deadsuperhero

deadsuperhero OP , 12 days ago

Probably because, to my knowledge:

1. I didn’t know that Mitra did that.
2. Even though it does have that functionality, I have no idea whether it would work with the rest of the network.
3. This article was about sub.club

I’m not trying to slight Mitra in any way, shape, or form, but my focus for this article was scoped to one thing in particular.

deadsuperhero OP , 12 days ago

Dude, listen. I am one person running a volunteer news project for free. I try my best to stay on top of researching the space, but there’s no reasonable way for me to catch everything. I’ve written 200+ articles at this point, but due to a combination of factors, I struggle to get more than one article out per week at times. I regularly juggle a backlog of 40+ drafts at any given moment. Add a dash of burnout and fatigue, and you’ll start to get a clearer picture: it’s hard to keep up, and only getting harder.

There’s no way for me to reasonably catch everything. Mitra’s a cool project and all, but it’s tiny enough that I’ve heard relatively little about it. There are dozens of projects out there at this point, and new ones everyday. If you’re not advertising the thing you’re building and what it does, there’s a high chance I might miss it.

I keep an eye on the FEP developments from time to time, and I applaud all you’ve accomplished with that. However, the existence of a spec does not necessarily mean that platforms out there are necessarily implementing each and every one of them.

deadsuperhero OP , 12 days ago

Most efforts haven’t moved beyond the planning stages. Just because you can point to a plugin or a FEP spec doesn’t mean that it’s an ongoing active effort for bring a payment layer to the Fediverse, with a consumer-facing tool or platform. I’m sorry if I didn’t catch that Mitra had some of that functionality, but I would also push back and say that the average person is not going to use Monero for payments on the Web anytime soon.

Those PeerTube plugins are nice, and the Premium Users one was actually something I pointed @quillmatiq to for sub.club, as an example of prior art. They’re interesting experiments, possibly useful integrations, but not in and of themselves actual platforms to build infrastructure and solutions on.

deadsuperhero OP , 21 days ago

Fucking amazing book, I laughed so hard from start to finish.

deadsuperhero OP , 1 month ago

Yeah, I’ll try to look into this for clarity. It really depends on what they mean here - I think they’re referring to curated server following between admins, which is what PeerTube does.

When I tested out the messaging system, I was able to federate back and forth with Mastodon. Maybe it works fine at a user level, it’s just the search entries that don’t get federated automatically?

deadsuperhero OP , 1 month ago

Yep, I’m aware of their effort, and have reached out about collaboration. 😁

The icon font I’ve been building might technically predate it. I’ve been building it since December at least, and it’s something our site depends on.

deadsuperhero OP , 1 month ago

Regardless of how you feel about it, it’s still notable that people on the Fediverse managed to scrape $500k together. This is the first time something like that has ever happened on this network. In the world of big politics and presidential campaigns, it’s not much. However, within the scope of grassroots organizing, it’s substantial.

I agree that I would love to see that funding go towards mutual aid, infra and project funding, and supporting people who work on different parts of the network.

deadsuperhero OP , 2 months ago

So, to be clear: it’s not a concept like Nomadic Identity. Rather, it’s a demonstration of importing data archives from other social networks and platforms, and integrating that data into an existing Fediverse account.

In other words: it’s not a singular managed identity for all your apps, it’s a mechanism for marrying data from different systems to a Fediverse Actor. Paired with something like Nomadic Identity, it would be a game changer.

deadsuperhero OP , 2 months ago

I think it’s a big opportunity that the Fediverse has largely slept on. A lot of people shrug it off, but Facebook, Instagram, Medium, and a number of other places offer an export archive of your data.

Some of it isn’t all that usable, but there’s something extremely appealing about being able to take old parts of your social graph with you, and merge it into a new identity. A fixation I’ve had for the past few years is consolidating all of my data into one place, under one identity, and I’m exploring the possibility of writing data converters.

Interestingly, Pixelfed allows you to import your Instagram archive, and it’s fantastic.

deadsuperhero , 2 months ago

I was working at a tool checkout in my shop for a while, and the sheer amount of ignorance and repetition blew me away.

People would come in, see signs stating things like “Don’t throw your hazardous waste in this trash can!”, and people would straight up ignore it. Things got so bad that we had to stop offering a trash can in our part of the shop.

A lot of people would also just repeat the same statements, day after day, week after week. For example, we have iPads that contain maintenance manuals. We have to update those manuals every week, on the same day. Without fail, the same people always forget which day Update Day is, and have to ask.

The worst ones happen when people come to turn in their gear before end of shift. Most people are fine, but every toolbox has to be thoroughly inspected before being scanned back in. Often, somebody misplaced a tool, left garbage in the box somewhere, or there’s some other undocumented discrepancy.

Most people are cool about it, and willing to make things right. But, some people act like you’ve purposely screwed them over, or react with total apathy and disrespect. I don’t make the rules, man, I’m just trying to do my job.

deadsuperhero , 2 months ago

I used to work with enterprise customers at a SaaS company, and still have a lot of anger in how corporate types use this fluffy language. I think my “favorite” example of this jargon is “Please Advise.”, which basically just means “What the fuck?!”

deadsuperhero OP , 3 months ago

The shocking part was less about Maven’s methods or lack of ethics, and more along the lines of “How the fuck did they do that?!”

deadsuperhero OP , 4 months ago

Oh wow, how did I miss this?!

deadsuperhero , 4 months ago

Congratulations! I’ve been around for roughly the same amount of time, and it’s wild to see how much things have changed.

I still miss old Identi.ca, though.

deadsuperhero OP , 4 months ago

This is a situation that I think will get better in time. There’s some really promising efforts involving Fediverse Enhancement Proposals, where multiple projects collaborate on shared ways of doing things. Some of these behaviors are getting studied and standardized by the larger SocialCG entity, as well.

There’s also a lot of promising development behind a Fediverse Testing Suite. If we can develop a platform-agnostic testing system for people to build against, it will potentially become the new development standard, rather than optimizing for Mastodon and nothing else.

deadsuperhero OP , 4 months ago

Yeah, if you read the article, Hometown and Glitch actually get mentioned. The criticism is not about making a fork to do your own thing… but, instead, about trying to compete with Mastodon directly.

Doing that kind of fork (which is what people are calling for) requires a tremendous amount of coordination, effort, and commitment that cannot be done casually.

deadsuperhero OP , 4 months ago

It actually does have that nowadays, it’s just that the feature requires Elasticsearch to work, which is one extra piece of infra for admins to worry about.

deadsuperhero OP , 4 months ago

Nextcloud is a fork of Owncloud. IMO, as a product Nextcloud is superior in every way.

deadsuperhero OP , 4 months ago

Most of the backlash pertains to the board members appointed to the new nonprofit. One of the members is a lawyer that has defended crypto and AI companies, another is ex-Twitter angel investor Biz Stone.

Mastodon’s community usually has some kind of vague beef about one thing or another when it comes to Eugen and the decisions he makes for the project, whether it’s a new feature or a design change or that he didn’t do something that other projects wanted to do.

deadsuperhero , 5 months ago

Hell yeah, I’m all about this. Article gets rendered so poorly on Mastodon, and the behavior is inconsistent from one platform to the next.

deadsuperhero , 5 months ago

While I think shareholders can be a driving factor, I see it way more often with VC-funded companies. The “2.5x year over year” growth mantra that places like YCombinator stipulate have disastrous effects on small tech companies. Often, these startups have an incentive to keep taking additional funding rounds, which appears to tighten the grip the VC has over them.

Try growing the next Microsoft or Google or Amazon out of that model. I’m not convinced that it’s possible. At least if you bootstrap your own company, you don’t have the same binding obligations…even if it takes way longer to get to a place that’s self-sustaining.

deadsuperhero OP , 5 months ago

Yes, we have an article in the works about it. 😁

deadsuperhero OP , 5 months ago

I think there’s a balance to be struck between “good defaults” and “customize to your heart’s content.”

Emissary is very much in line with some of my own pipe dreams regarding Fediverse / IndieWeb platforms, but it’s still very young as a project. I think the best thing they could probably do is ship bundles of templates as different experiences, that are easy to install right out the gate.

Want a bog-standard microblogging system? Go for it. Want something more like Lemmy? No problem. Want to just build something yourself from scratch? Here’s the docs.

I think what excites me about this is that it could be a tremendous development tool for people looking to mock up new ideas for apps and platforms, while sitting in top of ActivityPub and offering actual functionality. The Music project the lead dev is working on already looks great in less than two weeks of development, and aims to be compatible with Funkwhale.