Audio for morning commutes:
Thanks to the open web, it’s more viable than ever for creators to take back ownership and control of their work, their audience, and their livelihood. No one knows this better than Molly White, a researcher, writer and software engineer. This episode was recorded live at SXSW 2025.
Still a bit more than halfway through it, listening on, it's safe to say I enjoy this one also because I agree with a lot of her points, but some things still leave me slightly unsettled. Maybe three issues for now: At first, "we are all content creators" with every piece of stuff we post anywhere on the 'net. Really? There's a reoccurring quote out there I end up with then and now which is more or less like "we tell stories to join the conversation", and in many ways I can relate with this much more. Never seen myself as a content creator, let alone publisher of anything valuable out there - just a mere nerd writing stuff on the interweb to maybe get into this or another conversation. Focussing on ones own role of a content creator, of trying to keep followers and an audience, despite all my agreeing with the idea of digital sovereignty in there, feels way too much like a one-way, like basically being focussed on my own stuff and ensuring people can read all of that easily everywhere - rather than considering the other way 'round and focussing on also making sure I can read stuff others wrote. Then, she somehow lost me with still posting to Twitter even while it sucks and she might be banned there sooner than later. No criticism on my end, I get her point but I just very much disagree with that perspective for a whole load of reasons, digital sovereignty included. And maybe finally, however, talking the other way 'round and practically handling this idea: Hoping for the (AP) Fediverse to somehow get more serious about that. Not just as in being able to somehow move accounts and contacts between instances of the same software but actually by being able to, like, move all my content and conversations and contacts seamlessly from one server to another without losing anything or causing a lot of friction for either myself or server administrators or my friends (refusing to call them readers or followers or contacts at this point). There's still room for improvements here, and I'll now shut up, stop ranting and be listening on. There's a lot of valuable stuff in there anyway.
https://dot-social.simplecast.com/episodes/molly-white-sxsw
Audio for morning commuters:
[...]And, you know, Bluesky, they're, they're paving the way for a billion people on the network, like a Facebook size social network, and I think the fediverse is very focused on, you know, couple hundreds, 1000s of folks, but this, this space of a few million is, is, I think there's lots to explore there.[...]
I repeatedly have proven to be torn about ActivityPub vs ATProto, still considering the Fediverse to in its current state be better from a global governance and distribution of power point of view while ATProto, for multiple reasons, seems a better choice for actually building tools for larger communities, and this is what made me listen to this episode very cautiously. There are some things in here of which I wonder whether they should be red flags immediately. But still I very very much applaud the idea of putting people communities and their needs first, not technological ideas and requirements. That's something I am sometimes missing in the AP Fediverse that just all too often gets lost in its own internal frictions of implementations, interoperability issues and essentially tech-centric communities gating themselves against each other.
via https://dot-social.simplecast.com/episodes/rudy-fraser
Audio for the morning:
From the outside, Bluesky may seem like a Twitter clone. But anyone who’s close to the technology — and the team — knows that they’re building something much deeper: they’re rethinking the internet’s architecture to create a more flexible, user-centric web.
I really enjoy listening to these, and come up with a bunch of conclusions. For one, it's incredible and quickly unnerving to see the widespread use of the word "awesome" for virtually everything. Then, Bluesky folks are undisputably great at doing marketing for their brainchild. Which has good and bad sides to it. They don't have solutions to a lot of interesting problems yet, but in a way they seem better at making them transparent and obvious: With all the ActivityPub based Fediverse focused on the individual server, no one (not even conceptually) "owns" things such as bandwidth consumption for communication between these nodes, for data storage costs all across the infrastructure, for resource consumptions on the individual node to handle loads of in- and outbound traffic. The AT protocol model of the world at least has these on the list, plus it seems to strive more for that vote-with-your-feet - idea of you just taking your data (yes /all/ your data) and just switch your provider if the one you're left with isn't feasible for you anymore (a feature I could have direly needed earlier this year in my pixelfed mess). Bluesky is still quite a bit from that and has its own slew of issues to tackle, but I still ... wonder whether it's further from that than ActivityPub is from actually making account data portable in a reliable manner. Or from adding something like distributed moderation with moderators of communities spread all across different instances aren't necessarily the folks to run instances. It will be interesting and somehow I am also waiting for AT to be submitted to a standardization body like the IETF which might be a smarter choice and place than the W3C as a much more "web-centric" entity. And I learnt on the sidenote that Paul Frazee, the guy who did this show on the Bluesky end, apparently worked with the Beaker Browser and SSB community before which also was new to me and seems quite good a reference point to start with. Worth listening, after all, despite way too much commenting on my end having gone on here.
https://dot-social.simplecast.com/episodes/paul-frazee
Also, elsewhere, talking large language models, image generation and everything related to that:
Miyazaki himself has called AI “an insult to life itself,” while fans of his work happily and unwittingly feed the hungry AI machinery with opportunities for iterative practice, helpful feedback, and subtle signals for improving the technology along the way. All while completely disregarding the crooked practices that went into sourcing content for the models, and totally disrespecting the opinions and wishes of the creators of the original art upon which these cheap derivative imitations are fabricated.
Watching this happen is really frustrating. Watching artists see the time and talent and passion that they put into their work being so casually devalued by an increasingly effective array of smoke and mirrors (while simultaneously witnessing the harmful ecological side-effects, as some kind of demented cherry on top) is even more frustrating. And then for me, personally, being asked to weigh in on this, to take a strong position and ban the use of this technology within the omg.lol community, well, that’s extra frustrating. But it’s happened a few times in the past 24 hours, and so here I am talking about it now.
I'm having quite mixed opinions on most of the AI and LLM topic going on out there for a bunch of reasons, somewhere in between the general attempt to be basically open in regards to benefits and hazards, advantages and negative side-effects of whichever tool comes up next - and bad gut feelings on many different levels, including distribution of power due to model control, hardware costs, energy consumption, infrastructure spent on such tools, and including effects like these. For this very aspect and in this situation however, once again I completely side with Adam and his rather well-written article, as well as the conclusions he is about to make here. Worth reading.
https://omglol.news/2025/04/02/we-have-to-talk-about-ai-art
Morning listenings, on the way to the office:
The developers wanted to tear down nearly all of the old mill buildings and replace them with more retail. Townsend would end up spending the next two years fighting alongside other residents to save the mill district, but unfortunately, the building was replaced by a parking lot for a supermarket. Townsend and the other artists saw it as another sign over excess new development in Providence, but they weren’t done with the developers (or with the mall). They decided the best way to understand what they were up against was to live in the mall for one week without leaving.
Heard this story on that podcast before, ages ago, but somehow this idea of a secret appartment hidden inside the guts of a shopping mall doesn't cease to amaze, same as the general idea of looking for unused accidential space in this kind of semi-public buildings. There's a lot of interesting aspects to this one for sure.
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/621-secret-mall-apartment/