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
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/
Listened to this while cycling to the office:
And so we change this together. The issue is will and the issue is resources. The issue is not ideas right. We're not waiting for one genius to figure it out. We're waiting for a clear map and some space to examine it together and share insights and then figure out how to push forward to a world where it's you know, thousands of interesting projects that are all thinking together about creating much better tech and reshaping the industry and its incentives in order to nurture that.
Meredith Whittaker of Signal talking to Tech Stuff and it's been an inspiring listen, even though gloomy at times. Learnt quite some new things here, and still think she's got a lot things right in what she does.
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-techstuff-26941194/episode/the-story-ask-lots-of-questions-264421545/
Halfway through this, on the train that morning: Paris Marx and tante discussing open source, past and present, the wordpress mess, open-source AI, Richard M. Stallman and a few related aspects. As it says on the tin:
I think we have actually reached the limitations of what the Open Source term and concept can do for us and I am not sure it’s enough for the future. Because software projects for the commons and a sort of social good need to face the fact that they are political and therefore need to include actual political representation of all stakeholders as well as democratic and transparent modes of decision making (at least when reaching a certain traction/user base).
Worth checking out for sure, as always.
via https://tante.cc/2024/11/08/podcast-the-corruption-of-open-source-tech-wont-save-us/ .
On-ears this morning, on the road:
What does that mean, exactly, and why does it matter? Bluesky founder and CEO Jay Graber says social media is stagnating because “we're in this trap where users are locked in and developers are locked out.” It’s time to open things up again, she states, like in the innovative early days of the internet.
https://dot-social.simplecast.com/episodes/jay-graber
The transcript is okay'ish, but it's still worth a listen. Generally, repeatedly, what I really, fully, totally admire about the atproto / Bluesky approach is their take on user data and identity even as a mere mortal. Like: Even without being required to "run infrastructure" of your own, be able to tie all you have to your own domain name, your own online identity and be able to take, handle, move that as you see fit. Too, in example, the option to use a custom domain name even on infrastructure operated by others has been around for ages in Tumblr and for quite a while in micro.blog, and whyever this hasn't been a first-class baked-in feature with every other federated network and most specifically "newer" implementations and standards such as ActivityPub or Mastodon is something I have a hard time wrapping my head around.