Notices by dave (dthompson@toot.cat), page 3

@alienghic I live on the opposite side of the country so I'm good. just feel bad for everyone out there.

santa monica by everclear came on the radio whilst driving home

we can live beside the ocean
leave the fire behind
swim out past the breakers
watch the world die

which felt strange to listen to with the wildfire happening in LA and made me wonder if my friends in pasadena have had to evacuate (they haven't, yet anyway) and then when I got home I saw that parts of santa monica are being ordered to evacuate. it's scary out there... hope fedi folks in LA are staying safe out there :(

You know, there's nothing like seeing the leadership of large corporate social media fail so terribly at understanding what "free speech" actually means and the needs of marginalized groups to remind ourselves: we're glad we're working seriously on community-oriented communication tech.

Onwards!

Computers are good, actually

For-profit tech corporations though...

I guess it comes *not quite but pretty close* to being that human bodies need one calorie a minute on average

@cwebber faved while frowning

hard to not be a lisp weenie when people go wild about zig's comptime but god didn't put me on this earth to do easy things

For this reason, we are a nonprofit (a US 501(c)(3) to be exact).

The Internet's original designs were largely a public works project. Enormously powerful and wonderful things can happen when technology is built in the interest of people and given to the commons.

It should be possible for *ordinary people* to help the network as a whole operate. This means Spritely's tech can't be expensive to run, nor must it take an enormous amount of technical skill and time to operate and administrate.

Open source isn't sufficient. Self-hostable isn't sufficient!

Really, this means several things.
- There should be no central institution declaring, monitoring, surveilling, or approving the use of our technology
- It must be possible to self-host
- And in fact, "self-hosting" is not enough, since "self-hosting" often means a high technical barrier to entry!

the next spritely office hours will be on 1/22. hope you can join! https://community.spritely.institute/t/next-office-hours-on-1-22/651

hey I just released my first new guile project in a long time. it's called guile-bstructs and it's meant to be a rough equivalent of chez scheme's ftypes but for guile. you can use it to efficiently manipulate binary data. useful for c ffi wrappers, gpu buffer packing, and other things. I'm using it to make sdl3 bindings and so far, so good. hope it's useful to other guilers.

https://dthompson.us/posts/guile-bstructs-0-1-0-released.html

#scheme #guile

@dckc thanks! glad it was useful

"teaching old hippies new tricks" by @danny https://www.oblomovka.com/wp/2025/01/02/teaching-old-hippies-new-tricks/

> A few fates that I’ve avoided, barely: one is joining the Nineties Internet Re-Enactment Society, where communities scrabble to re-inforce the dominant vibe of — what, two? three? years maximum? — the early networks. I mean, I still have it in my habits — my dinky RSS reader, my affinity for plain text, email. A co-worker described watching me work as “like someone playing one of those adventure games”. I can see it.

We are not just building another Twitter, another Facebook... not even just decentralized versions of those.

When today's "social media" started to rise to power nearly two decades ago, one of the big sells was if everyone is connected to everyone all the time, society would improve.

However, while having the ability to publish and broadcast widely is good, we don't think flattened and decontextualized communication leads to the kind of world we wish to inhabit.

It's simply too hard to build secure, peer-to-peer technology today. These days you have to be an expert across a wide variety of different domains in order to engage with building secure p2p tech.

But what if secure p2p tech was the *default thing you get*. Is such a thing possible?

For the first several years of Spritely's history, we've been focused on low-level tech. This may seem strange! Isn't the goal the next generation of decentralized social network technology?

Making it easy and the *default* to build secure p2p tech requires new tech foundations. And we have them!

@kai I had the sopranos theme in mind

@touk fuck, where's my zig to take off in???

@monkey1 I use a vps on digital ocean. not sure how they found me, exactly, but links to my software are out there enough that it's easy to find. this could have been happening for a long time and I'm only noticing now. not sure, really.