status

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. 

Interesting find, picked from one of my timelines

Cara.app is a relatively new social media platform: a kind of fusion between an Instagram timeline with a share button, and an Artstation portfolio layout on the user's profile. Almost every artist I know is opening a Cara.app profile right now and posting about it on every social media site. Some influencers, like industry veteran Bobby Chiu, even praise the platform and openly urge everyone to move to it.

https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1032/a-critique-of-caraapp-the-no-ai-instagram-and-artstation-copycat-child

As cara.app hit my circles before, too, I found this worth reading. Specifically I agree with most of the things mentioned in (8). Though this focus on "having instances" of something and  "decentralization" (...) in an ActivityPub understanding of things to me slowly seems to show all of its technical and conceptual drawbacks, introducing yet another platform that is essentially a walled garden with data stored on one system of one legal entity doesn't seem what one would expect in 2024.

Listening recommendation for the morning:

There are a lot of companies and ideas competing for space on the post-Twitter internet, and Jay makes a convincing argument that decentralization — the idea that you should be able to take your username and following to different servers as you wish — is the future. It’s a powerful concept that’s been kicking around for a long time, but now it feels closer to reality than ever before. You’ve heard us talk about it a lot on Decoder: the core idea is that no single company — or individual billionaire — can amass too much power and control over our social networks and the conversations that happen on them.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/25/24108872/bluesky-ceo-graber-federation-social-media-decoder-interview 

There are quite some reasons that leave me very cautious about Bluesky, one being for sure the fact there's one commercial entity currently backing this service / protocol, especially one that has risen from the same ecosystem that caused a lot of the trouble we do experience with current social media platforms. But, I've then and now been at odds with ActivityPub as a protocol, which gets worse the more I dig into it, and from that perspective, it seems the AT crowd gets a lot of things right, considered a lot of things that don't just seem obvious at least in the 2010s but actually surprising to see them missing from ActivityPub, a spec that has been established at roughly the same time: Full account portability (the idea of comparing personal data, conversations, comments, posts, ... to a github repository which "of course" you want to easily be able to take, backup, move around, ... seems both stunning and painfully trivial), support of custom domains for users (which Tumblr has already been supporting for years now), distributed curation and moderation (because most obviously community structures will be different to server or domain structures and not necessarily live on one instance exclusively) - in a way I really do hope they "show don't tell" by submitting that protocol to some standardization body anytime soon. Maybe this, too, could provide a good option for the "open" fediverse to counter the problems that might arise the very moment platforms like Meta / Threads fully embrace ActivityPub. (I also found it rather interesting to listen to what she had to say about why Meta might be more into ActivityPub than AT - being "server-centric" rather than "user-centric" - but that might just be a loose end of things.)

Reading DHHs musings on technology and running services always is a good way to start a day. This one is no different:

https://world.hey.com/dhh/keeping-the-lights-on-while-leaving-the-cloud-be7c2d67

The magic of Basecamp 2’s incredible two-year 100% uptime, as well as all the other applications hitting 99.99%, come in part from picking boring, basic technologies. We run on F5s, Linux, KVM, Docker, MySQL, Redis, Elastic Search, and of course Ruby on Rails. There’s nothing fancy about our stack, and very little complexity either. We don’t need people with PhDs in Kubernetes or specialists in exotic data stores. And neither do you, most likely.

But programmers are attracted to complexity like moths to a flame. The more convoluted the systems diagram, the greater the intellectual masturbation. Our commitment to resisting that is the key ingredient in this uptime success.

Quite a strong wording in this conclusion but generally it's hard to disagree here. Just too many people throw in too much external and third-party complexity for the sake of it, stuff they don't completely know or understand, because that's "how you do it these days". In the end, still, reliability, stability, security of a system in day-to-day operations to quite some degree depends on whether (or not) people know how to handle their environment in as much detail as possible.