Daily Journal 📓

I’ve been using Grist, an open source and self hostable Airtable replacement, and excitedly telling people about it. They’re hosting a summit in Paris in early December, where I also found out about the French government’s La Suite, a government collaboration platform.

Had a catch up call with Tarun from Gitwallet. The platform has been iterating to serve developers doing open source consulting. A new thing they’re experimenting with is Echo: an software ecosystem explorer. Very cool!

The future is interfaces: @piratesoftware.live shared a short video of doing demos at a public conference with keyboard + mouse and with a game controller. The punchline of what kids gravitated towards is a good one.

Subvert is launching today: you can become a co-op founding member for $100USD by buying the zine “Plan for the Artist-Owned Internet”, or for free as a founding musician or label. I’ve joined, love to see more projects like this.

Had an inspiring call with the ZKorum team this morning. They’re trying on some new taglines, including “building citizen networks rather than social networks”

End of an era. I futzed around and switched my blog publishing back to Github Pages, after 4 years publishing to IPFS via Fission, according to the Colophon. My next protocol adventures are going to have more atproto.

Frontpage is a link aggregator (think Hacker News) defined as a new Lexicon data type on atproto. It’s out of invite only access, and you can use your existing account to login.

iA Writer is cancelling their Android app because it seems impossible to comply with Google Drive connection rules.

I see so clearly that we need a user-owned file sync protocol.

Jesse Rodgers, who is helping run Startup Barn in Waterloo, makes a pitch for getting back to basics with the term Startup — just build:

“Startups, at their core, come from people creating something of value for others. They are born from the act of building, not from the rituals of the startup religions or the blessings of the Venture Capitalists.”

The Bluesky team put together a simple Hello World app to showcase atproto called Statusphere.

It showcases custom data types (Lexicons) as well as OAuth, and runs locally.

Wired article on Apple Intelligence and Private Cloud Compute: Apple Intelligence Promises Better AI Privacy. Here’s How It Actually Works

Brad Neuburg on Y Combinator “YC model doesn’t work for (deep tech) startups, and is focused on the last tech war”.

This is the same for all these accelerator programs. See When Tailwinds Vanish for more.

John from Ascent is in Vancouver this week, holding office hours at Z-Space. If you’re building a startup, especially company formation or raising, come through and meet with him.

Ventoy is an open source tool to create bootable USB drives.

via alice

Blaine told me he built Slocan Helps as a front end on top of Grist after my recommendation and it worked out well.

I’m looking for other cool Grist projects — got any to share?

I use Obsidian as an editor for my website, and git for sync between devices & publishing.

On my Daylight Computer which runs Android, I haven’t managed to get git setup.

What Obsidian plugins should I look at to do my own sync?

Automattic is planning to migrate 500M+ Tumblr blogs to WordPress, with the nuance that the front end shouldn’t change (and they’re looking to hire)

We’re talking about running Tumblr’s backend on WordPress. You won’t even notice a difference from the outside.

I put together a new site ATProtocol Dev where I’m going to be hosting tech talks and resources about open social protocols.

My first set of talks will look at emerging Proto Apps that go beyond microblogging.

The FeathersJS team wrote up a trip report of their DWeb Camp experience, as well as David’s presentation at the Causal Islands Tiny Talks in SF.

Signed up for Spaceship, a new domain registrar that is in fact Namecheap, but starting over with a new brand and new codebase.