer is better than an adversarial maintainer!” — just handing the reins of even a single software package that has north of 13k unique clones a week (mux) is just not something I’d ever be comfortable with.

I’ve written something like six or seven personal wikis over the past decade. It’s actually an incredibly advanced form of procrastination

Call it the Great Ravine.  Many companies will not cross the chasm.  But the ones that do will form the bedrock of future AI applications and a new stack that most AI driven businesses use by default.

Think of it as the LAMP stack for AI.

• I’m so tired of just harmlessly getting together with other weird geeks and going to what amounts to a digital pub after work and waking up one day to find every pint poisoned.

• Twitter is and was the home to so many small artists who clawed their way to an audience, who had the opportunity to be seen by the world without the intermediary of already-established success. It was precious and vital to making a living from art, and not just art but activism and craft industries and intellectual output that so many think should never make anyone’s living. And those people are going to lose so much because Elon Musk needed to drink from the attention fire hose. Those people are going to lose their audience and their opportunities, all for him. I’m going to lose so much. You have to be very famous to be safe from the effects of your biggest microphone being crammed up a rich white man’s ass and set to reverb. I am certainly not. Few of us are.

• Did a search and found a page on Obsidian.rocks that collects reasons why it’s not open source

• Pkg defines ed25519, ed448, secp256k1, P384, P521, bls12-381, bn254, pasta, stark curves.
• Edwards, Weierstrass, Montgomery primitives, hash2curve & pairings are also in.
• https://github.com/paulmillr/noble-curves

• Supply chain security: no dependencies, or minimal dependency on a package from 1 author. If you use something like elliptic, you’re exposing yourself to rogue dep updates

• JS, not WASM: js can be audited easily, wasm cannot. You may be executing malware when using wasm lib

• Auditability, readability: much easier to read code based on native bigints, instead of something like bn.js

• Correctness: thorough testing with wycheproof, and others

• Vietnamese food recommendations from a recent meal at Do Chay #foodwiki
• Specifically Banh Xeo Crepe

• Members -> Apps -> Updates, where Updates from apps are available to all users
• Maybe take Ghost content and put it in GitHub so people can make updates, push back into Ghost?
• Sort of Headless CMS
• Fission site works this way, Ghost as editing interface, then Eleventy for pulling content via API and publishing static site
• Working with Eleventy on the #Ghost site
  • Eleventy Starter Ghost

• No more Heroku
• Talked a bit about beyond Docker / LAMP stack apps to 12 Factor App
• Lots of n8n for automation
• Cloudron
  • Pays for annual Cloudron license
  • Uses it for one click apps - Ghost installs, a URL redirect, etc
  • Not really using it for custom apps
• CapRover
  • It isn’t really multi user at all
  • Single admin user / pass
  • Uses it for all his NodeJS apps
  • $10/month server
• Render
  • Free static apps
  • Paying for one dyno
• Boris’ phrase: self hosting is selfish
• Boris is running PhotoPrism https://photos.bmannconsulting.com
  • like a self-hosted Google Photos
  • Runs on Digital Ocean but needs a pretty hefty server, like $20/month
  • Just barely getting multi users
  • I would like to share this with at least 4 people -> $5/month
  • Plus at least one other person with server access, knowing how to upgrade / maintain the software
• Can we share Cloudron?
  • Saves money by sharing price of a subscription
  • Shared server costs - but will also need a slightly larger server
  • Sharing admin / updates
  • Comingling and interdependence: what if stuff Boris runs takes down the server? What if what Rosano runs takes it down?

• Boris looking at this as Heroku successor
• They use Nixpacks instead of Buildpacks

So I’m still converting the content to Markdown, but with nearly 9000 posts and Wiki pages here, it may take a while yet. I’m not in a hurry.

• But it’s not personal in the sense that I keep it to tech / business topics
• My Micro.blog site https://blog.bmannconsulting.com has photos and food and stuff
• But! Because I don’t have a good blogging workflow, it has some articles there that would make more sense here, like this one
• Plus #foodwiki as the other space I have that is my personal log

• Our vision continues to be a world where all groups can access the funding they need to do their work, regardless of their institutional status. Our role is to provide administrative, legal, and financial tooling for unincorporated groups to raise funds. https://twitter.com/piamancini/status/1606315241343619073

• The Horizons Dashboard lets you explore $88MUSD raised since 2016, with $43MUSD of that in 2022 https://discover.opencollective.com
• Open source and mutual aid as the top two categories of collectives

To be honest, I don’t know what my relationship with the internet will look like after the heat death of the fowl place. For now I’m just gonna focus on this here website, but this new timeline feels like an okay place to lurk in the short term. https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/moving-timelines/

If technology growth is likely to double every 100 years the speed at which this journey could be made, then, using equation –1, it would seem that a voyager need only wait 690 years or so to make the journey in 100 years or less (i.e. at a speed of 6/100 speed of light). In other words, the star could be reached in well under a thousand years from now simply by waiting. Total time to destination is 690 years of wait + 100 years of travel = 790 years.

• I think of the early days of ML.
• The first releases of #TensorFlow were incredibly hard to use and put into production. Early adopters spent 6 months just getting things working.
• Then, Google dumped an update out in public and it now took weeks or days to get started
• The people who spent 6 months struggling, expending effort vs all of the resources of Google wasted a lot of their effort — and would likely have been better off just waiting
• b5 and the Qri team also paid this cost on the early days of the #IPFS protocol and network

in a recent chat with the Verge, Steam Deck designer Pierre-Loup Griffais mentioned that the company is paying over a hundred open-source devs to work on the various bits of software that keep the Steam Deck ticking. Valve has them working on stuff like Steam for ChromeOS and Linux, too

Griffais said Valve’s corralling of open-source devs is part of “a larger strategy to coordinate all these projects and set up kind of an overall architecture” for gaming on Linux. That is to say, Valve is using its technical and financial clout to herd the cats of open-source development in a single direction, in order to get Linux functioning as a viable alternative to Windows for PC gaming.

• LATER Get #Indie Kit running on Railway
• I need the #Fission append endpoint for image uploads…

I’m strangely happy this is finally possible. Like I wrote two months ago, I’ve been waiting for this for twelve years, and am quite giddy it’s finally real, even if it’s clearly a 1.0 feature. So thanks, Apple.

In 2022, game engines sit at the centre of a key ideological and economic battleground and the two most popular game engine companies face uncertain futures. What is the alternative?

Dan Romero is the co-founder of Farcaster, the decentralized social network that many in crypto are turning to as a Twitter alternative. Jess and Dan explore what it means to be a decentralized social network in 2022, the critical differences between stewarding an open protocol and a client, the transition from users to customers, and how to build for revealed preference vs. stated preference